"Corrected by the Author": Women, Poetry, and Seventeenth-Century Print Publication

Early modern women's poetry tends to be read in one of two prevailing critical paradigms. On the one hand, much important scholarship emphasizes revision, augmentation, and the malleability of women's manuscript texts. On the other, print editions of women's texts are celebrated as landmarks; print publication, in this view, bestows new qualities of posterity, stability, and fixity. This essay reinterrogates these paradigms of malleability in manuscript and fixity in print. Focusing on the variant print editions of poetry by Katherine Philips, Anne Bradstreet, and Margaret Cavendish, it reveals a complex contingency to women's printed poetic texts and, in doing so, reassesses women poets' relationship to seventeenth-century print culture.