Many who study the literature of the English eighteenth century will know the name of Elizabeth Singer Rowe as belonging to someone—and here it gets vague—who wrote about death. Wasn’t she widowed shortly after marriage, and didn’t she make a small career of writing about it? Well, yes, and the little book that came first, Friendship in Death (1728), was the work by which she was chiefly remembered for the rest of the century. It contained twenty letters from the dead to the living, but, unlike the urbanely cynical shades of that underworld genre in Lucian or Fontenelle, Rowe’s departed spirits write from a Christian paradise on the urgent business of remembrance and repentance: “to impress the Notion of the Soul’s Immortality,” in Rowe’s own prefatory words. She was an accomplished poet, too, her verse, like her prose, often colored by the Nonconformist religious belief and purpose she had inherited...

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