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Ann Yearsley’s “Clifton Hill,” included in her first collection, Poems, on Several Occasions, seems in appearance to mostly follow various conventions of the prospect poem, one of the most popular poetic forms in eighteenth-century English poetry. However, Yearsley in this poem significantly revises and transforms its conventions. Traditionally, a prospect poem presents a poetic figure, usually a male character from the middle or upper classes, who looks down from a high place and shows an appropriate aesthetic response to an open perspective, and thereby affirms his privileged social status as well as anticipates future expectations. In contrast, in “Clifton Hill” Yearsley presents Lactilla, a working-class woman, and though Lactilla seems to follow an upward movement, her upward movement is often countered by the opposite one, and her future prospective is clouded by memories of the past. More strikingly, unlike the traditional male perspective in the prospect poem, Yearsley in “Clifton Hill” presents a feminist perspective through the story of Louisa, a mad fugitive woman. The story of Louisa also serves as an indication of Yearsley’s own situations as a working-class woman poet. (Hannam University)