The Rape of the Lock: An Heroi-comical Poem in Five Cantos

Front Cover
Vintage Classic, 2007 - Fiction - 38 pages

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE GEE

A hideous crime is committed at a fashionable London society gathering. The victim is the beautiful, innocent Belinda, her attacker is the dastardly Baron, and his weapon of choice is a pair of scissors...

Pope's mock-epic is the sharp and witty tale of the most famous bad hair day in the history of literature.

ILLUSTRATED BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY

See also: Gulliver's Travels

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About the author (2007)

Alexander Pope was born on 21 May 1688. He was brought up a Roman Catholic at a time where the laws of England were prejudicial towards Catholics. He suffered tuberculosis as a child and as a consequence never grew taller than 4'6". He first published The Rape of the Lock when he was twenty-three years old in 1712. Its success made him a celebrity in polite society. He later added to it in 1714 and 1717. It was written to reconcile two families who had fallen out over a similar incident where a Lord Petre had cut off a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor's head. Pope went on to translate the works of Homer and produce The Dunciad and An Essay on Man. He died on 30 May 1744. Born in Sydney in 1974, Sophie Gee was brought up and educated in the inner-city suburb of Paddington, graduating from the University of Sydney in 1995 with a first-class honours degree in English. She won a scholarship to Harvard, where she wrote a doctoral thesis about pollution, filth and satire in eighteenth-century London. She received a PhD in 2002 and was immediately appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Princeton. Recently she held a research fellowship at UCLA and has recently taught at University College London before returning to Princeton. She is the author of The Scandal of the Season.

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