Reviews for Renaissance Women Poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer

The average rating for Renaissance Women Poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-05-23 00:00:00 James Schultz Should we still accept the idea of 'women writers'? That a mainstream publisher like Penguin have issued this (2000) is a sign that Renaissance women writers have become a standard, albeit still marginalised, part of the canon. This is a good anthology which focuses on three very different English women: the elite Mary Sidney, the 'middle-class' Isabella Whitney, and the more socially-unclassifiable Aemilia Lanyer. And yet, as Danielle Clark, the editor, herself states, the very fact that these writers are classified as 'women writers' separates them from 'proper' writers and poets, implicitly male. That position is not helped by the fact that Whitney is not, strictly speaking, that good a poet; Sidney is represented as a translator of the psalms and one of Petrarch's Triumphs, and only Lanyer is shown to be an 'original' poet, interesting rather than brilliant. So while this volume certainly makes women's poetry accessible, at the same time it panders to the idea of women as second-rate writers. If Whitney had been located in a volume of popular ballads and 'street poetry', or Sidney in a book of religious poetry or translations of the psalms, say, we might perhaps get a more coherent picture of them in relation to their literary contexts. As it is, under the label 'Renaissance... poets' comparisons will inevitably be made with Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne who stood head and shoulders above most other writers of the period, male or female - and these women will thus reconfirm the secondary place of 'female writers'. So this is a useful volume to have - I'm just not sure that gender is a good category to use for selection and organisation.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-18 00:00:00 Stephen Mellow I went to a college run by feminist nuns. Yep, get over it. I read very few of these poems in college. There is a reason for that. A few of the poems are good. Many aren't.