Martha Sansom

Martha Fowke, later Martha Sansom, (1 May 1689 – 1736) was an English poet associated chiefly with the circle about Aaron Hill. She was the daughter of Major Thomas Fowke, an army officer murdered in 1708, and his wife Mary (née Cullen). Born in Hertfordshire on 1 May 1689 to a family of Roman Catholic gentry, she was educated at home and at boarding school. Her mother had been less supportive of her daughter's writing than her father. Fowke lived in London after her mother died in 1705, but moved to East Anglia in 1730 with her husband, Arnold Sansom, whom she had married around 1721. Their marriage was not a happy one.

Literary life

Fowke's work started to gain public attention notably with Clio and Strephon (1720), published anonymously and reprinted several times under various titles up to 1732. Another of her friends, the poet and painter John Dyer, painted her portrait and expressed devotion to her in two poems written from Wales that appeared, along with her verses in reply, in the Richard Savage miscellany of 1726.

Because of her association with fellow writers as an equal, her former friend and fellow-writer Eliza Haywood attacked Fowke in a scandalous account of her relationships, which affected her reputation badly. Her autobiographical work Clio, published in 1752, has a preface dated 1723 and probably circulated in manuscript.