Jane West [née Iliffe] who published as "Prudentia Homespun" and "Mrs. West," was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and writer of conduct literature and educational tracts.

Life

Jane West's parents were Jane and John Iliffe. She was born in London, though the family moved to Desborough in Northamptonshire when she was eleven. She reported herself to have been self-educated and interested in poetry from an early age. By 1783 she was married to Thomas West (d. 1823), a yeoman farmer from Leicestershire. She had three sons: Thomas (1783–1843), John (1787–1841), and Edward (1794–1821). In 1800 she wrote to Bishop Thomas Percy seeking his patronage, and while he lived she benefited from the connection, though her literary connections were never extensive. She did correspond with Sarah Trimmer

Sarah Trimmer

Sarah Trimmer was a noted writer and critic of British children's literature in the eighteenth century...

, and she wrote a series of poems in praise of women writers: Trimmer, Elizabeth Carter

Elizabeth Carter

Elizabeth Carter was an English poet, classicist, writer and translator, and a member of the Bluestocking Circle.-Biography:...

, Charlotte Turner Smith

Charlotte Turner Smith

Charlotte Turner Smith was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility....

, and Anna Seward

Anna Seward

Anna Seward was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield.-Life:Seward was the elder daughter of Thomas Seward , prebendary of Lichfield and Salisbury, and author...

.

Her writing is consistently conservative and didactic, though she did advocate expanded education for women. Her works serve as a counterpoint to the revolutionary politics of the day: A Tale of the Times (1799) is anti-Jacobin

Jacobin (politics)

A Jacobin , in the context of the French Revolution, was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary far-left political movement. The Jacobin Club was the most famous political club of the French Revolution. So called from the Dominican convent where they originally met, in the Rue St. Jacques ,...

; The Infidel Father (1802) attacks atheism; and one of her conduct texts, Letters to a Young Lady, "forms an ideological counterpart to Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)." Though she has been called "strident," her writing was popular in its day for its "improving" qualities. Letters to a Young Man (1801), for example, went through six editions by 1818. Her poems appeared in journals and anthologies and she was a long-standing contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine. Her dramas would seem to have been less in tune with popular taste; they were not as successful. And while she claimed to consider her womanly domestic duties more important than her literary activities — "My needle always claims the pre-eminence of my pen. I hate the name of 'rhyming slattern.'" — there are indications that she actively sought success as a writer. She never achieved the wide reputation she would have liked, however, and died at ninety-four feeling out of step with contemporary trends.

Fiction

• The Advantages of Education, or The History of Maria Williams (published as "Prudentia Homespun", 2 vols., 1793)
• A Gossip's Story, and a Legendary Tale (published as "Prudentia Homespun", 2 vols., 1796)
• A Tale of the Times (3 vols., 1799)
• The Infidel Father (3 vols., 1802)
• The Refusal (1810)
• The Loyalists: an Historical Novel (1812)
• Alicia de Lacy: an Historical Romance (4 vols., 1814)
• Ringrove, or, Old Fashioned Notions (1827)
• "The Sorrows of Selfishness" (children's story, published as "Prudentia Homespun")

Conduct literature

• Letters to a Young Man (3 vols., 1801)
• Letters to a Young Lady (1806)

Poetry

• Miscellaneous Poetry, Written at an Early Period of Life (1786)
• The Humours of Brighthelmstone: a Poem (1788)
• Miscellaneous Poems, and a Tragedy ["Edmund"] (York, 1791)
• An Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
  Edmund Burke
  Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
  
  (1797)
• Poems and Plays (Vols. 1 and 2, 1799; 3 and 4, 1805)
• The Mother: a Poem in Five Books (1799)

Other works

• Select Translations of the Beauties of Massillon (1812)
• Scriptural Essays Adapted to the Holy Days of the Church of England (2 vols., 1816)

Resources

• Baylis, Gail. “West , Jane (1758–1852).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2006. 11 Apr. 2007.
• Lonsdale, Roger ed. "Jane West (née Iliffe).Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 379-385.