Reviews for Early modern women's writing

The average rating for Early modern women's writing based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-25 00:00:00 Jose A. Raynal V. It's always very difficult to decide what to include and exclude in an anthology, especially one published in paperback and therefore limited in space. Paul Salzman has made some intelligent choices here which give us a mix of the canonical (Wroth, Behn) and the less well-known (Cotton & Cole, Biddle). He also crosses genres in a free way to include poetry, plays, letters and prose. In a brief but cogent introduction Salzman lays out his thinking and sites the collection well. He takes issue with Virginia Woolf's famous diatribe in the 'Judith Shakespeare' part of her A Room of One's Own and pays homage to the ongoing academic project of recuperating women's writing from the early modern period, much of which was circulated in manuscript, or amongst social networks. The volume introduces each of our women writers with brief biographical details, and a summary of their other works thus putting them into some kind of social, cultural and literary context. It's especially pleasing to see Mary Wroth's 'Love's Victory' printed here. So this is a fine anthology for both the student and general reader which challenges the assumption that women were 'chaste, silent and obedient' in the sixteenth century, and which allows us to begin to map some of the 'traditions' of women's writing which extend forward into the seventeeth century and beyond.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-09-09 00:00:00 Martha Brandino I did not finish this. Does not mean it is not good, though. It is a compilation of writings by female writers from the abovementioned period. These figures are unfamiliar to me - Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Clifford, Mary Wroth, Eleanor Davies, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, Hester Biddle, Margaret Cavendish, Dorothy Osborne, Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. ~ The poems are very long but beautiful. I enjoyed the style. Very flowery. However, the plays were hard for me to go through. The paragraphs here are just too bulky and long. Hence, I gave up reading the last 50 pages of the book.