ABSTRACT
Women who appeared in print in the seventeenth century almost invariably prefaced their texts with some form of apology for their transgression in speaking with a public voice when silent retirement was proper and becoming a woman. ‘I am’, admits Anne Bradstreet, ‘obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits’ (182). Apology was needed also since female authors were only too well aware that by education and upbringing, if not by sex, they had been ill-fitted for essaying this role. Even when fulfilling a maternal duty, Elizabeth Jocelin feels it necessary to explain why, knowing her ‘weakness’, she nevertheless appears as an author (183). A similar apprehensiveness prompts the preface to her posthumous book to reassure readers that her literary endeavours were ‘chaste and modest’ and to insist that they did not detract from her proper fulfilment of her wifely role (75). Dorothy Leigh similarly explains why she has had the ‘boldness’ to do something ‘so unusual among us’ as to change ‘the usual order of women’ by writing (184). She tactfully concedes to men ‘the first and chief place’, just as Anne Bradstreet seeks to win a hearing by judiciously conceding the inevitability of male pre-eminence (182). Evidence of hostility towards women who, in Lovelace’s phrase (perhaps with reference to Margaret Cavendish), prostituted themselves in public (185), is not hard to locate. ‘Whore is scarce a more reproachful name,/Than poetess’ declares Rochester (186). Anne Killigrew learned that publication by a woman brought ‘shame’, not ‘honour’, and, since she was a woman, also the charge of plagiarism (187). Ezell (1987) argues, however, that literary composition was a more generally available option for women than this hostility to publication and their own printed apologias might suggest (see esp. pp. 62-100).
