ABSTRACT
In recent years scholars have begun to realize that it is not only sexist perceptions that make it difficult for us to recover early modem women writers. We must also be wary of feminist ideals of the woman writer. As Margaret Ezell first argued, the earliest attempts to understand early modem women writers were hampered by narrow definitions of both femininity and writing. A critical stance that privileged outspoken print writers - a modem feminist ideal - slighted or ignored a wide variety of voices from the early modem period which did not display such protofeminist characteristics. The fault was, of course, not in the texts but in the criticism: 'If these texts refuse to yield up feminism,' Danielle Clarke writes in a recent essay, 'it may also be the case that feminism, as it has been applied, does not yield up the texts' (7).
