Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anne Bradstreet
-
Standard Name: Bradstreet, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Dudley
Married Name: Anne Bradstreet
Pseudonym: A Gentlewoman of those Parts
Pseudonym: The Tenth Muse
Used Form: Anne Broadstreet
Used Form: a Gentlewoman in New-England
AB
, born and brought up in seventeenth-century England, is known as the earliest poet of North America. She was a skilled and ambitious practitioner of verse history and scholarly adaptation from classical authors, but is best remembered today for her personal lyrics. Her few prose works include a brief spiritual autobiography (almost a mother's legacy) and various meditations.
MMB
also has strong coverage of writers, scholars, and activists, like Anne Askew
, Mary Astell
(whose uncle she credits with having generously tutored her), and Ann Bacon
. She seems to have excluded the...
Textual Features
Eavan Boland
The title sequence is dedicated to those who lost a country,
Boland, Eavan. A Woman Without a Country. Carcanet Press.
27
including the poet's grandmother, who was one of those living outside history (a favourite phrase of EB
). Her grandmother died in 1909...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Brereton
Each poem is headed by a picture, showing the thatched structure of Merlin's Cave and the stone-built royal hermitage respectively. The first poem, Merlin, is Humbly inscrib'd to Caroline
,
Brereton, Jane. Merlin. Cave.
title-page
and after imploring...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Bury
Here she concludes by quoting, unascribed, eight lines of poetry by Congreve
beginning When Lesbia first I saw, so heavenly Fair.
Bury, Elizabeth. An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury. Editor Bury, Samuel, Printed by and for J. Penn and sold by J. Sprint.
189
Such a worldly quotation seems out of character. Most of the quotations in...
Textual Features
Alicia D'Anvers
In the allegorical dialogue, Belgia is the mother and Britannia the wife of the hero Albion (William). While giving voice to nations in their standard female personifications was a fairly frequent trope, it is not...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln
Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, bore eighteen children, of whom nine daughters and seven sons lived to grow up. She did not suckle them herself; if she had done so, it would probably have been...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln
It was Anne Bradstreet
's father, an employee of the earl, who arranged this marriage.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge.
421
Intertextuality and Influence
Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Grymeston
EG
's prefatory epistle offers advice on the conduct of his life to her son Bernye, and further good counsel is prominent. This book (which also includes poems and prayers) is both the earliest extant...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sarah Orne Jewett
Her mother, born Caroline Frances Perry
, was a descendant of the earliest poet of North America, Anne Bradstreet
.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
In this film, a comic study of the gulf between French and US culture, one of two female central characters recites a poem by Anne Bradstreet
.
Londry, Michael. Email about Ruth Prawer Jhabvala film script to Isobel Grundy.
Textual Features
Sylvia Kantaris
This volume, through its title, invokes a whole tradition of women's poetry. Sappho
was the first to bear the honorific nickname of tenth muse, which was later freely bestowed on writing women (like Anna Maria van Schurman
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Bathsua Makin
Makin proposes a curriculum which blends tradition with innovation. In arguing that it is more important to know things, than to get words and that languages (the staple of current male education) are subservient to...
Reception
Mary Oxlie
This work listed MO
as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton
, seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his...
Timeline
By early March 2009: Elaine Showalter published A Jury of Her...
Bradstreet, Anne. Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight. Printed by John Foster, 1678.
Bradstreet, Anne. “The Introduction”. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, edited by Joseph R. McElrath and Allan P. Robb, Twayne, 1981, p. xi - xlii.
Bradstreet, Anne. The Tenth Muse. Stephen Bowtell, 1650.
Bradstreet, Anne, and Adrienne Rich. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Editor Hensley, Jeannine, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.