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

Letters as evidence of women's multiple roles both early and late in the period comes from Jennifer Ward's "Letter-Writing by English Noblewomen in the Early Fifteenth Century," in which women's involvement in estate management and patronage is documented, and from Jacqueline Eales' "Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: the Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1598-1643)" where Harley's active participation in local politics and in running family affairs is examined. Rosemary O'Day's enlightening "Tudor and Stuart Women: their Lives through their Letters" shows not only that women participate in arranging their children's marriages, but also that young women correspond about their own marriages. The importance of women's contributions to maintaining the elite status of their family appears in Vivienne Larminie's "Fighting for Family in a Patronage Society: the Epistolary Armoury of Anne Newdigate (1574-1618)," where Larminie demonstrates how Newdigate expresses herself "forcefully, eloquently and persuasively" ( 94). In a quite different way, the writer's political agenda is part of Sara Jayne Steen's "'How Subject to Interpretation': Lady Arbella Stuart and the Reading of Illness," where Steen's detective work leads to her conclusion that Stuart was probably afflicted with acute intermittent porphyria, an illness that her letters document but also exploit for political and psychological reasons. Even cloistered nuns, Claire Walker argues in Doe not supose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world': Letter Writing in Early Modern English Convents," exerted considerable influence on patronage decisions, disseminated family news, and conducted financial affairs.

The pleasures of eavesdropping on the correspondents' lives should not be ignored, perhaps most notably in the Thynne correspondence discussed in Alison Wall's "Deference and Defiance in Women's Letters of the Thynne Family: the Rhetoric of Relationships." Wall argues that some letters indicate how the proscriptions of preachers and didactic texts are received by women themselves, something about which we certainly need to know more. In Maria Thynne's irony, we may hear a delightful comeback to those endless injunctions to obedience and silence: she suggests that her two letters a day to her husband, Thomas, might indicate that she prattles, "but consider that all is business, for... there is not a more silent woman living than myself" (79). Similarly, in "Gentle Companions: Single Women and their Letters in Late Stuart England," Susan Whyman provides notable profiles of women like Peg Adams who wrote to her Verney kin, "... and as for anybody falling in love with me, I can't expect that [having] ... none of that which all the world values; I mean money" (183).

In Women Writing 1550-1750, women's participation in public discourse and the means by which they undertake and authorize it are similarly of fundamental concern. In "Redemptive Advice: Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing," Lloyd Davis makes an excellent case for Leigh's assumption of a public role through her redefinition of maternal duty. Similarly, Patricia Pender's "Disciplining the Imperial Mother: Anne Bradstreet's A Dialogue Between Old England and New" demonstrates that Bradstreet uses domestic discourse between mother and daughter to enable her entry into public, political disputation. Two essays on Margaret Cavendish--Jo Wallwork's "Old Worlds and New: Margaret Cavendish's Response to Robert Hooke's Micrographia" and Diana Barnes' "The Restoration of Royalist Form in Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters"--effectively argue for Cavendish's place in public debate about experimental science and politics, adding to the overwhelming evidence that moves Cavendish well out of private eccentricity an d into the mainstream.