Producing Women's Poetry, 1600–1730 Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print

Producing Women's Poetry is the first specialist study to consider English-language poetry by women across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Gillian Wright explores not only the forms and topics favoured by women, but also how their verse was enabled and shaped by their textual and biographical circumstances. She combines traditional literary and bibliographical approaches to address women's complex use of manuscript and print and their relationships with the male-generated genres of the traditional literary canon, as well as the role of agents such as scribes, publishers and editors in helping to determine how women's poetry was preserved, circulated and remembered. Wright focuses on key figures in the emerging canon of early modern women's writing, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch, alongside the work of lesser-known poets Anne Southwell and Mary Monck, to create a new and compelling account of early modern women's literary history.

Introduction; 1. The resources of manuscript: Anne Southwell, readership and literary property; 2. The material muse: Anne Bradstreet in manuscript and print; 3. The extraordinary Katherine Philips; 4. The anxieties of agency: compilation, publicity and judgement in Anne Finch's poetry; 5. Publishing Marinda: Robert Molesworth, Mary Monck and Caroline of Ansbach; Conclusion: producing women's poetry.

Gillian Wright is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on early modern women's writing and reading, and is especially interested in women's reception of classical literature and the print-manuscript nexus in female writing. She has worked with the Perdita project on manuscript compilations by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women, and her co-edited anthology Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry (2005) won the Josephine Roberts prize for the best edition of 2005, awarded by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Together with Hugh Adlington and Tom Lockwood, she is co-editor of the forthcoming Chaplains in Early Modern England: Patronage, Literature and Religion. She has also published on Samuel Daniel's The Civil Wars, editorial theory and the cultural influence of Stoic thinking in the early modern period.