English Women Writers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

    In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf writes:
     
      . . . it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.  Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by , what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.  Shakespeare himself went, very probably-- to the grammar school , where he may have learnt Latin--Ovid, Virgil and Horace--and the elements of grammar and logic. . . . Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home.  She was as adventurous, as imaginative,  as agog with the world  as he was.  But she was not sent to school.  She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone the reading of Horace and Virgil.   She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps,  and read a few pages.  But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about  with books and papers.
       
    The intent in quoting such a lengthy passage from Woolf is to highlight the fact that she got it exactly right.  From her perch in the twentieth century, Woolf described exactly the conditions that led to a silence in woman's voices in the sixteenth century.  It was not that woman did not have the intellectual capabilities to write but that they lacked the education.

    Elite Learning

    Women in the sixteenth century were just beginning to be allowed some education.  It was a time of Renaissance in England, with humanism taking root and education flourishing. The education of women first took root in elite households, including the the household of Thomas More and the king's own castle.  Henry VIII took steps to ensure that his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were properly educated.  Mary's mother, Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), was a Spanish princess, who was herself well educated as a child, although her education centered around those things that would help her to be a good wife.  Nonetheless, Catherine was meticulous in her attention to Mary's education, calling on the humanist Juan Luis Vives to aid her in devising a curriculum for her daughter.

    The Education of a Christian Woman

    Mary's education followed the path laid by Vives in his Education of a Christian Woman.  Vives primarily proposed education for women to be for religious improvement; he saw no secular use for education in women.  The Education of a Christian Woman was intended to educate Mary in much the same manner as her mother had been educated.  Vives believed that the home was a small commonwealth that was presided over by a wife.  In order to properly run a home, a woman needed to be educated.  In this framework, there was little need for book learning; hence lessons were focused elsewhere.

    Vives believed that girls should be taught by female teachers, since young girls should not spend time with men lest they like them too much . Yet he also voiced his concerns about educated women.  He suggested that learning would enable women to deceive men in the manner of Eve.  Rhetoric, especially, was not to be taught to women.

    Thus the royal nursery provides a model of what education for girls was like in the sixteenth century.  Education was intended primarily to teach young girls to be dutiful wives and devout Christians and was conducted within households under the direction of private tutors.  If reading was included in the curriculum at all, it was usually without the accompanying skill of writing.  These traditions in women's education effectively silenced women for much of the sixteenth century.  These circumstances under which women lived are perhaps what prompted Joan Kelly's famous article, "Did Women have a Renaissance?"

    Early Women's Voices

    Over the course of the century, some women did learn to write and did put pen to paper.  Some of the earliest women writers in England include the following: Margaret Beaufort (1441-1509),  Margaret (More) Roper (1505-1544), Anne Boleyn (1507-1536),  Katherine Parr (1512- 1548), Mary Bassett, Anna Cooke (Bacon) (1528-1610), Elizabeth Cooke (Russell) (1528-1609), Jane Grey (1538-1554), and Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603).  These women represent the earliest writers in the century.   They were all women of the highest status and hence were privileged in their ability to write.  These women primarily used their pens to write religious treatises in English, since their audience (other women) did not have skills in Latin.  Early women writers often put their energies into translations.  Margaret Beaufort, for example, translated two religious works from French to English.

    Katherine Parr's interest in learning brings to bear an interesting point.  Her life was almost cut short as the wife of Henry VIII when it was discovered that she had been a friend of Anne Askew.  Askew was executed for interpreting the bible and then refusing to back down when confronted by the magistrates.  Askew 's fate is chronicled in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs; she was tortured and burned for her Protestant beliefs, primarily because she had the gall to voice them out loud.  Katherine was at risk merely because she associated with a woman who flouted traditional conventions, which stipulated that women must first of all be silent.

    Women of the Middle Class Speak out

    In the middle of the sixteenth century, education had begun to trickle down the to non-elite women and some middle-class women writers emerge. Isabella Whitney (fl. 1567-1573) is perhaps England's first female professional poet.  Whitney wrote A Choice of Emblemes, which is a collection of poetry. Unlike her contemporaries, Whitney chose secular topics over religious ones in her writing.  Furthermore, Whitney differed from her forerunners in that it is believed that she was of middle-class origins.  Unfortunately, little else is known about Whitney.  How and why she received her education is unknown.

    Anne Wheathill was another woman of middle-class origins who wrote in the late sixteenth century.  She wrote along more conventional lines that Whitney, choosing religious topics as the focus of her writings and addressing an audience of women.

    The Seventeenth Century

    As the sixteenth century melted into the seventeenth, more and more women were writing.  Among those writing in the early 1600s were the following: Rachel Speght (fl. 1617-1621), Mary Sidney (Herbert), the Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621), Katherine Phillips (1631-1664), Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676), Aemelia Lanyer (1569-1645), Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), and Elizabeth Cary.  Many of these women were of the upper class or, lacking that accident of birth, had ties with women of that status.  Lanyer is a good example of a woman who consciously sought the patronage of upper-class women, often dedicating her works to desired patrons. There was a flourishing manuscript circulation during this period, through which women circulated their writings.  Women still wrote primarily for other women, and religion continued to be a common theme.  As time passed, however, a broader range of topics were taken up by women writers.  The end of the seventeenth century even saw the emergence of a female playwright. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is immortalized by in A Room of One's Own:
     
      And with Mrs. Behn, we turn a very important corner in the road.  We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audiences or criticism, for their own delight alone.  We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets.  Mrs. Behn was a middle class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits.