Women Writers

...The importance of Elizabeth I's consciousness of her gender and her manipulation of gender perceptions for political gain cannot be underestimated. The Monarch's experiences because she was a female were jeopardised first by an irascible father, then endangered by Court intrigues; international enticements and threats must have pervaded the consciousness of many in her kingdom. Elizabeth's ambiguous status as marriageable yet unmarrying focused general awareness on the uneasy juxtaposition of woman and power. The permissiveness accorded stage heroines in Elizabeth's time, to play with power and choice, very likely owed a good deal to the effect of her decades of successfully doing just that.

Unlike royal women's voices, echoing through letters and documents which have survived with official papers, the letters of non-regal women were not considered to be literature, precisely because they were written by women. Diaries, too, were unlikely to survive, as Samuel Pepys' wife later found. In order to convince her husband that her life was unsatisfactory, during a quarrel Elizabeth Pepys read to her husband from her diary. In his diary we can read:
so picquant, and wrote in English and most of it true, of the retirednesse of her life and how unpleasant it was, that being writ in English and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was vexed at it and desired her and then commanded her to teare it... v
What we hear is her resistance to destroying her diary and his motive of embarrassment at what others would think. The censorship of husbands could, in theory, be absolute. But women's silence was not. With a pseudonym or widowhood, literary endeavour and protest were possible. Women could write addressing women as their audience in order to seek a place in the social and literary worlds.

In 1589 Jane Anger (presumably an appropriate pseudonym) wrote a tract railing against men who had railed against women. She defended women's intelligence and ability to write, saying that women are not governed by lust, as had been alleged. What is of great importance here is that her views were published and were part of the controversy called the 'querelle des femmes' begun in Elizabethan times. Jane Anger's refutation of the sweep of denigrations of women is the more entertaining because she demonstrated logic, a knowledge of the Classics and the Bible, and a ferocity of polemic which dispels the idea that women are different from men in their ability to insult. It is easy to see why she used a pseudonym in forthrightly castigating men, presumably having been angered by publication of attacks which we might call verbal harassment or libel....


v Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthers, 11 vols (London, 1970-83), IV, p. 9., quoted by Sara Heller Mendelson, "Stuart Women's Diaries and Occasional Memoirs", ed. Mary Prior, Women in English Society 1500-1800, (London: Methuen & Co., 1885), p. 184.