Isabella Whitney

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Standard Name: Whitney, Isabella
Birth Name: Isabella Whitney
Married Name: Isabella Eldershae
Pseudonym: Is. W.
IW is remarkable as the first woman—middle-class too, not noble—to publish a book of poems in English, which she did in 1567. She went on to issue another collection and several separate poems.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Reception Ephelia
Maureen E. Mulvihill calls Female Poems the first volume of English poetry in which a female voice takes a purely secular viewpoint.
Mulvihill, Maureen E. “Sly Stuart Duchess: The Many Masks of Mary Villiers (’Ephelia’)”. The Female Spectator (1995-), pp. 1 - 5.
3
Though the much earlier Isabella Whitney has a better claim to this...
Textual Features Germaine Greer
The selection of poets is highly informed. It reaches back in time before GG 's anthology Kissing the Rod, to Anne Askew and Isabella Whitney , and forward to Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood
Textual Production Jane Anger
The title continues: Jane Anger her Protection for Women To defend them against the Scandalous Reportes of a late Surfeiting Lover, and all other like Venerians that complaine so to be overcloyed with womens kindnesse...
Textual Production Lady Hester Pulter
In the same manuscript album as her poems and romance, LHP included a collection of emblem poems titled The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah.
Pulter, Lady Hester. “Introduction”. Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, edited by Alice Eardley, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014, pp. 1 - 40.
27, 185
These...

Timeline

1567
George Turbervile published Heroycall Epistles (London: Henry Denham), a translation of Ovid 's Heroides.