ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the conundrum that lies at the root of all studies of early modern English women's writing. It focuses on three women, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary and Aemilia Lanyer, who stepped over the boundaries of gendered and generic constraint that sought to exile them from poetic practice. The book also offers a way to understand the psychological and material conditions and theoretical strategies of their out-of-character writerly opportunities as they were validated in their own, and other women's, textual testimonies. The early modern period in England expended much energy both in defining gender ideology and sexual difference and in projecting oppositional and hierarchical difference onto oversimplified gender difference. In this period women were inscribed by the dominant discourse as not only marginal to social and political power but as specifically marginal to the production of public discourse itself.
