Leapor was a working-class poet who often shirked her duties as a maid to write poetry, largely in the style of Pope. "She was said by her father to have begun writing verse at about ten or eleven years old, a habit her parents tried unsuccessfully to discourage" (DNB). Her friend Bridget Freemantle suggested a subscription edition of Leapor's unpublished verse and tried to interest the London stage in a tragedy she had composed, but Leapor died from measles before these plans could come to fruition. Her fame as one of the foremost poets of her century is posthumous. ‘Proposals for printing by subscription the poetical works, serious and humorous, of Mrs. Leapor’, apparently penned by David Garrick, appeared on 1 January 1747, and nearly 600 subscribers received the first volume in April 1748. The less successful second volume of 1751 was printed by Samuel Richardson.