Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England (review)

Connections between gender and genre have developed into a significant body of scholarship in studies of early modern women's writing. This volume of essays by ten scholars provides new approaches to such now canonical women writers as Margaret Cavendish, Anne Halkett, and Anne Clifford and fresh treatment of little-discussed genres such as literary prefaces, mothers' legacies, self-defense narratives, and recipe books. Poetry, personal letters, and romance fiction, too, are seen in relation to women's life writing. The editors summarize that these essays, all using the approach of historical formalism, show how early modern women "produced rhetorically sophisticated discourses of the self" in which "textual form and the subjectivity it produces are mutually constitutive" (6, 1).

Margaret Ezell's essay on domestic papers brings detailed attention to the material culture of manuscript production as well as to women's reading and writing practices (33). Protestant women's reading of religious texts, Ezell claims, provided a "platform from which to launch their self-examinations," which might be recorded in manuscript books of notes and meditations (36). Although such manuscripts were not intended for print publication, they were not solely individual exercises either, intending an audience within the author's domestic circle and often being handed down as valuable heirlooms from mother to daughter. Such practices, Ezell suggests, complicate any simple binary between the public and the private in the period.

Another set of manuscripts valuable within domestic contexts are the recipe books discussed by Catherine Field. Such books addressed not only cookery but also medicine, the care of animals, and household information, all areas that emphasized bodily, empirical practice where women were acknowledged experts. These manuscripts were often collaborations compiled over generations. Such volumes, Field argues, demonstrate positive attitudes toward women's knowledge little seen in more formal literary genres. Furthermore, these books "posit the female body as healing (and heal-able)," and benign rather than shameful (58). Megan Matchinske's essay on Lady Ann Clifford's diary also emphasizes a positive approach to female embodiment, claiming that her writing "actively creates for her an embodied, temporally responsible, and spatially attentive identity" that repetitively connects her self with her land but that contrasts with the smooth personal chronology delineated by male autobiographers like Pepys (66).

Thus configurations of identity vary by both authorial gender and genre, a point Helen Wilcox emphasizes in analyzing varied forms of self presentation in the letters of Arbella Stuart and Dorothy Osborne compared with the poetry of Mary Wroth and Martha Moulsworth. (Uniquely in this volume, Wilcox outlines her pedagogical strategies for increasing undergraduates' appreciation of these authors.) Julie Eckerle adds printed prefaces to the list of untapped genres that disclose early modern women's "sophisticated rhetorical maneuvering" to create respectable self-presentations (99).

Proving one's respectability takes a vivid form in the "defense-narratives" that women made to criminal allegations (169). According to Josephine Donovan, who expands the range of the volume by including French and Spanish as well as English examples, the narratives of such accused con women as Mary Frith and Mary Carleton "helped to establish the prototype of a maligned female figure protesting her innocence and defending her reputation" that became central to the later growth of the novel (170).

The theme of women as empiricists appears in two differing essays on Margaret Cavendish. Elspeth Graham focuses on themes of connection and separation in Cavendish's works, admiring the "curiously open quality" that makes her writings "available for a plurality of readings" (131). For Graham, Cavendish takes on the role of a "natural philosopher observing and delineating" the object of herself (146). Lara Dodds, instead, sees the figure of an idealized housewife, based on Cavendish's mother, as a figure for nature in Cavendish's writings that authorizes her critique of contemporary natural philosophy: Cavendish's "writing...