for sixteen years to Richard Gwinnett (1675–1717). The couple was not in a financial position to get married until 1716 when Gwinnett finally came into an inheritance. Thomas then postponed the marriage in order to nurse her terminally ill mother. Gwinnett died of consumption the next year, and although he left Thomas a legacy, his family suppressed his will. After litigation, Thomas could not cover her legal costs. During their engagement they had maintained an extensive correspondence, much of which was published as Pylades and Corinna (1731–2) and The Honourable Lovers (1732; repr. 1736) after Thomas's death by Edmund Curll. Thomas was active and had a reputation in London and Bath literary circles. She experimented with a wide range of literary forms including lyrics, panegyrics, pastorals, polemics, religious meditations, and satires. Much of her poetry dealt with women's issues, particularly women's right to education, as women were in her time "still deny'd th'Improvement of our Mind." In "On Sir J- S- saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My books would make me Mad. An Ode" (1722), the poet exposes the faulty logic of "Sir J– S–" and concludes that he and other men who would deny women access to learning are motivated by an avaricious Soul, Which would, with greedy Eyes, monopolize the whole: And bars us Learning on the selfish Score: That conscious of our native Worth, Ye dread to make it more. (ll. 80—84) Her work initially circulated in manuscript, but due to financial necessity she published Miscellany Poems on Several Subjects anonymously in 1722, and thereafter sought print publication. Reputation Her friend Henry Cromwell at one point gave Thomas some letters he had received from a young Alexander Pope. Impoverished, Thomas sold these letters to Edmund Curll in 1726. Curll promptly published the letters in Miscellanea in Two Volumes (1726), much to the irritation of Pope. For this infraction he lampooned Thomas in The Dunciad (1728) as "Curll's Corinna" (II 66): Full in the middle way there stood a lake, Which Curl's Corinna chanc'd that morn to make: (Such was her wont, at early dawn to drop Her evening cates before his neighbour's shop) (Bk. II, ll. 69—72) These scatological lines are generally interpreted as referring to ongoing medical issues Thomas suffered — "a history of fluxes, purges, and Surgical and medical horrors" — after 1711. A minor revenge was attributed to her by Pope — the publication