ABSTRACT
While the women poets whose works this chapter examines had different social positions, experiences, beliefs, and opinions, writing lyrics was, for all of them, part of their active social lives. It discusses some of the women poets who participated in poetic practices like those pursued mostly by men at the courts, Inns of Court, and universities. The chapter shows what happens when, harp in hand, diverse seventeenth-century women poets take hold of various lyric traditions and make them relevant to their social lives. In Anna Trapnel case, taking the harp in hand moves beyond a figurative or conceptual reshaping of her social role towards a material alteration of it. Harp in hand, Katherine Austen resisted and revised the social conventions related primarily to the role of a wealthy widow. The inconsistencies engendered by the conflicts among Austen's status as widow, her ambitions for ever higher rank, and her gender underpin her complicated, discontinuous self-representations.
