ABSTRACT
Beyond what she herself tells us in the text, nothing was known about Martha Moulsworth (1577-1646) when her poem was first published in 1993. However, its appearance not only generated a lot of critical interest but also spurred scholars to search for information about the author. Thanks to research by Evans, Greer and Grundy (see Evans and Little 1995), we now know Moulsworth was probably born at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, where her father, Dr Robert Dorsett, held the living. He was a member of Christ Church, Oxford, and one of Sir Philip Sidney's teachers. As the poem says, Moulsworth was married three times. Her first and third husbands (Nicholas Prynne and Bevill Molesworth) were goldsmiths, the second (Thomas Thorowgood) a draper, though he also owned two inns at Hoddesdon, a small town 20 miles north of London. He and Bevill Molesworth both owned houses in London too, but it was in Hoddesdon that they and Martha had their permanent homes, and probably where she wrote her poem. She continued to be a prominent member of the Hoddesdon community after Bevill's death. Germaine Greer (Evans and Little 1995: 3), noting that 'every writer of autobiography sets out not to explain the self via the text but to reinvent the self as text', argues that the image of Moulsworth in the poem is in certain ways at odds with what we know about her in real life. A concrete example is her claim (ll. 29-30) that her father taught her Latin; as she was only two and a half when he died, any Latin she did learn must have been rudimentary to say the least. The text offers a very interesting construction of female/feminine identity, and, as poetry, in a form that draws attention to the 'artificial' fashioning of the self in words (in addition to its conventional poetic features, it contains one couplet for each year of Moulsworth's life). To prompt consideration of the form in which she expresses her self, I have preserved Moulsworth's use of lower-and upper-case letters and
52 For printed texts, see Evans, R. C. and Little, A. C. (eds) (1995), 'The Muses Female Are': Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance, West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, pp. 203-20. This gives old-and modem-spelling versions of the text, and a photographic reproduction of the original manuscript. The poem was previously printed in Evans, R. C. and Wiedemann, B. (eds) (1993), 'My Name Was Martha': A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem, West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, pp. 4-8.
