Abstract
This article examines the work of four women poets in the 1780s and 1790s - in particular, the way they juxtapose the apparent triviality of the domestic with the more elevated concerns expected of the poetic or literary. In this analysis, this juxtaposition is aligned with the gap between low and high that characterises burlesque, a gap that is exploited to comic and even satirical ends in these poems. This poetic critique of domesticity is set against a backdrop of recent criticism that reads the late eighteenth century as a time when the domestic ideology of separate spheres hardened. © 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.