ABSTRACT
David Norbrook has lamented the scholarly neglect of the works of seventeenthcentury English puritan and republican Lucy Hutchinson in comparison to the boom of studies produced in the last two decades on the works of many other seventeenth-century women writers, including Margaret Cavendish.1 As Norbrook points out, this relative inattention to Hutchinson’s extensive works-including her translation of Lucretius, her epic Order and Disorder, her biography of her husband, her autobiography, and the “Elegies” that will be the focus of this chapter-seems to result from what appears to be her frighteningly thorough interpellation by the dominant, masculinist gender ideology of her place and time: she “is readier than some of her contemporaries to accept, and defend, a position of female subordination” (Norbrook, Order and Disorder xiii).2 For example, Hutchinson blames Queen Henrietta Maria for many of Charles I’s political and religious errors, asserting that “never [is]…any place happy when the hands which were made only for distaffs affect the management of scepters.—If anyone object the fresh example of Queen Elizabeth, let them remember that the felicity of her reign was the effect of her submission to her masculine and wise counsellors” (Memoirs 89).3
