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ABSTRACT
Isabella Whitney is often celebrated as the first professional woman English writer. Such “firsts”, however, are sticky—a matter of shifting data and definitions. More importantly, a focus on a “first” woman can often obfuscate the reality of women’s historical involvements in a field. When Whitney’s first work was published, the printing press had not yet been in England a full century, and professional writers of any description were still thin on the ground. But women who wrote, who were involved in the book trade, or who otherwise participated in the publishing world were no anomaly. While gender is important to both Whitney’s work and her historical place, this article will prioritize placing those considerations in conversation with the larger contextual community of early modern print. How might we continue to reconceptualize Whitney’s place in the history of women’s writing, circumventing tokenization and promoting a fuller appreciation of all women’s places in the world of early modern writing, print, and books? Whitney’s work then emerges as an exemplar of early professional authorship qua professional authorship, full stop, and as one access point for appreciating the rich and extensive involvement of women in the early English publishing and writing networks.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Wendy Wall, “Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy”, English Literary History, 58.1 (1991): 46.
2 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Whitney, Isabella” (by Betty Travitsky), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/45498 (accessed June 29, 2022).
3 Laurie Ellinghausen, “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 45.1 (2005): 2.
4 Wikipedia, s.v. “Isabella Whitney”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Whitney (accessed June 29, 2022).
5 Regina M. Buccola, “‘These So-Called Early Modern Women Writers’: Strategies for Integrating Women Writers into English Department Curriculum”, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 34.1 (2003): 154.
6 Alice Eardley, “Recreating the Canon: Women Writers and Anthologies of Early Modern Verse”, Women’s Writing, 14.2 (2007): 270.
7 Eardley, 271.
8 Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing”, Criticism, 62.2 (2020): 170. Dodds and Dowd particularly frame feminist formalism as a response to an enduring “logic of female exemplarity” whose result is that “[i]n both scholarship and the classroom, early women writers continue to be singled out for political rather than aesthetic reasons: for their gender, as such, or for being the ‘first’ woman to accomplish a particular feat” (176).
9 Buccola, 148.
10 Michelle M. Dowd, “Navigating the Future of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Pedagogy, Feminism, and Literary Theory”, Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, ed. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2018), p. 279.
11 Particularly excellent demonstrations of women’s embeddedness in early modern writing and print cultures were offered by Cristina León Alfar, Valerie Billing, Vanessa M. Braganza, Jean Elizabeth Howard, and Niamh J. O’Leary during the “Feminist Debates and Early Modern Studies” roundtable chaired by Lara Dodds at the 2022 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (Jacksonville, Florida, April 9, 2022).
12 Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), p. 6.
13 Michelle O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer must, haue somwhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richards Jones, and Crafting Books”, Women’s Writing, 26.1 (2019) and Kirk Melnikoff, “Isabella Whitney Amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones”, Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (Arden Shakespeare: New York, 2020).
14 Valerie Wayne, “Introduction: Locating Women’s Labour”, Women’s Labour, ed. Wayne, p. 19.
15 Danielle Clarke and Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Gender, Reception, and Form: Early Modern Women and the Making of Verse”, The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, eds. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), p. 160.
16 Clarke and Coolahan, 154.
17 Eardley, 282.
18 Clarke and Coolahan, 152 (emphasis in original).
19 Dowd, 262.
20 Ibid., 264.
21 Ibid., 279.
22 Ibid., 269.
23 In addition to the authors cited here, my own framework has been shaped by the scholarship of Micheline White, Victoria Burke, and Margaret Ezell.
24 Clarke and Coolahan, 154.
25 Wall, 47–8.
26 Michelle O’Callaghan, 17.
27 Ibid., 21.
28 Paul A. Marquis offers just such an engagement with the question of Jones’s potential editorial interventions (“Oppositional Ideologies of Gender in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Copy of a Letter’”, The Modern Language Review, 90.2 (1995): 316). Jones and Whitney’s collaborative work also features centrally in Melnikoff’s “Amongst the Stalls” and O’Callaghan’s “‘My Printer.’”
29 Betty Travitsky, “The ‘Wyll and Testament’ of Isabella Whitney”, English Literary Renaissance, 10.1 (1980): 77. Travitsky’s framing does engage Whitney as exceptional among women, rather than among early modern writers more generally, in ways that might counter my larger arguments here.
30 O’Callaghan, 27.
31 Ellinghausen, 2.
32 Ibid., 3.
33 Wall, 51.
34 Whitney Trettien, “Isabella Whitney’s Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45.3 (2015): 515.
35 Ellinghausen, 1.
36 Julianne Werlin, Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England (Oxford, Oxford UP, 2021), p. 70.
37 Isabella Whitney, dedicatory epistle to George Mainwaring, A Sweet Nosegay, (R. Jones: London, 1573), sig. A5.
38 Danielle Clarke, “Public and Private”, A Cultural History of Women: In the Renaissance, ed. Karen Raber, vol. 3 of A Cultural History of Women (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 134.
39 Clarke, 133–4.
40 Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, “Isabella Whitney”, Early Modern Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), p. 48. Of further relevance is Danielle Clarke’s argument that the country house tradition may itself begin with Aemilia Lanyer’s work (The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2001), p. 8.
41 Travitsky, 81.
42 Whitney, “A communication which the Auctor had to London, before she made her will”, Nosegay, sig. E2v.
43 Helen Wilcox, “‘Ah Famous Citie’: Women, Writing, and Early Modern London”, Feminist Review, 96 (2010): 27.
44 Oxford DNB, “Whitney, Isabella.”
45 Ibid.
46 Wall, 47, 35.
47 H.R. Woudhuysen’s Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (1996) and Christopher J. Warner’s The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557: Songs and Sonnets in the Summer of the Martyr’s Fires (2013) offer just two examples of the shift in this argument. Based on her more recent work, I want to acknowledge that Wall might also construct her articulation of that challenge differently, now, though her articulation in 1991 is characteristically nuanced and full.
48 Wall, 47; Ellinghausen, 8.
49 Melnikoff, 145, 156.
50 Clarke, 133.
51 Trettien, 517.
52 Ibid., 133 (emphasis in original).
53 Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 16–7.
54 Stevenson and Davidson, 48.
55 Marquis, 317.
56 Travitsky, 79.
57 Ibid., 80.
58 Wall, 47.
59 Ibid., 58.
60 Ellinghausen, 11–2.
61 Oxford DNB, “Whitney, Isabella.”
62 Trettien, 515–6, italics in original.
63 Dowd, 278.
64 To extend this consideration of context forward, I also want to emphasize that my own areas of disagreement with earlier scholarship are only possible precisely because of that earlier scholarship. As Dowd articulates throughout her article on “Navigating the Future of Women’s Writing,” certain processes of engagement were necessary to move us into a space where we could begin to argue for a different kind of work with gender. If I now argue for a revision of early writing culture that embeds gender considerations more equitably and so engages all writers on equal terms, that revision required the initial recovery of women writers from a history of scholarship that had aimed at erasure.
65 Danielle Clarke, “Mid-Tudor Poetry”, The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry, eds. Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022), p. 435.
66 My point, here, is not to elide the anachronism of claiming that Whitney somehow was or was not “feminist,” herself, as an unavailable political position, but instead to highlight the importance of acknowledging Whitney’s (and other women writers’) contributions to individualism, authorial privilege, and capitalist framings of labour simultaneously with our restoration and reconsideration of their work as a feminist act.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore
Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore is an associate professor in early modern British literatures at the University of Central Oklahomar and the author of Gender and Position-Taking in Henrician Verse: Tradition, Translation, and Transcription. Her work on gender in early modern Britain has appeared in Appositions, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing.