Jane Winscom (nee Cave) wrote poems on significant contemporary events, such as ‘A Poem occasioned by the late dreadful riots on Bristol Bridge’ September 1793, and ‘An Address to the Inhabitants of Bristol, Occasioned by the Present Calamities and Recent Observations’. Read in the context of Bristol in the 1790s, the poems offer a sustained exploration of the tensions between individual rights and the uses of governmental authority. They address threats to liberty and the oppression of Bristol’s marginalized, disenfranchised, or enslaved persons.

Winscom was the daughter of John Cave of Talgarth, Brecon, an exciseman and glover. Although not much known about her life, details in her early poetry, which was collected and published by subscription in 1783, give glimpses into her circumstances. In one poem, she writes of herself as being ‘fix’d . . . in an humble station,’ unfamiliar with ‘soft affluence.’ Living away from home by 1777, she heard of her mother’s death and composed an elegy. By 1779 she was living in Bath, from where she moved, on her own and unhappily, to Winchester, where she knew no one. She published a poem entitled: ‘On the Author’s leaving Bath, and going to Winchester’. It has been speculated, on the basis of these poems, that she was probably a servant or a teacher. In 1783, she married Thomas Winscom, an excise officer from Bristol, with whom she had two sons. The family moved to Bristol in 1792. On May 25, 1793, readers of a Bristol newspaper encountered an unusual plea for assistance from a local resident, Jane Winscom (1754–1813). ‘The Head-Ach, Or an Ode to Health’ is a fifty-line narrative poem that details with painstaking accuracy the symptoms and unsuccessful treatment of severe and frequent headache. Having listed the many useless ‘remedies’ provided to her by medical practitioners, Winscom begs:

Live’s [sic] one on earth possess’d of sympathy,  Who knows what is presum’d a remedy?  O send it hither! I again would try,  Tho’ in the attempt of conqu’ring I die.

‘The Head-Ach’ was included in Winscom’s Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac, and Religious (1794), where it is preceded by ‘Written the First Morning of the Author’s Bathing at Teignmouth, For the Head-Ache’ and followed by ‘An Invocation to Death.’ The poems not only provide a valuable historical record of the treatments she underwent in England in the 1790s, they also provide a patient’s account of the physical and psychological effects of her experience of headache. Despite the fact that they were written more than two hundred years ago, Winscom’s poems display many of the same features as current pain narratives. They expose private and devastating suffering to public gaze and publicly question the medical establishment that has failed to restore their author to health. They also reveal features that have come to be understood as foundational in pain narratives: a body turned on itself and figured as an external enemy, and the absolute power of pain to silence the sufferer. Most importantly, the poems demonstrate Winscom’s narrative composition of a self who has overcome this enforced silence to speak about the experience of head pain.

Winscom published a total of five editions of her poetry by subscription from 1783 to 1795. Jane Cave, probably between 1801 and 1806, published at Bristol, pseudonymously as ‘Mrs Rueful’, a new kind of collection, Prose and Poetry, on Religious, Moral and Entertaining Subjects, exposing painful secrets about her marriage. She died in Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1813 at the age of fifty-eight; her obituary appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, praising her ‘extraordinary genius and vigour of intellect,’ her ‘great firmness and presence of mind,’ and her ‘domestic character,’ and describing her as ‘an authoress of no mean talents.’