8vo. [4], xv, [1], 186pp. Contemporary half-calf, marbled boards. Bumping to corners, splitting to lower joint (the board nevertheless remains firmly attached) and heavy wear to boards. With the early ink inscription of '(?)Samuel Bothy, 50 Ludgate Hill' to FFEP, opposite a now defaced bookplate; small old-stains to G1v and G2v, else internally clean and crisp.

The sole lifetime published work of poet and literary critic Elizabeth Moody [née Greenly], whose verse had previously circulated in both manuscript form and in periodicals, such as the weekly St. James's Chronicle, under the pseudonym 'The Muse of Surbiton'.

Both Moody and her much younger husband, the dissenting clergyman of Turnham Green Christopher Lake Moody (1753-1815), reviewed books for the Monthly Review; indeed, she was the periodical's first regular female reviewer. Many of her reviews, published between 1789 and 1808, were of French and Italian literature both translated and in their original form. Within this collection this predilection for European languages, an acute awareness of the prevailing social issues (with pieces addressing or relating to Johnson, Priestley, Horace Walpole and the radical John Wilkes), and an occasionally wicked satirical bent, such as in her 'Sapho, tempted by the Prophecy, burns her books and cultivates the Culinary Arts', are all revealed in spades:

'Now fancy soars to future times, When all extinct are Sappho's rhimes; When none but Cooks applaud her name, And nought but recipies' her fame.'

ESTC locates just four copies within the UK (BL, Cambridge, Oxford and Suffolk Record Office), and only six further elsewhere (Colorado, McMaster, Princeton, UCLA and Yale Stirling and Beinecke).