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

A number of essays provide salutary critiques and revisions of current methodology, cautioning us not simply to limit contexts for women's writing to women's literary history or--following early work by Margaret Ferguson and Margaret Ezell--to assume that recovering women's texts can ignore the circumstances of their transmission. In "Recovering Early Modern Women's Writing," Elaine Hobby argues from the evidence of The Midwives Book that Jane Sharp revises contemporary midwifery manuals; thus, women's texts must be situated generically within a wide range of early modern texts authored by both men and women. Susan Wiseman demonstrates in "'The most considerable of my troubles': Anne Halkett and the Writing of Civil War Conspiracy" that determined editing of Halkett's texts erased their politics and reinvented Halkett's character and behavior. And in "'Divine Chymistry' and Dramatic Character: The Lives of Lady Anne Halkett," Kim Walker argues convincingly that Halkett's autobiographical self should be re ad intertextually with the heroines of Caroline drama, particularly Fletcher's plays. Similarly, in "Tixall Revisited: The Coterie Writings of the Astons and the Thimelbys in Seventeenth-Century Staffordshire," Julie Sanders claims that the letters are more profitably read in the context of family relations and history rather than simply as the work of women writers. In "'Dear Object': Katherine Philips' Love Elegies and Their Readers," Kate Lilley explains clearly why radically different readings of Philips' erotic writing are possible, and explores the significance of hostile reception by her contemporaries.

One potential problem with an anthology developed from conference papers is that the essays sometimes seem too short and undeveloped. Such brevity is more of an issue in Women Writing 1550-1750 than in Early Modern Women's Letter Writing; however, it does not seriously detract from the real advantage of both anthologies, that in one volume readers gain access to an enormous amount of scholarship about early modern women, both in the valuable endnotes and in the ambitious arguments of the authors.