ABSTRACT
The text denies Lucy Hutchinson any being apart from John Hutchinson even as, without him, it confers on her an enduring identity. It characterises her as his shadow when his surviving image is hers; it presents him as her author when he is her literary creation. For Lucy to write at all was to emerge from the shadow of John by laying implicit claim to the prerogatives of the masculine gender. It was an insubordinate, immodest and unfeminine act, if not an entirely surprising one from the woman in whose poetry John himself detected rationality. The less intrusive Lucy is, the less corporeal she becomes, and the more entirely she loves for the more completely she depends upon John. Lucy may be made ‘more equall’ by the Colonel Hutchinson, but she cannot be made equal. This rhetorical strategy allows no role reversal. In short, Lucy Hutchinson’s conception of the feminine gender role was entirely traditional.
