ABSTRACT
Two related issues of absorbing interest to scholars working to legitimate early modern women's writing have dominated many of the ground-breaking studies of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. The first has been how to situate Cary as historical personage and biographical subject in the growth of what might be called 'feminist' thinking. The second, how to read the role of women in relation to male power in Cary's closet drama, The Tragedy of Murium, The Fair Queen of Jewry. At the beginning of modern Cary criticism, Nancy Cotton Pearse claimed in 1977 that the 'sentiments expressed in the play are autobiographical'. Elaine Beilin ten years later observed that 'the coincidental parallels between the lives of Mariam and Elizabeth Cary are striking'. Elizabeth's writing activity is strikingly represented as occurring in very specific, framed, spatial locations.
