This chapter explores the significance of class and gender for the landscape of genius. While laboring-class and women authors were often celebrated for their genius, that genius was almost always defined and delimited by their specific social identities rather than becoming associated with nature or the nation in general. As a result, landscapes of genius rarely formed around such authors. The English laboring-class poet, John Clare, thus failed to generate a literary landscape despite his strong identification with nature and local place. Robert Burns’s use of Scots dialect and wider identification with Scottish nature and identity, by contrast, established him as a central figure for Scottish nationalism and produced the “Land of Burns” as an early prototype of the landscape of genius. The chapter concludes by exploring the intersection of class and gender. It engages with the English laboring-class women poet, Ann Yearsley, whose proud self-assertion of independent genius precluded her identification with nature; and the genteel American women writer, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who presented herself in Rural Hours (1850) in a social and domestic relation to nature that deliberately dissociated her from any claims to genius or a landscape of genius.

My examination of the general trends in epic writings of the 1790s lays the ground for my fourth chapter to explore one of the more curious epics of that decade: ‘Brutus’, by Ann Yearsley. The chapter explores how Yearsley uses the resources of the epic genre to claim a cultural authority that permits her to promote the idea of an uplifting colonialism that seeks to transform indigenous populations. Yet she seeks to qualify and critique this ideology of Christian imperialism by calling attention to its accompanying dangers. Attending to the ways she draws attention to the racial hybridity of conversion narratives – as well as the ways she deflects the anxieties summoned by such hybridity – I show how Yearsley implicitly claims for herself a transcendent interiority that both aligns her with the middle class and allows her to assert independence from those who would exert authority over her, such as her former patron Hannah More.