'That Uncertain Name'

‘Were they that name?’ Thus asks Paul Salzman at the outset of his engaging new monograph. Salzman’s question, as specialists will realise, self-consciously echoes and rewrites the question famously asked by Denise Riley in the title of her feminist classic Am I That Name?¹ Riley’s concern, in the late 1980s, was with the homogeneity constructed by the term ‘women’, a term which, she argued, produced a false and damaging illusion of continuity, obscuring both the plurality and the instability of this vexed category across time. Nearly twenty years later, Riley’s deconstructive anxieties have become mainstream, to the extent that no book on the subject of women’s writing would now be complete without some prefatory self-interrogation about the validity of its own terms of reference. Salzman’s rephrasing of Riley’s question, however, represents no perfunctory acknowledgement of the difficulty, but rather a serious and sustained endeavour to think through its implications for women’s writing from the early modern period. How is it possible, Salzman asks in his introduction, to ‘steer between the Scylla of homogenizing transparently identifiable early modern women writers, and the Charybdis of deconstructed texts which call any identity into question’ (p. 8)? Can scholars of early modern women’s writing find a means of addressing the anxieties articulated by Riley without destroying their own subject in the process? A concomitant question, which also becomes important to Salzman’s project, is whether the concept of ‘women’s writing’ has any historical validity within the early modern period. Would text-producing women from that time have viewed themselves, or been viewed by others, as ‘women writers’? Did they, or their contemporaries and successors, think they were that name?

It is his concern with self-perception and reception which accounts for the participle in Salzman’s title. Unlike many recent studies which have invoked this fashionable topic, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing is genuinely and pervasively preoccupied with readership. Despite setting out to survey a wide range of writing from across the period 1558–1700 – he inveighs against critics who ignore genres traditionally regarded as ‘nonliterary’, or who acquiesce in the conventional period division separating ‘early modern’ from ‘Restoration’ – Salzman is strikingly modest in his aspirations. He explains in his introduction that:

this book is an analysis of how early modern women’s writing has been interpreted by early modern women themselves, and then by those who for a variety of reasons engaged with it in succeeding centuries. I do not, on the whole, emphasize my own readings of individual works, although my own interpretations are evident from time to time.

(p. 10)

After a preliminary chapter on ‘The Scope of Early Modern Women’s Writing’ (where ‘scope’ denotes principally generic variety, with some attention to the intersection of genre and history), the book consists of six further chapters: on poetry, Mary Wroth, Anne Clifford, prophecy, Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson, and Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. The more explicitly generic chapters are typically constructed through both discussions of the general issues and an analysis of representative writers within the titular category. Thus chapter 2, ‘Poets High and Low, Visible and Invisible’, surveys the scope and readership of early modern women’s poetry chiefly through two paired discussions, on Elizabeth I and Isabella Whitney and on Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Sidney; while chapter 5, ‘Prophets and Visionaries’, engages with genreand period-specific issues by focusing on the output and influence of four women: Eleanor Davies, Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fox, and Jane Lead. By comparison, the purportedly author-based chapters devote considerable time to investigating generic issues and contexts relevant to individual writers. The history of women’s dramatic writing is surveyed in the Margaret Cavendish section as a context for Cavendish’s Plays (1662), while the chapter on Mary Wroth reads Urania (1621) in relation to the development of post-Sidneian prose romance. Salzman also attends scrupulously to book history and issues of the materiality of the text such as...