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

Ms. Wright examines the significance of collections of the poetry of early modern women, whether compiled by the writer or others who knew her. The compilers of these collections, she observes, “helped to determine not only that each of these poets would be remembered, but also how she would be remembered.” She analyzes the situations and motives of those responsible for compiling the collections, their intended readers, and how their arrangement presents them. Skilled bibliographical analysis of manuscript and print collections, with particular emphasis on their paratexts, supports her compelling conclusions about the motives, means, and circumstances of production and, ultimately, about the achievements of these poets.

Producing Women’s Poetry includes a chapter each on “substantial, ambitious and accomplished writers”: Anne Southwell, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips, Anne Finch, and Mary Monck. Aemelia Lanyer, Lucy Hutchinson, Aphra Behn, and Mary Chudleigh are discussed briefly in the concluding chapter. Acknowledging her “productionist” approach to writing by early modern women, Ms. Wright argues that “if we are to do justice to early modern women’s writing we need to take as much account of form, ideas, imagery and genre—the traditional stuff of literary criticism—as we do of materiality.” This ideal combination of approaches is a tall order to fill when referring to multiple collections of five poets spanning more than one hundred years.

The chapter on Anne Southwell considers her “significance as a manuscript poet.” Ms. Wright examines the Southwell manuscript now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, finding that “the direction of textual travel is predominantly inwards” Southwell appears to be “more interested in possessing texts for herself than in passing them on to others.” The excellent analysis of the compilation of the manuscript and its appropriation of print texts would be still more valuable had Ms. Wright included more analysis of Southwell’s poetry. Such a combination would support the claim that Southwell is not only a manuscript poet, but a significant one. As with the first chapter, on Southwell’s work, the final chapter, on Marinda: Poems and Translations upon Several Occasions (printed in 1716), would have been strengthened by greater attention to the poetic texts. Ms. Wright impressively analyzes the paratexts of Marinda, a volume that includes poems by Mary Monck, née Molesworth, and demonstrates how Mary Monck’s father, Robert Molesworth, who dedicated the volume to Caroline of Ansbach, sought to fulfill a political agenda in collecting his daughter’s works after her death.

The study of Bradstreet’s collections focuses on The Tenth Muse (London, 1650). Ms. Wright’s insightful attention to that volume’s paratexts, organization, and selection uncovers important clues about Bradstreet’s work, circulation, and reception. “What has often passed unnoticed,” remarks Ms. Wright, “is that at least some of her more personal poetry does in fact predate the publication of The Tenth Muse in 1650,” but such poetry was “consistently excluded from the volume.” One of the chapter’s highlights is the thoughtful application of genre theory and historical aesthetics to Bradstreet’s “The Foure Monarchies.” Ms. Wright reinterprets the purpose and interest of the poem by analyzing it as an example of “verse history.”

In the chapters on Philips’s and Finch’s poetry, the importance of material evidence gleaned from their collections is especially well integrated with analysis of the poetic texts. Discussing six collections in manuscript and print of Philips’s work, Ms. Wright astutely interprets their principles of selection and organization. Analysis of the Tutin manuscript, for example, reveals “two apparently anomalous aspects of Philips’s writing: on the one hand, the relatively slight attention devoted to politics in her pre-Restoration poetry; and on the other, the complexity of attitudes her political allusions of this period reveal.” On the question of whether Philips was indeed behind the printing of her work in 1664, a publication she disavowed, the volume’s selection of works, naïve printing of manuscript conventions, and...