Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press by Sarah C. E. Ross (review)

Women, Poetry, and Politics is a well organised, illustrated, and informed examination of the writing of Elizabeth Melville (fl. 1599–1631), Anne Southwell (bap. 1574–d. 1636), Jane Cavendish (1620/21–69), Hester Pulter (1595/6–1678), and Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81).

Sarah Ross begins by discussing the issues her title brings into prominence, exploring the idea that seventeenth-century women’s poetry was indeed political (which word she defines). Ross does not oversimplify, arguing that in the texts examined, especially religious but also familial tropes are ‘preeminent modes of articulating politics’ (p. 10), and that these texts appear in manuscripts circulating in networks and communities both semipublic and semi-private. She draws attention to the many modes used: vision, contrafactum, sonnet, biblical verse paraphrase, devotional lyric, elegy, and emblem among them.

A chapter is devoted to each poet, drawn from the ‘most innovative’ (p. 4) of those recently discovered. Ross includes numerous complete verse quotations, addresses issues of manuscript circulation, and particular contexts. In Elizabeth Melville’s case, this last is Scottish Presbyterian, her poetry a means ‘of simultaneously inscribing the devotional self … and articulating a political stance of defiance against James VI and I’s incursions on … Kirk governance’ (p. 30). Ross writes of devotional lyrics, sonnets, and sonnet sequences in manuscript, as well as Ane Godlie Dreame, pointing out Melville’s ‘remarkably ungendered’ poetic voices (pp. 31, 33). She sets Melville’s work beside others such as Lanyer, Speght, and James Melville in its uses of imagery, biblical reference, anagram, and acrostic, but misses the potential political significance of Melville’s use of the Scottish interlaced sonnet, favoured by James VI and I.

Following chapters are equivalent in their depth and thoughtfulness. They depict the very different ways in which the work of these writers mirrored or expressed religio-political involvements. Ross argues, for instance, that Southwell, an English Calvinist, harnesses her social lyrics to devotional and religious forms, expanding her meanings to high political involvement, in the manner of Du Bartas or Quarles; that Cavendish uses the ‘fantasized family unit’ as trope or emblem of a familial and political desideratum’ (p. 133); that Pulter’s work and its audience is friendship politicised; and that the well-educated, republican Hutchinson imagines the political state through patriarchal relationship.

The valuable bibliography lacks The Apparelling of Truth: Literature and Literary Culture in the Reign of James VI, eds McGinley and Royan (2010), but this is a mere quibble.