Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess Winchilsea, is something of a liminal figure in eighteenth-century literature not only in terms of gender but also in terms of her personal life and reception. The posthumous obscurity and nearobliteration from the canon of a literary figure who was highly regarded in her time has puzzled most of Finch’s modern readers. For Barbara McGovern, this is accounted for by the marginalization that the writer was subject to even in her own time, a ‘displacement […] due not to gender alone but also to political ideology, religious orientation, and aesthetic sensibility’ (McGovern 2004, 3). Nevertheless, as McGovern further points out, ‘[w] hen she was determining her own identity through her poetics […] ideologies of gender were foremost for Finch’ (McGovern 2004, 6). The physical retirement which is crafted into the ideal poetic role through the unspoken mediation of Virgil in Finch’s ‘poetics of evening’ (Miller 2005, 603) intersects with another aspect of literary crepuscularity: dreaming and reverie. This chapter is an attempt to see how Finch’s poetics explores the alien nature of the oneiric mind not only to express female creativity but also to posit that alienness as a crucial condition for the creative act when attempted by a female agent. This complex philosophical position is framed, I argue, through the narrative of Eve’s dream of Satanic seduction in Paradise Lost, Book V, which adumbrates many of Finch’s pastoral and melancholy poems. Using the essential otherness of the dreamlike state to claim community with canonical, usually male poets, Finch inflects neoclassical attitudes to creativity with gendered signification. Grounding my analysis on close readings from a selection of poems, I will illustrate the ways in which this Augustan poet carefully constructs an aesthetic and ethical ideal of femininity and female creativity through an intimate philosophical engagement with the liminality and power of the dreaming mind. Although the remaking of Eve in the image of the female poet backed by Miltonic authority cannot be openly acknowledged by a poet of such subtle sensibility as the Countess of Winchilsea, these readings indicate that this privileging of the oneiric and the liminal in her work is informed by an interpretation of Eve’s dream as a metaphor for poetic creativity.