The Life and Poems of Anne Hunter

Book excerpt: Anne Home Hunter (1741–1821) was one of the most successful songwriters of the second half of the eighteenth century and most famously renowned as the poet who wrote the lyrics to many of Haydn’s songs. This volume contains over two hundred of Hunter’s poems, many unpublished in her lifetime and collected for the first time, extending and amplifying the previously definitive edition of her Poems that was published in 1802. Accompanied by a scholarly introduction and a long biographical essay, this expertly researched book sets Hunter’s oeuvre in the political, social, and cultural context of her time.