ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in this book. The book explores the psychoanalytic processes of subjective inscription in the poetry of women writing in early modern England. When a woman in early modern England took up her pen to write verse, a degree of conscious understanding of herself in relation to her task was certainly at work. Isabella Whitney embarks on a task proclaimed as 'new'; Elizabeth Cary determines to resist family pressures to read and write for her 'recreation'; Aemilia Lanyer knows she is doing something 'seldome seene' in women. Whitney's first poetic collection relies on, but at the same time radically undermines, binaried systems of gendered opposition between false men and faithful women. It goes without saying that the subjectivity of all women who wrote poetry in early modern England was not cut from the same cloth; the ways in which their subjectivity split were not predictable or duplicable.
