Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England (review)

In her superb monograph, Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England, Patricia Demers notes the need for a 'thick, layered, and inclusive' study of the writing of early modern women, where 'markers of class, literacy, religion, and race demarcate significantly different opportunities and restrictions.' Displaying immense learning, deep sensitivity to language, and passionate commitment to history, Demers has produced precisely such a study.

Demers begins with the material circumstances and conditions under which women wrote in the early modern period, including legal status, marriage, childbirth, and the ways in which the 'discourses of women's education and household economics were inextricably intertwined.' She goes on to examine the major genres in which women wrote, arranged in rough chronological order. The opening section on translation does justice to the artistry of writers like Margaret Roper, Anne Vaughan Lock and Mary Sidney Herbert (among others), largely owing to Demers's ability to move between languages and evoke the subtle meanings of the translator's word choices. In the next section, women writers are demonstrated to have contributed in a number of ways to theological debate, the literature of romantic intrigue, and classical tragedy. A section on meditations, testimonials, and prayers demonstrates the 'reciprocal early modern relationship between cognition and spirituality.' Demers then considers private yet expressive forms like letters and diaries, followed by a powerful theoretical and formal consideration of women's poetry. As one example of the 'composite discourse' of women's poetry, the work of Aemelia Lanyer, Bathusa Reginald, Rachel Speght, and Lady Mary Wroth is described as 'dramatizing emotively ideas about friendship, sex, class, the pursuit of learning, gendered bodies, and state bureaucracy.' A section on 'Drama and the Dramatic' presents a fascinating spectrum of writing – through 'closet drama to the maternal monologues of advice manuals and the cultural critique of prophecies and polemics.'

Demers offers powerful theoretical perspectives in addition to historical and generic analysis. For example, she views the poets 'Eliza,' An Collins, and Elizabeth Major through Julia Kristeva's ideas of abjection. She compares Margaret Cavendish's 'focused sensibility of atomistic motion' to the postmodern reader 'so inured to theories of doom, entropy and deterioration.' Demers is also wonderful at giving an authoritative yet concise summary of the main threads of an author's critical reception, as when a strong reading of Aemilia Lanyer finds that critics have found her work to be 'abundantly important: passionate, bold, deeply faith-informed, and transgressive.' Demers has a number of important comments in the book about the need to avoid aesthetic and generic uniformity in studying early modern women. She notes, for example, that critics should be open to both the incisive rationality of Mary Cary and the more untramelled writing of Anna Trapnel, without closing off aesthetic possibilities. Likewise, Demers argues that when considering early modern dramatists, it is critical not to concentrate on professional or public theatre to the exclusion of other forms of dramatic production (like closet drama). For a specialist in the writings of early modern women, the book's remarkable combination of wide scope and keen detail provides new insights on well-known figures, and adds to our knowledge of lesser-known writers of the period. For people new to the field, the book will serve as a lucid, comprehensive, and appealing introduction to a wide spectrum of women's writing.