Lewalski 1993

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

balkanization of women's writing

"yet these texts urgently need to be read with the full scholarly apparatus of textual analysis, historical synthesis, and literary interpretation in play, wince they come before us bare and unaccommodated, without the accretion of scholarship and critical opinion through the ages that so largely determines how we understand and value literary works." (1-2)

Jacobean court seen as hostile to women; yet we first hear Englishwomen's voices in large numbers during this period -- "breakthrough to female authorship" (3)

why?:

• "larger space for cultural activity was opened to aristocratic women when Queen Elizabeth's death removed her from the scene as an overwhelming cultural presence while leaving in place a powerful female example" (7)
• "evidence of some counterweight to patriarchy provided by female communities -- mothers and daughters, extended kinship networks, close female friends, the female entourage of Queen Anne" (8)
• patriarchal ideology shot through with "conflicting demands and loyalties" for women -- husband, father, king; conflicts "force choices and thereby foster the growth of self-consciousness" (8)

"I have more interest in resistance than subjugation, more interest in attending carefully to what these women manage to express than in reading through them (again)t he all-too-true story of what the culture managed to repress. although these women writers were subsequently ignored or suppressed, I take it that their literary gestures of resistance matter, and that those gestures (often subtly coded) have resulted in fascinating texts." (11)