Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A note on references
- Chronology: women and literature in Britain, 1500–1700
- Introduction
- Part I CONSTRUCTING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
- Part II WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
- Chapter 7 Renaissance concepts of the ‘woman writer’
- Chapter 8 Courtly writing by women
- Chapter 9 Women's poetry in early modern Britain
- Chapter 10 Women's writing and the self
- Chapter 11 The possibilities of prose
- Chapter 12 The first female dramatists
- Further reading
- Index
Chapter 11 - The possibilities of prose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A note on references
- Chronology: women and literature in Britain, 1500–1700
- Introduction
- Part I CONSTRUCTING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
- Part II WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
- Chapter 7 Renaissance concepts of the ‘woman writer’
- Chapter 8 Courtly writing by women
- Chapter 9 Women's poetry in early modern Britain
- Chapter 10 Women's writing and the self
- Chapter 11 The possibilities of prose
- Chapter 12 The first female dramatists
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
In 1500 the printed prose writings in English by women consisted at most of one work; but by 1700 women in Britain were prolifically represented in printed prose and had assumed what Catherine Belsey and others have termed a ‘subject’ position. The number of printed English prose works written by women up to 1700 (and recovered in this century through gendered textual archaeology and restoration) is so large that they cannot all be named in this chapter. Instead, representative writings are examined here in a chronological survey, with particular attention given to those from the dense final quarter of the period.
The following comments by Gerda Lerner help to explain this shift in female subjectivity:
Writing women, working prior to the recognition that women might be capable of participating as autonomous thinkers in the public discourse … had to remove three obstacles before their voices could be heard at all: (1) that indeed they were the authors of their own work; (2) that they had a right to their own thought; (3) that their thought might be rooted in a different experience and a different knowledge from that of their patriarchal mentors and predecessors.
Yet another of Lerner's core insights is particularly pertinent to the notion of the ‘possibilities’ of prose: 'Women, ignorant of their own history, did not know what women before them had thought and taught.
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- Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 , pp. 234 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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