Heale 2003

Heale, Elizabeth. Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

"In Gascoigne's narratives, although the men do the writing, women are identified as the source and cause of the instability of courting and courtly languages. In this discourse of a feminized courtly world, males who succeed become by definition lady's men, abandoning a stable male use of language for an unstable female one." (34)

points out that while critics see her as writing within tradition of Turberville's translations of ovid's Heroides, "the language of her poems in this volume is more strikingly close to some of Turbervile's verse in the voice of Pyndara in Epitaphes, epigrams, Songs and Sonets." (36)

"Out of the fragments and phrases of the flexible discourses of courting and aphoristic counsel, she ... constructs a voice and point of view that is then presented as personal and autobiographical." (37) -- just like writers borrowing from Tottel's authors

"Is. W.'s implied presence is a rhetorical device to stabilize a conventional discourse as true speech." (37)

"Whitney's publication of her own secular poems in the form of a miscellany was a remarkably bold act." (37)

"Whitney demonstrates great skill and wit in adapting the normally male-gendered conventions of the early Elizabethan single-author collections to serve her own female-gendered self-presentation." (37)

"the 'herbs' and 'flowers' metaphors, so popular with early Elizabethan miscellanists, are neatly gendered to represent Whitney as engaged in a woman's task, gathering medicinal herbs for the care and health of friends and family" (38)