The importance of early modern women's writing on literary criticism is unveiled in a new book by Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Reader in Early Modern Literature in the Department of English.
Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England reveals a hidden history of women literary critics in the seventeenth century. Through analysis of a range of unexpected genres and media - letters, notebooks, prefaces and poems - Dr Scott-Baumann traces how these women were leaders in defining poetic style and the place of poetry in society. In fact, they arguably considered literary theory as much as men did, using their own preferred forms, which were then overlooked.
This book is based on a decade of research in archives and libraries, revealing several little-known works by women that have remained in manuscript since the seventeenth century, and showing that even well-known poems and fiction should also be considered works of literary criticism. Its wider questions are ones which still resonate today: who has the authority to judge works of literature? Whose taste is valued and whose opinions are silenced or excluded?
Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Reader in Early Modern Literature
Throughout the book, Dr Scott-Baumann explores the gendered language of poetry that developed in the early modern period and persists today. She explains how this devalued women poets and the 'feminine style' of poetry and shows how the history of literary style is one of exclusion and inclusion.
I hope the book will show that when we use words like 'original', 'smooth' or 'irregular' to describe a poem, we are drawing on centuries of vexed- and often sexist- definitions of poetic style.
Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Reader in Early Modern Literature
Two poems by Anne Wharton, Restoration poet and niece of famous libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, are also published for the first time in this book. These poems, held in manuscript in Yale University's Beinecke Library, demonstrate Wharton as a writer of satirical, critical poems about gender, far beyond the biblical work she is more often known for.
The volume was recently reviewed by Clare Bucknell for The New York Review of Books.
The idea that women might not only learn to use the tools of rhetoric but theorize them too was another matter. Writing on poetics - what we would call literary criticism -involved the display of knowledge and the exercise of authority, and these were questions of power.
Clare Bucknell in The New York Review of Books
