ABSTRACT
This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section.
The last three decades have witnessed rich discoveries in early modern women’s writing, especially manuscript poetry. Lucy Hutchinson was a seventeenth-century Puritan and republican whose corpus is now believed to include a translation of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, an unfinished Biblical epic Order and Disorder, a parody of Waller, her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson and twenty-four Elegies. These Elegies (written in manuscript and now edited by David Norbrook) mourn both the death of Hutchinson’s husband in prison in 1664 and the couple’s hopes for a Godly republic. Hutchinson reverses certain conventions of the country house or estate poem genre; hospitality, social harmony and the fertility of the natural world are replaced with political isolation, republican disillusion and a Biblical rhetoric of grief and shame. This article compares Hutchinson’s poems with two country house poems, Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Description of Cooke-ham’, and also shows the diversity of allusions, including to John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ and Sidney Godolphin’s translation of Dido’s passion for Aeneas. The Elegies reveal Hutchinson as a Puritan Parliamentarian influenced by royalist literary traditions, and an educated and talented woman poet transforming genres in subtly allusive and politically radical ways.
