Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (review)

Paul Salzman finishes his introduction by writing, "I do not address this book to the small group of specialists in this area (although I hope they may find things of interest in it), but to those from a wide variety of fields and disciplines who want to know more about what women wrote in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how that writing was read . . . through to the present day" (10). Both audiences will find the book enjoyable. Specialists, in addition, will admire its accuracy of detail, its careful analysis, and its particular judgments on difficult problems of interpretation.

Salzman is good at describing and reflecting current emphases in the study of early women's writing, though he may give Anne Clifford more attention and Elizabeth Cary less than accords with trends as I know them. This is only to say, however, that he does not narrowly restrict himself to writing a literary history and, rather, has the good sense to follow his own inclinations when it comes to pursuing what he finds to be of interest. He says that he tries to follow Margaret Ezell's example in setting writers and their work within the context of print publication and manuscript circulation, and he is very successful in this attempt. He also tracks reception history in such a way as to inform backgrounds to current interpretation, uncovering various sorts of salient facts along the way and, occasionally, drawing daring conclusions. Virginia Woolf, he asserts, may have felt a certain amount of hostility towards Aphra Behn as a person simply because Vita Sackville-West admired Behn as a sort of sexual free spirit. Woolf might have liked Sackville-West to have been a little less free.

Salzman's consideration of individual writers begins with two apparent opposites: Queen Elizabeth, the ultimate in aristocratic women of the time, and Isabella Whitney, a servant who, nevertheless, wrote and published poetry. Elizabeth was something like what we today would label a public intellectual, while Whitney took on a very serious task in exploring the idea and practice of service. Whitney's view was not simple or straightforward, however, and it is difficult to be sure, in one poem at least, whether she thought life was better lived as a married woman or as a single person serving in an imporant household. Salzman next considers Lady Mary Wroth, pausing to examine two sonnets in depth. Along the way, he remarks on the lack of reference to her writing later in the seventeenth century within manuscripts, even though her story was well-known. I would agree with him that "the literary forms she used were out of fashion," perhaps even as she wrote within them (86). Salzman undertakes what at first seems a quirky discussion of the current owner of one of the manuscripts of Wroth's Love's Victory, but that discussion is rendered cogent as it becomes clear that manuscript transmission has always depended on various owners' feelings about what is public and what belongs to particular families.

The significance of Anne Clifford's diary, in its personal segments (1616–19) and in its entirety, is treated as are its importance to Woolf and Sackville-West, and hence to readers in the later parts of the twentieth century. Prophetic writing by women is explored with particular attention to Lady Elinor Davies, Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fell, and Jane Lead, part of the point being to look into nontraditional, or at least non-mainstream, literary forms.

The book's final two chapters pair Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson on the one hand, and Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn on the other. Both pairings work well. Hutchinson, in particular, is less well-known than should be the case. Salzman follows Kate Lilley in asserting the "permeability of manuscript and print" (182). He also discusses men who adapted Philips's poems, most strikingly the Duke of Monmouth, who had his adaptations with him at the time of his...