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Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 45, Number 1, Winter 2005
- pp. 1-22
- 10.1353/sel.2005.0005
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay offers a new perspective on the Tudor poet and maidservant Isabella Whitney's way of constructing herself as a female author in the early modern literary marketplace. While Whitney is most often read as a writer desiring textual communities through patronage and the exchange of letters, I note that throughout her miscellany A Sweet Nosgay (1573) she continually emphasizes her isolation from family and community. This stance, I argue, helps Whitney develop a sense of herself as a professional writer who must, after losing her post as a servant, achieve economic independence through the sale of her own verse.