Gender, Authorship and Whig Poetics

Abstract

Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) was one of the most high-profile and popular women writers of her day. Yet her place in the history of women’s writing has been relatively marginal. Why has this been the case? One reason is that Rowe has been assigned a very particular role in women’s literary history which has narrowed assessments of her significance. Rowe’s image has been one of sentimental piety and modest retirement: exactly the impression that her posthumous biography sought to imprint in the minds of her readers. In terms of the broader paradigms of women’s literary history Rowe serves as a rather dull example of what the woman writer would have to become in order to succeed: sentimental, spiritual, pious, virtuous and decidedly nonprofessional. In these final two chapters I aim to complicate this reductive portrait of Rowe by relocating her as a writer in terms of the different contexts — both discursive and geographical — in which she lived and wrote. First, I place her early publications and her first attempts at poetry in relation to the complex web of political and religious ideas within which Rowe was writing. By reading Rowe’s poetry and authorial image through these contemporaneous discursive networks I demonstrate one way in which our understanding of Rowe can differ significantly from the posthumous portrait.