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.