[3] and notes that Colman and Thornton were friends to John Duncombe,[4] author of The Feminiad (1754), a poetic celebration of women writers.
[5] Colman, as surviving partner, published a considerably expanded edition in 1785,[6] in partial response, it has been conjectured, to the absence of women writers in Samuel Johnson's extensive Lives of the Poets (1779–81).
All the newly added writers produced their work in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, some of them years after the first edition was published.
Together, they help the editors make a case for including women writers in the national literary tradition: "The Ladies, whose pieces we have here collected, are not only an honour to their sex, but to their country.
"[8] Poems by Eminent Ladies was only the first of "multiple attempts to promote and anthologize women writers as important members of the national literary tradition,"[9] part of what scholar Moira Ferguson calls an "eruption of female panegyrics," mainly by men, that includes George Ballard's Memoirs of British Ladies (biographies of sixty-five notable women; 1752); Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets (1753); Thomas Amory's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755); and Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments.