Reading Early Modern Women's Writing

This book contains the first comprehensive account of writing by women from the mid sixteenth century through to 1700. At the same time, it traces the way a representative sample of that writing was published, circulated in manuscript, read, anthologised, reprinted, and discussed from the time it was produced through to the present day. Salzman's study covers an enormous range of women from all areas of early modern society, and it covers examples of the many and varied genres produced by these women, from plays to prophecies, diaries to poems, autobiographies to philosophy. As well as introducing readers to the wealth of material produced by women in the early modern period, this book examines changing responses to what was written, tracing a history of reception and transmission that amounts to a cultural history of changing taste.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Were They That Name? Categorizing Early Modern Women's Writing 1: The Scope of Early Modern Women's Writing 2: Poets High and Low, Visible and Invisible 3: Mary Wroth: From Obscurity to Canonization 4: Anne Clifford: Writing a Family Identity 5: Prophets and Visionaries 6: Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Huchinson: Authorship and Ownership 7: Saint and Sinner: Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn Conclusion

About the Author :
Paul Salzman is a Reader in English Literature at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely in the areas of early modern prose fiction, early modern cultural history, and early modern women's writing. His last book was a literary/cultural history of a single year, Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621. He has also edited four Oxford World's Classics volumes, the most recent of which was Early Modern Women's Writing: An Anthology 1560-1700.

Review :
The reading Salzman has undertaken for this project is very comprehensive: he helpfully corrects the mistakes in the literature, a process that happens rather too rarely in critical works. Elizabeth Clarke, The Review of English Studies Salzman focuses most rewardingly... on how early modern women writers were perceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries... Salzman's account leaves much for scholars to question, including whether the Victorians favoured the same early modern women as the Romantics, and why Elizabeth I was treated so badly by anthologists Elizabeth Scott-Baumnann, Times Literary Supplement Salzman['s]...engaging new monograph...is invaluable...a capable conspectus of and a significant contribution to its subject. Students and researchers alike will be grateful for what Salzman has achieved in this book. The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 36, Number 4