Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print by Gilllian Wright (review)

In this superb study, Gillian Wright examines within the material environments of manuscript and print the work of five seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women writers (Anne Southwell, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips, Anne Finch, and Mary Monck), whose poetry collections were either constructed by them or by individuals close to them. One of the distinctive features of this work is its recognition that the production of women’s writing involves more agents than one, especially when manuscript compilation and print publication were the result of male transcription, selection, arrangement, and editing. In those cases where the compilers were not the authors, what was at stake were which writings were to be preserved or excluded, how they were to be organized, and, implicitly, how each poet was to be remembered.

Wright first discusses Anne Southwell as a manuscript poet, the only one of the five writers whose work did not reach print in its own era. She emphasizes that Southwell operated outside the usual social networks of manuscript transmission and that her husband, Henry Sipthorpe, had a crucial role in shaping her two extant manuscripts. Southwell herself wrote in a variety of secular and religious genres and sometimes engaged in acts of literary appropriation. Wright portrays her as militantly Protestant, confident in her literary activities; yet, while the literary talents were Anne’s, the production of the collections of her verse was in Henry’s scribal and editorial hands.

In dealing with the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, who left no manuscript remains, Wright works back from the biographical and print evidence of her writing to delineate the relationship of her public and personal poems and their presentation in print in The Tenth Muse (1650) and Several Poems (1678), mainly in the former book. While her relationship with Thomas Dudley was central to her writing, it was her brother-in-law in London, John Woodbridge, who made significant decisions of how this work was to be presented and who arranged the publication of the first collection of her verse. Woodbridge, Wright argues, emphasized Bradstreet’s observance of her wifely duties and her status as “a respected member of her community” (68) as she wrote verse that was “generated by and within a male-dominated context of textual exchange” (74) — mainly that “between father and daughter” (77). Wright points out that “the much remarked-on dichotomy between public and private poems in Bradstreet’s oeuvre does not … reflect a division between her early poetry — public, didactic, and still obsessed with Europe — and the later, more American poems of her maturity, but is instead a construct of print-publication” (79). The production of her verse in print, then, distorts our view of her literary career. The decision to exclude the personal verse from The Tenth Muse, Wright suggests, was Woodbridge’s. Conscious of the critical preference for Bradstreet’s personal poetry, Wright argues for the literary value of “The Four Monarchies,” seeing in this work her political rewriting of Ralegh, elements of whose Historie of the World she used to comment on contemporary politics, thus laying claim to woman’s right to intervene in the public world.

Katherine Philips is at the center of Wright’s study. The production of her writing, however, is the most complicated one Wright examines in this book. Here the surviving evidence in both manuscript and print allows us to see the full picture of the production, transmission, compilation, editing, and dissemination of a poet’s work. Wright examines closely the four major manuscript compilations of Philips’s poetry to trace the extension of the work from her literary coterie to the broader readership of the unauthorized and authorized print editions. The Tutin manuscript, a selective collection done in the 1650s, separates the philosophical poems from the personal ones in a “purposeful arrangement” (105): associated with literary royalism, it contains, by contrast with the later...