Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550-1714 & Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700 & Women Writing 1550-1750

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2003 by Elaine V. Beilin

Harriette Andreadis. Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550-1714.

(The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History and Society.) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. xiii 254 Pp. index. illus. bibl. $45 (cl.), $17 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-02008-8 (cl), 0-226-02009-6 (pbk).

James Daybell, ed. Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700.

(Early Modern Literature in History.) Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2001. xiv 213 pp. $62. ISBN: 0-333-94579-4.

Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman, eds. Women Writing 1550-1750.

(Meridian, The La Trobe University English Review, 18.1.) Bundoora: Meridian, 2001. 255 pp. $20. ISBN: 0-9578971-0-3.

Each of these books breaks new, fertile ground in the study of early modern women. New methodologies, new cultural contexts, revisionist readings of earlier scholarship, rereadings of familiar texts, and new attention to lesser known texts distinguish all three volumes.

From the beginning of her illuminating study, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics 1550-1714, Harriette Andreadis insists that simply applying modern assumptions about lesbian erotics to early modern women will not work. Agreeing with previous scholars that the establishment of binary heterosexual and homosexual identities did not occur until the eighteenth century, Andreadis points to the seventeenth century as essential ground for understanding the making of that modern ideology of sexuality. But, she maintains, naming female same-sex desire, relationships, and practices in historically accurate terms is problematic, not the least because seventeenth-century women themselves often participated in the "unnaming" of same-sex relations as they increasingly became identified as transgressive. Hoping to read silences and ellipses as well as the words on the page, Andreadis traces the development of "Sapphic discourse." In the place of honor is Katherine Philips, whose poetry of female friendship has long been a critical battleground of opposing views about the corporeality of same-sex erotics. Andreadis attributes to Philips the establishment and acceptance of a female poetic voice writing "apparently chaste language of passionate female friendship whose veiled and shadowed subtext is inescapably erotic" (56); and she unequivocally believes chat Philips is writing from her own experience, revising Donne's images and arguments as well as the available language of male friendship to invent a publicly acceptable discourse expressing her own passion for women. From Philips' solution to the problem of creating social respectability for homoerotic poetry emanates a tradition of what Andreadis calls "double discourse," increasingly useful to female poets the more socially transgressive Sappho becomes. Tracing Philips' influence on their poetic strategies, Andreadis outlines a historical process in which female erotic discourse develops, whether expressed in the highly allusive, veiled images of Anne Killigrew, the avowedly "inoffensive" poems of Anne Finch, or the evasive and ingenious pastoral of Jane Barker. Significant contexts for this development are offered in two key historical chapters on cultural representations of Sappho and Calisto: in chapter two, Andreadis analyzes images and a variety of texts to demonstrate Sappho's eventual preeminence as the "primary icon and embodiment of transgression" (51); and in chapter five, she demonstrates the sexually ambiguous reworking of Ovid's Calisto narrative to include female same-sex erotics.

Scholars of early modern women's writing will certainly want to read Andreadis' comprehensive study, one that fills an obvious gap in seventeenth-century literary history. Anyone who has taught Katherine Philips' friendship poems or Margaret Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure will find that many of the questions that arise for modern readers of these texts are the very questions that Andreadis confronts, theorizes, and offers to answer. On fundamental problems of terminology--is it accurate to use "lesbian" in the seventeenth century?--Andreadis is helpful, not doctrinaire, and painstakingly precise. Even if readers hesitate to agree with some of her claims--for instance, that the absence of poems about husband or children necessarily signifies in assessing what matters to a poet--by and large, the book instructs and illuminates, and will certainly stimulate further discussion.

The two collections of essays under review emerged from conferences that reflect the benefits of international collaboration. Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700 is an outstanding anthology in which every essay offers substantial analysis of and insight into a remarkable body of documents. Taken together, these essays provide compelling evidence for early modern women participation in a wide range of social, political, and cultural roles; they make incontrovertible women's presence in the public sphere as part of extended family groups, communities, and national networks. Indeed, this volume adds to a growing scholarship on women's letters that indicates why they are something of a new frontier for exploring women's daily lives. In his introduction, James Daybell estimates that there are 10,000 items of women's correspondence to 1642, and in his own fine essay, "Female Literacy and the Social Conventions of Women's Letter-Writing in England, 1540-1603," he estimates that in the period he studies, t here are 2300 letters extant. Daybell raises knotty issues surrounding women's correspondence, such as the significance of dictated letters and the attendant question of female literacy. But he judiciously complicates the simple evidence of signatures by examining the multiple reasons why a woman might use a secretary in some cases and write letters herself in another. In other words, beyond orthography and penmanship lie the familial, social, and political functions of women's letters that are of central concern in this volume. Each essay provides a framework or a context for understanding aspects of the letters, and in most cases, the union of historical and literary methodologies is fruitful and instructive. As Rosemary O'Day reminds us, we need to be alert to the varying historical contexts shaping the conventions of correspondence that individual letter writers obey or revise. Examples of successful interdisciplinary analysis abound, from Roger Dalrymple's examination of "Reaction, Consolation and Redres s in the Letters of the Paston Women," where genre is a crucial determinant of expression; to Alison Truelove's "Commanding Communications: the Fifteenth-Century Letters of the Stonor Women," where class and status are more likely to influence content and style. Similarly, Anne Laurence introduces a remarkable group of early eighteenth-century letters by women who essentially adopted the role of Civil War historians.