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EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY
Early Modern
Women’s Complaint
Gender, Form, and Politics
Edited by
Sarah C. E. Ross · Rosalind Smith
Early Modern Literature in History
Series Editors
Cedric C. Brown
Department of English
University of Reading
Reading, UK
Andrew Hadfield
School of English
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
Within the period 1520–1740, this large, long-running series, with inter-
national representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within and
outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theo-
retical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest
in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive
cultures.
Editorial board
Sharon Achinstein, John Hopkins University, USA
John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge, UK
Richard C McCoy, Columbia University, USA
Jean Howard, Columbia University, USA
Adam Smyth, University of Oxford, UK
Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield, UK
Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading, UK
Steven Zwicker, Washington University, US
AKatie Larson, University of Toronto, Canada
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14199
Sarah C. E. Ross • Rosalind Smith
Editors
Early Modern
Women’s Complaint
Gender, Form, and Politics
Editors
Sarah C. E. Ross Rosalind Smith
Victoria University of Wellington The Australian National University
Wellington, New Zealand Canberra, ACT, Australia
Early Modern Literature in History

ISBN 978-3-030-42945-4 ISBN 978-3-030-42946-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This volume of essays emerges out of two collaborative projects on early

modern women and complaint that have received generous funding from
government bodies in New Zealand and Australia. We are enormously
grateful to the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi Marsden Fund,
and to the Australian Research Council, for funding the two parallel proj-
ects: Woe Is Me: Women and Complaint in Renaissance England and Early
Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint 1540–1660.
Some of the greatest delights of such projects are the conversations and
exchanges they make possible, in conferences and symposia, and in col-
laborations with scholars whose work we admire, and from whom we have
learned so much. Most of the essays in this volume were first presented in
our Women and Complaint seminar at the Shakespeare Association of
America conference in Los Angeles and the Renaissance Society of America
conference in New Orleans, both in 2018. Others were presented or
refined at a symposium on Complaint and Grievance: Literary Traditions
in Wellington and in panels at ANZAMEMS in 2019. We are grateful to
everyone who contributed to these events, and whose critique and discus-
sion have shaped the work here. Most of all, we would like to thank our
essayists, who have joined the project with verve, a dazzling range of spe-
cialist knowledges, and a willingness to rethink complaint with us. You
have all quite literally made the book what it is.
We are also particularly grateful for the intellectual contribution of all
of our essays’ readers, whose insightful responses have made this a much
better book: Victoria Burke, Linda Charnes, Julie Crawford, Lynn
Enterline, Laura Estill, Elizabeth Ewan, Julia Flanders, Kathryn Gray,
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Helen Hackett, Hilary Hinds, Lorna Hutson, Katherine Larson, Christina

Luckyj, Joanna Martin, Patricia Pender, Kathryn Schwarz, Ray Siemens,
Mary Trull, Helen Wilcox, Matthew Woodcock, and Marion Wynne-
Davis. We belong to an exceptionally generous and collegial field, one
which is indebted to decades of work that has made women’s writing a
vibrant, complex, and challenging area of study. Our project on complaint
is deeply dependent on and inspired by the work that precedes us and the
excellent scholars with whom we have the privilege to collaborate. Chief
among these for this project is our colleague and co-author (co-complainer)
Michelle O’Callaghan, who has been integral to the volume’s develop-
ment, as have Danielle Clarke and Kate Lilley, as keynote speakers and
workshop colleagues at our symposium in Wellington. Lynn Enterline has
been a huge supporter of this work, and one of our most formative inter-
locutors. Our colleagues in the Early Modern Women’s Research Network
have been perceptive, robust, and generous discussants, especially in the
volume’s final stages; thanks as ever to Patricia Pender, Kate Lilley, Paul
Salzman, and Susan Wiseman.
The sympathetic community of complaint scholars who have produced
this volume includes our invaluable research and editorial assistants, Jenny
Noble and Kelly Peihopa at Newcastle, and Emma Rayner and Jake Arthur
in Wellington. Thank you for all you have done; your contribution has
truly been beyond the call of duty. Finally, we would both like to thank
our families, who have come to know one another better over the course
of this project and whose presence and love sustain us: Andru, Milly, and
Henry; and Mark, Felix, Isobel, and Sophia.
Contents
1 Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s Complaint 1

Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith
Part I Sixteenth Century 27
2 Anne Lock and the Instructive Complaint 29

Susan M. Felch
3 Katherine Parr and Royal Religious Complaint:

Complaining For and About Henry VIII 47
Micheline White
4 “Ane Wyfis Quarrel”: Complaining Women in Scottish

Reformation Satire 67
Tricia A. McElroy
5 The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From

Heroidean to Tristian Complaint 89
Lindsay Ann Reid
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Seventeenth Century 115
6 Acts of Will: Countersovereignty and Complaining

in The Tragedy of Mariam117
Emily Shortslef
7 The Politics of Complaint in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory

and The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania137
Paul Salzman
8 Animating Eve: Gender, Authority, and Complaint157

Danielle Clarke
9 Complaint’s Echoes183
Sarah C. E. Ross
Part III Restoration 203
10 Aphra Behn’s “Oenone to Paris,” John Dryden, and the

Ovidian Complaint in Restoration Literary Culture205
Gillian Wright
11 Complaint in the Wilderness: Mary Rowlandson Speaks

With Job225
Susan Wiseman
12 Anne Killigrew and the Restoration of Complaint247

Kate Lilley
Part IV Representing Complaint: New Digital Forms 267
13 From Manuscripts to Metadata: Understanding and

Structuring Female-Attributed Complaints269
Marie-Louise Coolahan and Erin A. McCarthy
CONTENTS ix
14 Women’s Complaint, 1530–1680: Taxonomy, Voice, and

the Index in the Digital Age291
Jake Arthur and Rosalind Smith
Part V Afterword 313
15 “Past the Help of Law”: Epyllia and the Female

Complaint315
Lynn Enterline
Bibliography329
Index 359
Notes on Contributors
Jake Arthur is a DPhil candidate at Oxford University. His thesis recon-

siders writing by early modern women that has been classed as “deriva-
tive,” such as translation and paraphrase, arguing those texts offer a
striking demonstration of early modern women’s diverse cultural and
intellectual interventions, as well as a salutary reminder of the power of
derivative writing itself.
Danielle Clarke is Professor of Renaissance Language and Literature at
University College Dublin. Alongside many articles and book chapters,
she is the author of The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2001),
co-author of Teaching the Early Modern Period (2011), editor of Isabella
Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets
(2000), and co-editor of the collection “This Double Voice”: Gendered
Writing in Early Modern England (2000). She is writing a book on gender
and cultural reproduction 1500–1700.
Marie-Louise Coolahan is Professor of English at the National University
of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Women, Writing, and Language in
Early Modern Ireland (2010), multiple book chapters and articles in jour-
nals including Early Modern Literary Studies, Critical Quarterly, and
Early Modern Women. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded
project, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s
Writing, 1550–1700.
Lynn Enterline holds a distinguished chair as Professor of English at
Vanderbilt University, USA. Her publications include The Tears of
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (1995),

The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000), Shakespeare’s
Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (2012), and she has recently
edited a collected edition of essays, Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The
State of Play (2019). Enterline is working on a book called Epic Discontent:
On the Critical Potential of Passionate Character.
Susan M. Felch is Professor of English at Calvin College. Her books
include The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (1999), Elizabeth
Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers (2009), Elizabeth I and Her Age
(2009), and Teaching and Christian Imagination (2016). Her articles
have appeared in journals such as Reformation and The Sixteenth Century
Journal and she has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to
Literature and Religion (2016).
Kate Lilley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney.
She has published widely on early modern women’s writing; her articles
have appeared in Women’s Writing, Textual Practice, and Parergon, and
she is the editor of The Blazing World and Other Writings (1992) and
Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett (2010). Lilley is also the author of three
books of poetry: Versary (2002), Ladylike (2012), and most recently Tilt
(2018), winner of the Victorian Premier’s Poetry Prize.
Erin A. McCarthy is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of
Newcastle, Australia. She has published in John Donne Journal, Studies in
English Literature, and Review of English Studies. Her first book, Doubtful
Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England,
was published in 2020.
Tricia A. McElroy is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Alabama and serves as Associate Dean for Humanities and Fine Arts in the
College of Arts and Sciences. She has published essays on Scottish
Reformation poetry, the Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill, George
Buchanan’s Detection, and Holinshed’s Chronicles. She is preparing a new
edition of Reformation satire, Scottish Satirical Literature, 1567–1584, for
the Scottish Text Society.
Lindsay Ann Reid is Lecturer in English at the National University of
Ireland, Galway. Her primary research interests include classical poetry,
mythology, adaptation and reception studies, and early English print cul-
ture. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly,
Notes on Contributors xiii
Early Theatre, The Seventeenth Century, Studies in Philology, and

Comparative Drama, and she is the author of Ovidian Bibliofictions and
the Tudor Book (2014) and Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the
Medieval (2018).
Sarah C. E. Ross is Associate Professor of English at Victoria University
of Wellington. She is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in
Seventeenth-Century Britain (2015), the co-editor, with Paul Salzman, of
Editing Early Modern Women (2016), and the co-editor, with Elizabeth
Scott-Baumann, of Women Poets of the English Civil War (2017). She is
currently completing the project out of which this collection comes, Woe
Is Me: Women and Complaint in the English Renaissance, funded by the
Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi Marsden Fund, and the
Australian Research Council.
Paul Salzman is an Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University and
a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy. He has published widely
in the area of early modern women’s writing, including online editions of
Mary Wroth’s poetry and of Love’s Victory. His most recent book is Editors
Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825–1915 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
He is working on a book on the eighteenth-century editing of early mod-
ern texts, with a focus on spelling, transcriptions, forgeries, and facsimiles.
Emily Shortslef is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Kentucky. Her work has appeared in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural
Studies, Exemplaria, and English Literary History. She is completing a
book manuscript on the intersections of complaint and moral philosophy
in Shakespeare’s tragedies with the working title Shakespeare and the
Drama of Complaint: Address, Ethics, Action.
Rosalind Smith is Professor of English at the Australian National
University. She is the author of Sonnets and the English Woman Writer,
1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (2005), co-editor of Material Cultures
of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2014) and editor-in-chief, with Patricia
Pender, of the Palgrave Digital Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s
Writing (2019). She holds a four-year research fellowship from the
Australian Research Council for a project on early modern women’s mar-
ginalia and is Chief Investigator of the ARC-funded project Early Modern
Women and the Poetry of Complaint, 1540–1660.
xiv Notes on Contributors
Micheline White is an Associate Professor in the College of the

Humanities at Carleton University in Canada. She is the editor and co-
editor of three volumes on early modern women’s book ownership and
religious writing, including English Women, Religion, and Textual
Production, 1500–1625 (2011) and Early Modern Women’s Bookscapes:
Reading, Ownership, Circulation (with Leah Knight and Elizabeth Sauer,
2018). She has published numerous essays on Tudor and Jacobean wom-
en’s writing, and her work on Katherine Parr and Elizabeth I has been
featured in the Times Literary Supplement (2015) and on the CBC’s
Tapestry.
Susan Wiseman is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature at
Birkbeck College, University of London, where she teaches seventeenth-
century and Renaissance literature. Her publications include Conspiracy
and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England
(2006) and Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance, 1550–1700
(2014), and she has edited a special issue of Renaissance Studies on the
rhetoric of complaint (2008). She is a British Academy/Leverhulme
Senior Research Fellow.
Gillian Wright is Reader in English and Irish Literature at the University
of Birmingham. She has published widely on early modern women’s writ-
ing, including Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext,
Manuscript and Print (2013), and she has edited the volumes Katherine
Philips: Form, Reception and Literary Contexts (2018) and Early Modern
Women’s Manuscript Poetry (with Jill Seal Millman, 2005). Her most
recent monograph is The Restoration Transposed: Poetry, Place and History,
1660–1700 (2019) and she is editing Aphra Behn’s poetry for Cambridge
University Press.
Abbreviations
ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

EEBO Early English Books Online, 1473–1700
ESTC English Short Title Catalogue (online)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary, online edition
STC W. A. Jackson, J. F. Ferguson, and K. F. Pantzer, eds. A Short-Title
Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of
English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640. 2nd ed. 3 vols. London:
1986-1991.
TEI Text Encoding Initiative
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 13.1 The entity-relationship model assumed to underlie all

RECIRC data 274
Fig. 13.2 Wireframe with uncertainty flag added 276
Fig. 13.3 Wireframe with new fields for generic/named authorship and
ascription282
Fig. 14.1 A screenshot from the WordPress back-end of the entry to
Pulter’s “A Solitary Discourse,” showing content-based tags.
(Photo by the authors) 297
Fig. 14.2 A flow-chart of expanded authorship options in the database.
(Illustration by the authors) 301
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s

Complaint
Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith
Upon My Lady Desmond’s Reproaching of Me Wrongfully
What planet ruled at my unhappy birth

That I am thus a burden to the earth?
I never saw Content in any form,
For all my life has ever been a storm.
I wish to find a way to ease my cares
But when I seek am blinded still with tears.
My bluebird eyes may sometimes pity move,
But to prevent the cause, I find not so much love.
With downcast eyes I muse and sit alone,
And often to myself I make my moan,
And think I’m happiest when I’m most alone.
S. C. E. Ross (*)
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail: Sarah.Ross@vuw.ac.nz
R. Smith
Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
e-mail: Rosalind.Smith@anu.edu.au
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. C. E. Ross, R. Smith (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Complaint,
Early Modern Literature in History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_1
2 S. C. E. ROSS AND R. SMITH
Sometimes I mourn my losses and the dead,

Then the unkindest things the living said
To wound my tortured soul. But ah! It is in vain,
For all these thoughts does but enhance my pain.
To dead and living, my love too lasting for my ease,
No galley slave does seek so much to please.
Farewell those happy days I once did hope to ‘a’ had,
And farewell to those thoughts, for fear they make me mad.
Unhappy Feilding, whose wretched fate is such,
Thou ever thinks too little or too much.
Mount then my troubled soul and hence thy thoughts remove,
Love Him that above all things seeks thy love.1
“Upon My Lady Desmond’s Reproaching of Me Wrongfully” is written

into a commonplace book now held in the Beinecke Library, and is most
likely by Frances (Dorothy) Feilding, who also composes poems in the
same volume mourning the death of her husband and giving thanks for
her narrow escape from death in 1684.2 Her poem on this occasion is writ-
ten in response to a social slight, yet extends to broader discontents using
the formal conventions, figures, and structures of the mode of complaint.
“Blinded with tears,” the poem’s speaker rehearses her woes “alone,”
mourning both her “losses and the dead” as well as the more immediate
“unkindest things the living said.” The poem draws on popular traditions
of complaint circulating from the sixteenth century onwards in its inclu-
sion of personal, narrative elements deriving from a local social context. It
also adopts a conventional series of complaint postures—solitary retire-
ment, meditation on woe, and a final recourse to comfort in God—deriv-
ing from traditions of amatory, Ovidian, and devotional complaints. By
the late seventeenth century, the probable date of this lyric’s composition,
the diverse forms and vocabularies of complaint were immediately avail-
able for use by a woman writer in response to loss, grief, or discontent.
Feilding’s poem participates in a long tradition of early modern com-
plaint poetry: religious, political, and amatory, popular and elite, male and
female authored. Complaint is a powerful and ubiquitous rhetorical mode
in the English Renaissance, as the influential scholarship of John Kerrigan
and others has recognised.3 It is very often female-voiced, foregrounding
the voice and body of a lamenting woman, but until recently, “female
complaint” has been understood almost solely as an act of male literary
ventriloquy. Kerrigan describes “female complaint” as very rarely female
1 BEYOND OVID: EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S COMPLAINT 3
authored.4 Danielle Clarke, in foundational work on women writers’ use

of Renaissance rhetorical traditions, suggests that in spite of its experimen-
tation with the female voice, Renaissance complaint is largely “written,
translated, and adapted by men for the consumption of men.”5 A relatively
limited number of studies have focused on writing by Isabella Whitney,
Lady Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn,6 and some excellent recent explora-
tions of female-authored complaints have begun to expand the discus-
sion.7 However, as yet we have no sense of how women writers engaged
with complaint collectively and how they used this culturally central mode
to give voice to protest and loss.
In part, this is because critical explorations of complaint by male and
female early modern writers have centred on the specific legacies of Ovid’s
Heroides.8 Our sense of the tradition continues to be defined by the secu-
lar, amorous, female-voiced complaints of the 1590s by Edmund Spenser,
Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, William Shakespeare,
and others, which are shaped by the Ovidian template of amatory loss and
transgression.9 These Ovidian models are vital, but Dorothy Feilding’s
poem illustrates some of the challenges that complaint texts written by
early modern women, including those recently retrieved from the archives,
present to a largely Ovidian conception of the forms and capacities of the
mode. Emerging in an idiosyncratic manuscript context at the later end of
the period, Feilding’s lyric draws on a much broader set of associations,
and a range of traditions that both encompass the Ovidian and extend
beyond it. Her poem exemplifies just some of the ways in which early
modern women engaged with complaint traditions, and points to com-
plaint as a richer cultural and literary resource for women writers than has
hitherto been imagined.
This volume is the first sustained interrogation of the ways in which
early modern women participated in complaint, the diverse set of com-
plaint models on which they drew, and how our sense of early modern
complaint changes when female-authored examples are the focus. It not
only uncovers new forms, new texts, and new authors across the early
modern period, but also examines known texts by women writers as com-
plaints for the first time, reconsidering how canonical women authors par-
ticipated in the mode. In doing so, the chapters in this volume expand the
definition of complaint, demonstrating its flexibility, breadth, and com-
plexity as well as its significance for early modern expression. They dem-
onstrate that complaint is as freighted and ubiquitous a form for early
modern women writers as it is for men, a primary site for the early modern
subject to express experiences of grief, protest, and loss. This volume

traces the complex and varied history of complaint for early modern
women writers, uncovering new kinds of plaint and plainants in its chap-
ters, and providing new readings that promise to reconfigure our under-
standing of complaint more broadly.
Forms of Complaint: Mode, Genre, Voice

In this volume and in the wider project on early modern women and com-
plaint to which it belongs, we refer to complaint as a mode. This formula-
tion builds upon Alistair Fowler’s suggestion that modes are “adjectival,”
extending beyond formal structures to the expression of tone, or what
Gerard Genette describes as “feeling.”10 As Barbara Lewalski notes,
“modes seem to have evolved from certain historical genres (heroic from
epic, pastoral from idyl and eclogue) and may interpenetrate works or
parts of works in several genres.”11 She looks back to Sidney’s identifica-
tion of eight categories of poetry as defined by modal qualities of tone or
effect rather than metre or form: “the lamenting ‘Elegaick’; the ‘bitter but
wholesome Iambick’; ‘the Satirick, who … sportingly … make[s] a man
laugh at follie’; the ‘Lyricke … who with his tuned Lyre and well accorded
voice, giveth praise’.”12 In John Frow’s summary, modes “specify thematic
features and certain forms and modalities of speech, but not the formal
structures or even the semiotic medium through which the text is to be
realised.”13 By contrast, genre is nominative—it signifies a more specific
set of textual features, whether thematic, rhetorical, or formal—and sub-
genre a more specific set again. If complaint is a mode in the Renaissance,
then “female complaint” is a genre within that mode—characterised by a
time-bound constellation of thematic, rhetorical, and formal
conventions.
This capacious definition of complaint as mode is a modern one. Early
modern literary commentators do not refer to “complaint” directly as
either mode or genre, although they do discuss complaint within taxono-
mies of elegy and lamentation. Puttenham identifies writers:
who sought the fauor of faire Ladies, and coueted to bemone their estates at
large, & the perplexities of loue in a certain pitious verse called Elegie, and
thence were called the Elegiack: such among the Latines were Ouid, Tibullus
& Propertius.14
He later identifies “a certain lover’s complaint made to like effect” in a

discussion of the rhetorical device of escalation, auxesis, situating this dis-
cussion in a wider context of texts of protest, beginning with one from
Carus “inveighing sore against the abuses of the superstitious religion of
the gentiles.”15 This sense of complaint as directed specifically towards the
experience of love’s loss and more generally against the times is also found
in Sir Philip Sidney’s discussion of the “elegiac” who “weeps the want of
his mistress,” as well as the “lamenting elegaic”:
which in a kind heart would move rather pity than blame; who bewails …
the weakness of mankind and the wretchedness of the world; who surely is
to be praised, either for compassionate accompanying just causes of lamen-
tation, or for rightly painting out how weak be the passions of woefulness?16
Tone links this range of laments, directed towards experiences of loss and
grievance in diverse circumstances identified as variously amorous (want),
spiritual (weakness), and political (the wretchedness of the world): a stance
of grief or protest in the face of loss or abandonment, directed towards
generating recognition and compassion in its audience. Early modern
poets and writers use the term “complaint” in similarly flexible and impre-
cise ways, often invoking “complaint” in their titles, such as Samuel
Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond and George Herbert’s “Complaining,”
and investing the term with a mobility that encompasses modal, generic,
and occasional use.
Such early modern approaches to complaint are overlain with earlier
classical taxonomies, including the Socratic triad of authorial, figural, and
mixed speech and the Aristotelian division of literary genres into the epic,
the dramatic, and the lyric. These are enunciative structures—different
forms of the representation of speech—that propose the organisation of
texts based on how they are presented to their audiences.17 These models
contribute to how complaint has been understood in recent criticism: in
terms of oratory and the production of voice in the humanist schoolroom,
through the Ovidian models that prevailed in Renaissance literary culture.
Ovid’s Heroides, in particular, provided a rich archive of templates for the
expression of female loss and abandonment, with its verse letters written
from the point of view of the “heroines” of Roman history to the lovers
who have abandoned or mistreated them. So, too, did the catalogue of
violated and transgressed women in his Metamorphoses, who appear in
fresh incarnations through the poetic and dramatic texts of the Renaissance.
Penelope and Niobe, Philomela and Hecuba are the paradigmatic voices
of early modern “female complaint,” and as Lynn Enterline has explored,
the imitation of these voices of by male humanist schoolboys was founda-
tional to the creation of character in English Renaissance literary texts,
generating a language of female emotion that was closely associated with
woe. Imitatio as a humanist praxis was a mainstay of grammar schoolboys’
education, and centred on the writing of female complaint voices drawn
from classical precedent. The humanist writer’s task, to “imitate, feel, and
convincingly move in others” the woes of Hecuba or Niobe was, in
Enterline’s words, a “habit of alterity,” in which “transfers of affect elide
the difference between identities” of author and speaking female
character.18
The early modern female voices of Ovidian complaint are, in this way,
most fully understood in terms of male writers’ complex prosopopoeiae, the
figure of speech in which an imagined, absent, or dead person or thing is
represented as speaking, and have predominantly been associated with
male authors’ production of the effect of female emotion.19 The “female”
voices of Hecuba et al. are central to the early modern complaint, but
these are female voices produced by men. What of women writers? How
might the “emotion scripts” of these Ovidian classical models be taken up
by girls and women?20 This is a crucial question in understanding early
modern women writers’ engagement with complaint, and one that has
been the crux of feminist critical considerations to date. Danielle Clarke’s
early considerations of women’s own complaint writings explore the avail-
ability (or otherwise) of Ovidian complaint forms to the woman writer,
and argue that they provided “an overdetermined literary tradition,” in
which the female voice is always and inevitably “problematically rhetori-
cised.”21 Katharine Craik takes this argument further, noting that “it is
striking how few women actually authored complaints” and situating
complaint as part of “the well-documented early modern literary phenom-
enon of allowing female speech primarily as a means of silencing it.”22
These foundational arguments about the affordances of the classical
complaint tradition for women writers provide a starting point for our
current discussion, but they are challenged by a newly expanded corpus of
female-authored complaints that we and others have identified, and by
new approaches arising from work expanding early modern women’s writ-
ing as a field of enquiry.23 Our volume, for this reason, includes chapters
on the orthodox women complaint writers Isabella Whitney, Mary Wroth,
and Aphra Behn; it provides readings of well-known works written by
Anne Lock, Katherine Parr, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth

Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Killigrew as complaints, with a newly-
refined sense of what that means; and it introduces lesser-known writers
into the frame, in Constance Aston Fowler, Dorothy Feilding, Anne, Lady
Southwell, Lady Hester Pulter, and Mary Rowlandson. Further, the vol-
ume examines comparators such as the satirical female voices of Scottish
broadsides and the querelle des femmes, as well as producing new readings
of complaint in Milton and Shakespeare. Exploring this expanded corpus,
the chapters in this volume build on recent feminist formalism, incorpo-
rating the call to pay closer attention to the formal qualities of women’s
writing into a broader feminist reconsideration of mode, genre, and
voice.24 Once the tonal modalities of complaint are recognised across a
wide range of texts by women (as well as men), the formal and stylistic
qualities of these texts are thrown into sharper relief, informing readings
that engage with history and politics alongside rhetoric and form.
Together, the chapters in this volume reconsider the formal parameters
and characteristics of complaint itself, looking beyond Ovid towards the
religious, vernacular, and legal influences on the mode, and recognising a
range of new complaint authors, voices, and forms.
Complaint and the Early Modern Woman Writer:

Religion, Politics, and the Marketplace
One central question that this volume and our wider project seek to
address is: what rhetorical precedents were available to early modern
women writers of complaint, given their exclusion from the formal institu-
tions that so informed the humanist education of boys and men? Lynn
Enterline’s Afterword to this volume reminds us of the communities of
male-authored complaint: “the disciplinary and discursive regimes of the
grammar school and the Inns of Court,” the “skill-contending schools”
evoked in The Rape of Lucrece. Do women writers in this period, excluded
from these “skill-contending schools,” take up different kinds of “emo-
tion scripts” deriving from models of complaint and characterisation other
than the Ovidian? We cannot assume that elite girls and women had no
access to classical humanist models. Jennifer Richards’s work on oral read-
ing in the Renaissance insists on shared contexts for the absorption of
Renaissance books,25 and siblings such as Lady Alice Egerton and her
younger brothers, tutored by Henry Lawes, clearly shared much of their
early education, at least in lyric and musical and dramatic performance.

But girls’ physical absence from the Shakespearean schoolroom undoubt-
edly had an effect, and recent discoveries surrounding women’s educa-
tion, reading, and book ownership suggest variations in emphasis and
specifics. Perhaps most significantly, women’s education was more preva-
lently religious, the Bible at the heart of their reading and writing prac-
tices.26 Our early analysis of women’s booklists, marks of book ownership,
and manuscript compilation practices suggests a variant or complementary
corpus of influential complaint texts. The best-selling religious complaints
of Robert Southwell, for example, appear in multiple sources: Saint Peter’s
Complaint (1595) is present in the Countess of Bridgewater’s Library
alongside several other of his devotional texts; it is repackaged in the man-
uscripts gifted by Elizabeth Middleton to other women, and other of his
religious complaints feature in the manuscript of Constance Aston
Fowler.27 Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas’s Divine Weeks and Works was
read widely by women as well as men, and its influence on women writers
is increasingly widely recognised—as it is in Danielle Clarke’s chapter in
this volume.28 Another ubiquitous set of complaint lyrics can be found in
the songbooks owned or compiled by girls and women, full of amorous
complaints set to music by Thomas Campion, Thomas Morley, and John
Dowland.29
Certainly, the Bible remains the most commonly overlooked source of
complaint voices and forms, for women as well as men. Jeremiah and Job,
the Psalms and Lamentations, offer complaint voices that pervade early
modern literary culture, including the reading and writing of women.
David’s Psalms provided “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul,” in the
famous words of Calvin, expressing a range of emotions including “griefs,
sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities.”30 A number of other
biblical voices enabled a wide range of complaint articulations, from the
inconsolable to the highly strategic. Imitation and paraphrase of the Song
of Songs tapped into the febrile overlap of secular and sacred yearning that
underpins much devotional complaint, as the work of Elizabeth Clarke
and others has revealed.31 Rich, interrelated Catholic and Protestant tradi-
tions of Marian lament by Robert Southwell, Thomas Lodge, Nicholas
Breton, and others provide models for amatory and penitential complaint
for women writers, while the petitionary complaints of Queen Esther illus-
trate the supplicatory affordances of biblical complaint forms.32 The lam-
entations of Jeremiah provide the stuff of a complaint poem by the
Scotswoman Barbara MacKay, Lady Reay as well as the better-known
example by John Donne, while Job’s earthly trials were a specific template
for complaint in times of tribulation.33 Women’s fluid and creative engage-
ments with the Bible as readers and writers have been increasingly well
explored in recent years, but only infrequently in terms of “complaint” as
a vein of expression and a set of religious models that were alternative to,
or at times interwoven with, the Ovidian.34
Not unlike the ventriloquy that is so familiar from the secular, amorous,
female-voiced complaints of the 1590s, religious voices of complaint and
lamentation are open to fluid occupation across gender binaries. The
devotional imperative to voice a meditative longing for Christ initiates a
strand of poetic articulation that apostrophises not the absent earthly lover
of the amorous complaint, but divine, eternal love; and the trope of Christ
as the bridegroom of the faithful underpins a centuries-long tradition of
such devotional complaint being female-voiced. The trope is based on the
erotics of the biblical Song of Solomon, the Song’s language of ravish-
ment being taken up to express the faithful’s desire for Christ: “let him
kisse me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine”
(1:2). John Donne famously expresses his yearning for Christ as a desire to
be ravished by him, and male writers from James Melville in Scotland to
George Herbert and beyond adopt the feminised subject position of the
bride. And just as male authors occupy the devotional voice of the bride
with ease, so women writers move freely from the petitionary and peniten-
tial voices of Esther and Mary to those of Job and Jeremiah, as a means of
articulating a spectrum of emotions and purposes from abject woe to pre-
cise and purposeful critique, or for structuring a providential narrative of
displacement and loss. Christ’s love may be inaccessible until after death,
as so many devotional complaints make clear, but the sinner’s voice is as
open to women writers as it is to men.
Beyond Ovid, then, lie a plethora of complaint voices in which women
readers, compilers, writers, and performers engaged. Other complaint
voices, occluded by the Renaissance—and our—fascination with the
Ovidian, are found in the vernacular English traditions of medieval love
poetry, ballads and broadsides, bill-postings, and peasant complaint.
Wendy Scase has meticulously explored medieval cultures of legal com-
plaint—“the expression of complaint as a means of obtaining a judicial
remedy”—and its impact in generating what she terms the medieval “lit-
erature of clamour”: love lyrics and other literary texts that rely on judicial
plaint for their topics, forms, and language, and sometimes even the mate-
rial conditions of their production and transmission.35 Renaissance texts
too were flavoured by the more demotic voices and instrumental versions
of complaint that Scase uncovers, but continuities with these medieval ver-
sions of the mode have been insufficiently explored. Expanding our sense
of complaint voices and traditions beyond the Ovidian is not only driven
by an expansion of the archive of women’s writings: it also arises out of
recognising known voices as complaint voices, and repositioning known
texts as complaint texts, revealing in new ways the language, tropes, and
structures of complaint at play in their texts. The feminised Petrarchism of
Mary Wroth’s sonnets and pastorals, for example, can be read in complaint
terms, disrupting the binary between male Petrarchism and female com-
plaint inscribed in critical discussion of canonical 1590s poetry.36
Looking beyond the literary canon and beyond Ovid for the precedents
and traditions of early modern women’s complaint texts reveals a mode
that is porous, diverse, and complex, with considerable affective and effec-
tive purchase on the circumstances it laments and protests. Through this
expanded understanding of complaint as a mode, the chapters in this vol-
ume also open up new ways of understanding how complaint was circu-
lated, marketed, and sold. It is orthodox to note that the late Elizabethan
vogue for complaint self-consciously drew attention to the mode’s ten-
dency towards competitive imitation in the marketplace. Samuel Daniel is
the first to pair the sonnet sequence with female complaint in his publica-
tion of the full cycle of sonnets of Delia directly followed by The Complaint
of Rosamond. Rosamond’s complaint includes a proleptic lament against
poetic obscurity relative to her predecessors:
No Muse suggests the pitty of my case,

Each Pen doth ouerpasse my iust complaint,
Whilst others are preferd, though far more base;
Shores wife is grac’d and passes for a Saint;
Her Legend iustifies her foule attaint.
Her wel-told tale did such compassion find,
That she is pass’d, and I am left behind.37
For Rosamond, competitive advantage is achieved by mobilising “compas-

sion” in the reader, who also might be involved in writing his or her own
complaints with reference to successful exemplars. Wendy Wall argues that
Rosamond’s anxiety over literary authority parallels some of Samuel
Daniel’s strategies for prosecuting his own poetic authority in a competi-
tive marketplace. Publishing Delia and The Complaint of Rosamond
together stages Daniel’s emergence as a public writer, in a form of literary

cross-dressing that “functions as the legitimating ground for articulating
literary authority.”38 This influential reading of male authors manipulating
the genre of complaint in order to create a new, public form of courtier-
ship and a bid for laureate status has tended to overlook, however, the
variety of other ways in which complaint was marketed and sold in the
early modern period. The chapters in this volume explore alternative mod-
els of complaint’s circulation. They show complaint used to establish reli-
gious and political programmes, especially in the mid-Tudor period, as
well as to promote authors’ own interests in local political contexts, as
poets, courtiers, and advocates in the late sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. Evident across these chapters is a nuanced model of women’s use of
complaint to pursue diverse personal, religious, and political interests, as
well as a surprisingly broad range of ways in which complaint was mar-
keted and sold to achieve those aims.
One constant in early modern women’s use of complaint is the mobili-
sation of community: the sympathetic listeners whose “compassion” acti-
vates complaint’s affective strategies in achieving its poetic, religious, and
political ends. In contrast to the bereft female speaker overheard in
Elizabethan male-authored complaint, and on whose isolation criticism to
date has insisted, the chapters in this volume show women writers situat-
ing their plainants in networks of literary, social, and political exchange.39
At one level these communities are inscribed within the complaint texts
themselves. Caves and valleys echo a speaker’s voice, two plainants engage
in dialogue, a single auditor or a group listen in sympathy, while another
puts an oral tale into writing for a new audience because she “found her
estate so neere agree[s] with mine.”40 On another level, these communi-
ties operate through their modes of circulation, whether manuscript,
print, or song, forming receptive audiences aligned with the plainant
through shared emotions, shared experience, or imaginative sympathy.
Our examples open up multiple new models of complaint communities,
grounded in music, speech, reading, and writing, and located in the natu-
ral, human, and material worlds. As Kate Lilley explores in her chapter, via
the contemporary affect theorist Lauren Berlant, the “common emotional
world” of gendered experience from which complaint draws its power
speaks from the early modern period to the contemporary, motivating the
female complaint voices of early modern texts, and the feminist and queer
scholars who claim a relationship to them.
The ways in which our volume embeds early modern women’s com-
plaint in broader literary traditions of plaint and communities of woe offer
a revision of earlier readings of women’s participation in the mode,
those that were predicated on models of isolation, absence, and exception.
These models are exemplified in one of the few readings of the Dorothy
Feilding complaint with which this chapter opens, where Feilding’s poems
are seen to be “private autobiographical material” that show “no sign that
they are intended for an audience other than God and Feilding herself.”41
The many examples of early modern women’s engagement with complaint
that precede this poem suggest a different narrative, one where Feilding
writes into an existing textual tradition of complaint that was widely circu-
lated, performed, and imitated. In her mix of the local, existential, and
devotional, combining complaint conventions with new metaphors such
as “bluebird eyes,” Feilding’s poem exemplifies the ways in which late
seventeenth-century women participated in textual communities within
the mode, and looked outwards towards generating their own collectives
of sympathetic readers, engaged in Sidney’s “compassionate accompany-
ing” of others’ laments.42 By the 1680s, the mode of early modern com-
plaint contained within it a century and a half of rhetorical experimentation,
forming a rich resource of women’s engagement with the mode for a
writer such as Feilding to exploit. Complaint’s practitioners towards the
end of the seventeenth century drew on a range of precedents from a
female- and male-authored tradition, demonstrating the mode’s increas-
ing potential and flexibility for women writers as complaint took on new
forms in the marketplace.
Ovid and Beyond

The chapters in this volume explore new forms, new texts, and new authors
of complaint from the 1560s to the 1680s, expanding the parameters of
early modern complaint literature well before and beyond the late
sixteenth-century apogee of the male-authored “female complaint.” Susan
Felch is the first of several contributors to consider women’s religious
writing within Protestant devotional cultures, extending the critical lan-
guage of complaint into women’s biblical writings (and vice versa) in new
ways, and considering the voices and formal elements of religious com-
plaint as it was taken up by women writers. Focusing on letters and poems
circulating in the community of John Knox and his associates, including
Anne Lock, Felch in Chap. 2 offers a taxonomy of three kinds of
“theologically-inflected” complaint: the prophetic, the petitionary, and

the penitential. The latter, in particular, engendered the “intense and per-
sonal encounters between a penitent and a personal deity” that are familiar
to us from the rich literatures of—and about—the biblical psalms in early
modern culture. Claire Costley King’oo and others have explored the
articulation of suffering in the psalms of lament and of penitence, and the
direction of the psalmist’s complaint towards restitution;43 but this rich
discussion of the psalmic poetry of plaint and supplication has only rarely
been brought into conversation with complaint as a broader rhetorical
mode. Felch’s analysis provides a new consideration of how biblical com-
plaint might work differently from its secular variations: as an articulation
directed to penitence, a working through “the depths of sin” and into
grace. Felch draws necessary attention to the performance of penitential
complaint, insisting that in its psalmic and prayerful context, complaint “is
formative as well as instructive”; it is “not something one merely watches or
reads; it is something one enters into and does” (emphasis added).
Continuing the focus on religious complaint, Chap. 3 reveals the ways
in which women’s biblical complaints not only engaged personal lan-
guages of petition and penance, but provided powerful forms of social and
political engagement. Micheline White considers the way complaint func-
tions in Katherine Parr’s Psalms or Prayers (1544) and Lamentation or
Complaint of a Sinner (1547), arguing that Parr activates complaint’s
political potential in the service of a national wartime agenda linked to the
church calendar and in response to specific political crises. Parr’s royal
status and her influence over Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I
mean that her complaint texts are an acute example of a paradox inherent
in complaint, productively engaged by many writers: if complaint is in its
nature the articulation of loss and disenfranchisement, the pathos of its
articulation (especially if feminised) can generate a trenchant critique of
those in power, and a call to action. White traces a movement in Parr’s two
texts from complaining for an embattled Henry VIII in 1544 to complain-
ing about the Henrician church in 1547, the first underpinned by a radical
ventriloquy of Henry himself, in Parr’s adoption of a psalmic, monarchical
“I.” That Parr inhabits the Davidic “I” with such ease is both striking and
unsurprising: as White argues, practices of reading, writing, performing,
and praying through the psalms meant that:
early modern readers were accustomed to reading the Davidic “I” in mul-
tiple registers simultaneously and some of those registers were n
on-gendered:
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what little
belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickwick.
Seymour’s first sketch was of a long, thin man. The present
immortal one he made from my description of a friend of mine at
Richmond—a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the ladies’
protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John
1
Foster.
1
Is there not a blend of Mr. Tracy Tupman
here?
Seymour drew the figure from Mr. Chapman’s description:

Dickens put life into it—yet more life—and made it a “nurseling of
immortality.” That, believe me, is how it happens; just so, and in no
other way: and the operative power is called Genius. Remind
yourselves of this when learned men, discussing Shakespeare,
assure you they have fished the particular murex up which dyed
Hamlet’s inky cloak. Themselves are the cuttle, and only theirs is the
ink.
II
But we talk of Dickens: and the trouble with Dickens is that he—
whose brain in creating personage I suppose to be the most fecund
that ever employed itself on fiction—to the end of his days kept a
curious distrust of himself and a propensity for this childish expedient
of “drawing from the life.” It is miserable, to me, to think of this giant
who could turn off a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Dick Swiveller, a Mark
Tapley, a Sarah Gamp, Captain Cuttle, Mr. Dick, Mr. Toots, Mr.
Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Dodson and Fogg, Codlin and Short,
Spenlow and Jorkins, Mrs. Jellaby, Mrs. Billickin, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs.
Wilfer, Mr. Twemlow, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mr. Sapsea, Silas
Wegg, and indeed anyone you take into your own experience of life
—from Mr. Chadband to the Dolls’ Dressmaker, with hundreds of
lesser characters no less distinct—it is miserable to me, I say, that a
Genius with all this largess to mint and scatter should have taxed his
acquaintance to stamp their effigies upon poorer coin.
III
But let us discriminate. In “drawing from life” much will depend,
as Aristotle might say, on (a) the extent, (b) the manner, (c) your
intention: as likewise upon (d) the person drawn. I exclude all such
portraits as are likely to provoke an action at law; for these come to
be assessed under separate rules of criticism: and in general we
may say of them that they should be avoided from the instinct of self-
preservation rather than on grounds of disinterested aesthetic.
Confining ourselves, then, to portraits which are not actionable,
we may take, as an extreme instance, Samuel Butler’s The Way of
All Flesh. For in this book the persons portrayed are the author’s
own parents, and he portrays them in a manner and with intention to
make them odious, and to any extent: which seems to involve the
nice moral question whether a person the best able to do a thing
should not sometimes be the person who least ought to do it. And
should the injunction against laying hands on your father
Parmenides cover Parmenides if he happen to be your maiden aunt?
—and maybe, too, she can retort, because you come of a literary
family, you know! This power of retort, again, complicates a question
which, you perceive, begins to be delicate. Ought you to catch
anyone and hit him where he cannot hit back? Parmenides is no
longer a relative but (say) a publisher, and you have—or think you
have—reason to believe that he has cheated you. (And before you
answer that this is incredible, let me say that I am dealing with an
actual case, in which, however, I was not a party.) Are you justified in
writing a work of fiction which holds him up to public opprobrium
under a thin disguise? In my opinion you are not: because it means
your attacking the fellow from a plane on which he can get no
footing, to retaliate.
But it may be urged against him that Dickens by consent, and
pretty well on his own admission, drew portraits of his mother in Mrs.
Nickleby, and of his father in Mr. Micawber, and again in old Mr.
Dorrit of the Marshalsea—this last, I am sure, the nearest to life.
Well, I pass the question of provocation or moral excuse, observing
only that Dickens tholed a childhood of culpable, even of damnable,
neglect, whereas the parents of Samuel Butler did at least wing, with
a Shrewsbury and Cambridge education, the barbs he was to shoot
into their dead breasts. Dickens’ parents turned him down, at ten, to
a blacking-factory, and, as we saw in our last lecture, when the
moment came to release him from the blacking-warehouse his
mother tried to insist on his returning.
“I do not,” he records to Forster, “write resentfully or angrily,

for I know how all these things have worked together to make
me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I
never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent
back.”
IV
So there was provocation in plenty, humiliation inflicted on a
young and infinitely sensitive mind. But, when we have granted that
Dickens borrowed from his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, from his father
for Mr. Micawber and the Elder Dorrit, mark you how genius diverges
from the mere hint—how far Micawber differs from Dorrit, while both
are elemental. Mark you further how and while both are sublimated
and Mrs. Nickleby too—how much charity has to do with the
chemical process. Who thinks of Mrs. Nickleby but as an amiable
noodle? Who of Mr. Micawber, but to enjoy his company? Who of Mr.
Dorrit but with a sad ironical pity? Where in any portrait of the three
can you trace a stroke of that vindictiveness you find bitten upon
page after page of The Way of All Flesh?
Moreover, choosing Old Dorrit, the least sympathetically but the
most subtly drawn of the three, I would ask you, studying that
character for yourselves, to note how Dickens conveys that, while
much of its infirmity is native, much also comes of the punishment of
the Marshalsea against which the poor creature’s pomposities are at
once a narcotic, and a protest, however futile, of the dignity of a
human soul, however abject. Mark especially, at the close of Chapter
XXXV, how delicately he draws the shade of the Marshalsea over
Little Dorrit herself. He would fain keep her, born and bred in that
unwholesome den, its one uncontaminated “prison-flower”—but with
all his charity he is (as I tried to show you in a previous lecture) a
magisterial artist and the truth compels him. Mark then the workings
of this child’s mind on hearing the glad news of her father’s release.
Here is the passage:
Little Dorrit had been thinking too. After softly putting his [her
father’s] hair aside, and touching his forehead with her lips, she
looked towards Arthur, who came nearer to her, and pursued in
a low whisper the subject of her thoughts.
“Mr. Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves
here?”
“No doubt. All.”
“All the debts for which he has been imprisoned here, all my
life and longer?”
“No doubt.”
There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in
her look; something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to
detect it, and said:
“You are glad that he should do so?”
“Are you?” asked Little Dorrit wistfully.
“Am I? Most heartily glad!”
“Then I know I ought to be.”
“And are you not?”
“It seems to me hard,” said Little Dorrit, “that he should have
lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the
debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and
money both.”
“My dear child——” Clennam was beginning.
“Yes, I know I am wrong,” she pleaded timidly. “Don’t think
any worse of me; it has all grown up with me here.”
The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted
Little Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered as the
confusion was, in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it
was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck
Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.
Now I call that, Gentlemen, the true novelist’s stroke; rightly

divined, so suddenly noted that we, who had not expected it, consent
at once with a “Yes, yes—of course it happened so.”
V
But what I wish you to grasp is—in a man who could play strokes
like that by the score and conjure up out of his vasty deeps anything
from Dick Swiveller to Uncle Pumblechook, from the Marchioness to
Mrs. Joe Gargery—the silliness of diffidence which drove him again
and again to mere copying “from the life.” The superstition was idle,
even when it did no harm. Having, in Oliver Twist, to describe a
harsh and insolent Magistrate, Dickens (who could invent a Mr.
Nupkins at will) took pains to be introduced to the Hatton Garden
Police Court over which a certain Mr. Laing presided. He took these
pains scrupulously, through an official channel (as they say), with the
double result that we get Mr. Fang in the novel and that the Home
Secretary very soon found it convenient to remove Mr. Laing from
the Bench—and this, maybe, was all for the good—but you see how
our author has already mixed up his conception of Charles Dickens
as an author with that of Charles Dickens as a popular institution.
We will suppose that this Mr. Laing got his deserts. None the
less Dickens was hitting him on a pitch where he had no standing
and could not hit back. And I would warn you of this, Gentlemen—
that if, trained here, you go forth to do battle with wrongdoing, one of
two methods is equally fair, and no other. Either you must persuade
men generally that such and such a principle should govern their
actions, or, if you have to take a particular wrongdoer by the throat,
you should in the first place be absolutely sure of your facts, and, in
the second, take him preferably on his own ground: so that his
defeat will be righteous and plain to all, and he can excuse nothing
on your advantage of position.
I have diverged into advising you as artists in public life: but the
advice is not irrelevant, for it echoes that which, repeatedly given to
Dickens by his best friends, he repeatedly ignored, yet never without
detriment to his art and not seldom with irritating personal
consequences. You all know how he came to grief over his
caricatures of Landor and Leigh Hunt in Bleak House. Laurence
Boythorne was merely a cheap superficial, not ill-natured, portrait.
Landor, who never condescended to notice it, might well have
shrugged his tall shoulders and said, “Is this the friend who visited
Fiesole for my sake, and sent me home the only gift I demanded—
an ivy-leaf from my old Villa there ... and is this what he knows of
me, or even what I seemed to him?” (The ivy-leaf was found
wrapped away among Landor’s papers, twenty years later.) But
nothing—least of all its verisimilitude—can excuse the outrage
perpetrated upon Leigh Hunt in the mask of Harold Skimpole: for, as
Forster observes, to this character in the plot itself of Bleak House is
assigned a part which no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech
could redeem from contempt. Hunt, who (with all his faults) never
lacked generosity, had been among the first to hail and help Dickens,
was (as often happens) the last to recognise himself for the intended
victim: but when some kind friend drew his attention to the calculated
wound, it went deep. Dickens apologised in a letter which did its
best, but could, in the nature of things, amount to no more than
kindly evasiveness. He was guilty, and he knew it. Hunt had been
wounded in the house of his friend. It was all very well, or ill, for
Dickens to plead (as he did) that in Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby he
had played a like trick on his own father and mother. The first and
most obvious answer to that is, “Well, if you did, you ought to have
known better”—the second, “And, anyhow, why should that make it
any the more agreeable to me?” But Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber
(as we saw) are kindly, even lovable characters. Harold Skimpole is
at once abject and mischievous: and as Forster very justly remarks:
The kindly or unkindly impression makes all the difference

where liberties are taken with a friend; and even this entirely
favourable condition will not excuse the practice to many, where
near relatives are concerned.
But Landor and Leigh Hunt, you may say, were literary men of
their hands, well able to defend themselves. Well, then, take down
your David Copperfield and compare the Miss Mowcher of Chapter
XXII with the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXXII. You will see at once
that something very queer has happened; that the Miss Mowcher of
the earlier chapter, obviously meant to be an odious little go-between
in the Steerforth plot, has changed into a decent little creature at
once pathetic and purposeless. Why? The answer is that the
deformed original, recognising her portrait, had in the interim
addressed to Dickens a poignant letter of remonstrance. Dickens,
writing the story in monthly numbers, apologised and hastily
readjusted his plot.
These things work out to this—that in dealing with Dickens we
have to lay our account—as in dealing with Shakespeare we have to
lay our account—with a genius capable of vast surprises but at any
point liable to bolt out of self-control. I have no theories at all of what
a genius should be, or of how it ought to behave. Let us take what
the gods give and be thankful: and with Dickens as with
Shakespeare—both of whom write execrably at times and at times
above admiration—we have to accept this inequality as a condition
of our arriving at the very best. Even if we allow that a stricter
schooling would have spoilt both, and is indeed the bane of
originality: still let us keep our heads and tell ourselves that a great
part of Oliver Twist is execrable stuff and no less, as the talk of
Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or of Lucio in Measure for
Measure is execrable stuff and no less. By all means let us keep in
mind that these flagrancies are human and, if you will, a necessary
part of any Shakespeare, of any Dickens. But let us be quite clear in
judging them as counterweights, and tell ourselves that a Virgil or a
Dante—yes, or a Cervantes—would never need to ask such
forgiveness from us.
VI
Corruptio optimi pessima is one of those orotund sayings which
impress for the moment but are liable to have their wisdom very
considerably spokeshaved (so to speak) as soon as we apply the
Socratic knife. Is Tarzan of the Apes, after all, a corruption of the
best? And, if so, from what incalculable height did Lucifer plunge,
and how many days did he take before he broke the roof of the
railway station and scattered himself over the bookstalls? We may
derive solace, if we will, by telling ourselves that those horrible days
in the Chandos Street blacking-warehouse were a part of the
education of Dickens’ genius, taught it to observe, and so on. But I
say to you, as he said of Little Dorrit, that such a shadow of cruelty,
induced upon a sensitive boy, must inevitably leave its stain: and I do
most earnestly ask you, some of whom may find yourselves trustees
for the education of poor children, if you are sure that Dickens
himself was the better for a starved childhood? For my part I can
give that starvation little credit for his achievement, reading its effect
rather into his many faults of taste and judgment.
VII
It is usual to class among the first of these faults a defective
sense of English prose: and the commonest arraignment lies against
his use of blank verse in moments of pathos or of deep emotion.
Well, but let us clear our minds of cant about English prose, and
abstain from talking about it as if the Almighty had invented its final
pattern somewhere in the eighteenth century. Prose—and Poetry
too, for that matter—is a way of putting things worth record into
memorable speech. English writers of the late seventeenth and the
eighteenth century found, with some measure of consent, an
admirable fashion of doing this, and have left a tradition: and it is a
tradition to which I, personally, would cling if I could, admiring it as I
do, and admiring so much less many pages of Dickens and a
thousand of pages of Carlyle. After all, so long as the thing gets itself
said, and effectively, and memorably, who are we to prescribe rules
or parse sentences? What, for example, could that mysterious body,
the College of Preceptors, do to improve the grammar of Antony and
Cleopatra, even if they persuaded one another “Well, apparently
they have come to stay, and perhaps we had better call upon them,
my dear”?
VIII
Having, then, no preconceived notions about prose, and few
prejudices save against certain locutions of which I confess I dislike
them mainly because I dislike the sort of person who employs them
—I assert that Dickens, aiming straight at his purpose, wrote
countless pages of quite splendid prose. I defy you, for example, to
suggest how a sense of the eeriness of the Woolwich marshes with
an apprehension of horror behind the fog could be better conveyed
in words than Dickens conveys them in the opening chapters of
Great Expectations; as I ask you how the earliest impressions of a
sensitive child can be better conveyed in language than they are in
the early chapters of David Copperfield.
IX
But even this apologia—sufficient as I think it—does not cover
the whole defence. We have picked up a habit of consenting with
critics who tell us that Dickens’ prose is careless and therefore not
worth studying. Believe me, you are mistaken if you believe these
critics. Dickens sometimes wrote execrably: far oftener he penned at
a stretch page upon page of comment and conversation that
brilliantly effect their purpose and are, therefore, good writing. You
will allow, I dare say, his expertness in glorifying the loquacity that
comes of a well-meaning heart and a rambling head. Recall, for
example—casually chosen out of hundreds—Mrs. Chivery on her
son John, nursing his love-lornness amid the washing in the back-
yard: and remark the idiom of it:
“It’s the only change he takes,” said Mrs. Chivery, shaking

her head afresh. “He won’t go out, even to the back-yard, when
there’s no linen: but when there’s linen to keep the neighbours’
eyes off, he’ll sit there, hours. Hours he will. Says he feels as if it
was groves.... Our John has everyone’s good word and
everyone’s good wish. He played with her as a child when in that
yard she played. He has known her ever since. He went out
upon the Sunday afternoon when in this very parlour he had
dined, and met her, with appointment or without appointment
which I do not pretend to say. He made his offer to her. Her
brother and sister is high in their views and against Our John.
‘No, John, I cannot have you, I cannot have any husband, it is
not my intentions ever to become a wife, it is my intentions to be
always a sacrifice, farewell. Find another worthy of you and
forget me!’ This is the way in which she is doomed to be a
constant slave, to them that are not worthy that a constant slave
unto them she should be. This is the way in which Our John has
come to find no pleasure but in taking cold among the linen....”
Is that not prose? Of course it is prose for its purpose: and,

strictly for her purpose—strictly, mind you for their purpose—Mrs.
Chivery’s parallelisms of speech will match those of the prophet
Jeremiah at his literary best. “Ah,” say you, “but Dickens is dealing
out humorous reported speech. Can he write prose of his own?”
Well, yes, and yes most certainly. If you will search and study his
passages of deliberate writing you will scarcely miss to see how he
derives in turn of phrase as in intonation from the great eighteenth-
century novelists and translators whose works, if you remember,
were the small child’s library in the beautiful fourth chapter of David
Copperfield:
My father had left a small collection of books in a little room

upstairs ... which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From
that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle,
Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don
Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious
host, to keep me company....
The whole passage, if you will turn to it, you will recognise as
delicate English prose. But it is also a faithful, if translated, record.
From this line of English writers, the more you study him, the more
clearly you will recognise Dickens as standing in the direct descent
of a pupil. He brings something of his own, of course, to infuse it, as
genius will: and that something is usually a hint of pathos which the
eighteenth-century man avoided. But (this touch of pathos excepted)
you will find little, say, to distinguish Fielding’s sketch of Squire
Allworthy on his morning stroll from this sketch, which I take casually
from The Old Curiosity Shop, of an aged woman punctually visiting
the grave of her husband who had died in his prime of twenty-three:
“Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn’t change no more than life,
my dear.”... And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she
spoke of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson,
with a kind of pity for his youth growing out of her own old age,
and an exalting of his strength and manly beauty, as compared
with her own weakness and decay; and yet she spoke of him as
her husband too, and thinking of herself in connection with him,
as she used to be and not as she was now, talked of their
meeting in another world, as if he were dead but yesterday, and
she, separated from her former self, were thinking of the
happiness of that comely girl who seemed to have died with him.
X
No, we can none of us afford to despise Dickens’ prose. This
passage comes from one of his earliest books: if you would learn
how he (ever a learner) learned to consolidate his style, study that
neglected work of his, The Uncommercial Traveller—study such
essays as that on “Wapping Workhouse” or that on “The City
Churchyards”—study them with Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers—
and tell me if these two great Victorian novelists, after shaking the
dust of an Esmond or a David Copperfield off their palms, cannot, as
a parergon, match your Augustans—your Steele or your Addison—
on their own ground. Few recognise it, this pair being otherwise so
great: but it is so.
And because you will probably disbelieve me at first going-off, I
shall add the testimony of one you will be apter to trust—that of
George Gissing. I have spoken of one chapter in David Copperfield,
to commend it.
But, says Gissing:
In the story of David Copperfield’s journey on the Dover road

we have as good a piece of narrative prose as can be found in
English. Equally good, in another way, are those passages of
rapid retrospect in which David tells us of his later boyhood, a
concentration of memory perfumed with the sweetest humour. It
is not an easy thing to relate, with perfect proportion of detail,
with interest that never for a moment drops, the course of a year
or two of wholly uneventful marriage: but read the chapter
entitled Our Domestic Life and try to award adequate praise to
the great artist who composed it. One can readily suggest how
the chapter could have been spoiled; ever so little undue satire,
ever so little excess of sentiment; but who can point to a line in
which it might be bettered? It is perfect writing: one can say no
more and no less.
XI
I am glad, Gentlemen, on the verge of concluding these talks
about Dickens, to quote this from Gissing—a genuine genius,
himself an author of what Dr. Johnson would have described as
“inspissated gloom.” There is, I daresay, some heaven of recognition
in which all true artists meet; and at any rate it pleases one to think
that the author of The New Grub Street should, in this sublunary
sphere, have been comforted on his way (it would even seem,
entranced) by such children of joy as Sam Weller and Mr. Toots. And
I, at any rate, who admired Gissing in life, like to think of him who
found this world so hard, now, by virtue of his love for Dickens,
reconciled to look down on it from that other sphere, with tolerant
laughter—upon this queer individual England, at least. For
Providence has made and kept this nation a comfortable nation,
even to this day: and if you take its raciest literature from Chaucer
down, you may assure yourselves that much of its glorious merit
rests on the “triple pillar” of common-sense, religious morality and
hearty laughter. I for my part hold that we shall help a great deal to
restore our commonwealth by seeking back to that last “Godlike
function” and re-learning it. To promote that laughter, with good
sense and good morality, was ever Dickens’ way, as to kill wherever
he could what he once called “this custom of putting the natural
demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers
put dust, and pretending that it was swept away.” And I think of
Dickens as a great Englishman not least in this, that he was a man
of his hands, with a great laugh scattering humbug to make place for
mirth and goodwill; “a clean hearth and [to adapt Mrs. Battle] the
spirit of the game.”
XII
I conclude these lectures on Dickens with a word or two casually
uttered in conversation by a great man—possibly the greatest—of
the generation that succeeded Dickens; himself a superb novelist,
and a ruthless thinker for the good of his kind; a Russian, moreover,
to whom the language alone of Sam Weller or of Mrs. Gamp must
have presented difficulties well-nigh inconceivable by us. Some
nineteen years ago a friend of mine visited Tolstoy at his home and,
the talk falling upon Dickens, this is what Tolstoy said:
All his characters are my personal friends. I am constantly

comparing them with living persons, and living persons with
them. And what a spirit there was in all he wrote!
This having been reported to Swinburne, here is a part of

Swinburne’s answer:
What a superb and crushing reply to the vulgar insults of

such malignant boobies and poetasters as G. H. Lewes and Co.
(too numerous a Co.!) is the witness of ... such a man among
men!... After all, like will to like—genius will find out genius, and
goodness will recognise goodness.
Tolstoy to Dickens.... That is how the tall ships, the grandees of

literature, dip their flags and salute as they pass. Gentlemen, let us
leave it at that!
THACKERAY (I)
I
AMONG many wise sayings left behind him by the late Sir Walter
Raleigh—our Sir Walter and Oxford’s of whom his pupils there would
say, “But Raleigh is a prince”—there haunts me as I begin to speak
of Thackeray, a slow remark dropped as from an afterthought upon
those combatants who are for ever extorting details of
Shakespeare’s private life out of the Plays and the Sonnets, and
those others (Browning, for example, and Matthew Arnold) who in
revulsion have preached Shakespeare up for the grand impersonal
artist who never unlocked his heart, who smiles down upon all
questioning and is still
Out-topping knowledge.
Such a counter-claim may be plausible—is at any rate excusable if
only as an oath upon the swarm of pedlars who infest Shakespeare
and traffic in obscure hints of scandal. Yet, it will not work. “It would
never be entertained,” says Raleigh, “by an artist, and would have
had short shrift from any of the company that assembled at the
Mermaid Tavern. No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow.
No dramatist can create live characters save by bequeathing the
best of himself to the children of his art, scattering among them a
largess of his own qualities, giving, it may be, to one his wit, to
another his philosophic doubt, to another his love of action, to
another the simplicity and constancy that he finds deep in his own
nature. There is no thrill of feeling communicated from the printed
page but has first been alive in the mind of the author: there was
nothing alive in his mind that was not intensely and sincerely felt.
Plays like Shakespeare’s cannot be written in cold blood; they call
forth the man’s whole energies, and take toll of the last farthing of his
wealth of sympathy and experience.”
II
No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. That is the
sentence, of truly Johnsonian common-sense, which bears most
intimately on our subject this morning. The story runs that
Thackeray, one day tapping impatiently upon the cover of some
adulatory memoir of somebody, warm from the press, enjoined upon
his family, “None of this nonsense about me, after my death”: and
the injunction was construed by his daughter, Lady Ritchie, most
piously beyond a doubt, perhaps too strictly, for certain not with the
happiest results. For this denial of any authoritative biography—of a
writer and a clean-living English gentleman who might, if any human
being can or could, have walked up to the Recording Angel and
claimed his dossier without a blush—has not only let in a flood of
spurious reminiscences, anecdotes, sayings he most likely never
uttered or at least never uttered with meaning or accent to give pain
that, as reported, they convey. It has led to a number of editions with
gossipy prefaces and filial chat (I fear I must say it) none the more
helpful for being tinctured by affection and qualified by reserve.
This happens to be the more unfortunate of Thackeray since, as
I suppose, no writer of the Victorian age walked abroad more sturdily
on his own tall shadow, or trusted more on it. It was a shadow, too:
dark enough for any man’s footstep. I do not wish—nor is it
necessary—to break in upon any reticence. But you probably know
the main outline of the story—of a Cambridge youth, of Trinity, who
living moderately beyond his means (as undergraduates will) lost his
affluence, lost the remains of it when, bolting to London, he dared to
run a newspaper—two newspapers. The National Standard had
soon (in his own phrase) to be hauled down, and The Constitutional
belied its title by a rapid decline and decease. Thus he lost a
moderate patrimony, and we find him next as a roving journalist in
Paris, divided between pen and pencil, with an almost empty pocket.
There, in August, 1836, at the British Embassy, he made a most
imprudent but happy marriage—most happy, that is for a while.
Years afterwards he wrote to a young friend:
I married at your age with £400 paid by a newspaper which

failed six months afterwards, and always love to hear of a young
man testing his fortune in that way. Though my marriage was a
wreck, as you know, I would do it over again, for behold Love is
the crown and completion of all earthly good.... The very best
and pleasantest house I ever knew in my life had but £300 to
keep it.
Here, then, comes in the tragedy of Thackeray’s life. Daughters

were born to him amid those pleasures and anxieties which only they
can taste fully who earn their daily bread in mutual love on the
future’s chance. As he beautifully wrote, long after, in Philip:
I hope, friend, you and I are not too proud to ask for our daily
bread, and to be grateful for getting it? Mr. Philip had to work for
his, in care and trouble, like other children of men:—to work for
it, and I hope to pray for it too. It is a thought to me awful and
beautiful, that of the daily prayer, and of the myriads of fellow-
men uttering it, in care and in sickness, in doubt and in poverty,
in health and in wealth. Panem nostrum da nobis hodie. Philip
whispers it by the bedside where wife and child lie sleeping, and
goes to his early labour with a stouter heart: as he creeps to his
rest when the day’s labour is over, and the quotidian bread is
earned, and breathes his hushed thanks to the bountiful Giver of
the meal. All over this world what an endless chorus is singing of
love, and thanks, and prayer. Day tells to day the wondrous
story, and night recounts it unto night. How do I come to think of
a sunrise which I saw near twenty years ago on the Nile when
the river and sky flushed with the dawning light and, as the
luminary appeared, the boatmen knelt on the rosey deck and
adored Allah? So, as thy sun rises, friend, over the humble
housetops round about your home, shall you wake many and
many a day to duty and labour. May the task have been honestly
done when the night comes; and the steward deal kindly with the
labourer.
Always this refrain in Thackeray—the text which Dr. Johnson

once had inscribed on his watch, ΝΥΞ ΓΑΡ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ, “For the night
cometh.”
With the birth of her third child, however, Mrs. Thackeray fell
under a mental disease not violent at first, but deepening until it
imperatively required removal and restraint.
III
I have been as short over this as could be: but the simple fact
must be taken into account if we would understand Thackeray at all.
Without knowledge of it, for instance, how can we interpret the ache
behind his jolly Ballad of Bouillabaisse?
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is—

A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch, of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo;
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;
All these you eat at Terré’s tavern,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse...
Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a day that’s gone,
When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting,
In this same place—but not alone.
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me
—There’s no one now to share my cup.
If you wish, taking him at his best, to envisage Thackeray in the

days of his assured triumph, you must understand him as a
desolated man; as a man who, having built a fine house for himself
in Kensington Palace Gardens, could never fit it for a real home. If
he built himself a house, he could not sit and write in it; scarcely a
page of The Newcomes was written but on Club paper or at a hotel.
It would seem as if the very anguish of the hearth drove this soul, so
domestic by instinct, into the waste of Club-land, Pall Mall, the
Reform Club, where his portrait now so pathetically hangs. For
above all (let The Rose and the Ring with its delightful and delicate
occasion attest) Thackeray was born to be beloved of a nursery—the
sort of great fellow to whom on entrance every child, as every dog,
takes by instinct. In the nursery, quite at home, he rattles off the
gayest unforgettable verses:
Did you ever hear of Miss Symons?

She lives at a two-penny pieman’s:
But when she goes out
To a ball or a rout
Her stomacher’s all covered with di’monds.
Or, for elder taste,
In the romantic little town of Highbury,

My father kept a Succulating Libary.
He followed in his youth the Man immortal who
Conquered the Frenchman on the plains of Waterloo
—with similar fooling. Some men at Cambridge had the gift of this
fooling—in Tennyson’s day, too—and not the least of them was
Edward Lear, incomparable melodist of nonsense—nursery Mozart
of the Magic Flute—to whom, on his Travels in Greece, Tennyson
dedicated those very lovely stanzas beginning:
Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls

Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Acroceraunian walls....
He must be an unsympathetic critic (I think) and therefore an

incomplete critic, if indeed a critic at all, who feels any real
incongruity as in his mind he lets those lines fade off into
Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live, etc.;
for as Shelley once assured us, more or less:
Many a green isle needs must be

In the deep wide sea of—Philistie,
and to anyone who remembers the imaginary horizons of his nursery

I dare say the Blessed Isles of Nonsense and the land where the
Bong tree grows lie not far from Calypso’s grot, or the house of Circe
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,

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Early Modern Women's Complaint:

Gender, Form, and Politics Sarah C. E.

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Early Modern Literature in History

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo

This volume of essays emerges out of two collaborative projects on early

Helen Hackett, Hilary Hinds, Lorna Hutson, Katherine Larson, Christina

1 Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s Complaint 1

Part I Sixteenth Century 27

2 Anne Lock and the Instructive Complaint 29

3 Katherine Parr and Royal Religious Complaint:

4 “Ane Wyfis Quarrel”: Complaining Women in Scottish

5 The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From

Part II Seventeenth Century 115

6 Acts of Will: Countersovereignty and Complaining

7 The Politics of Complaint in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory

8 Animating Eve: Gender, Authority, and Complaint157

10 Aphra Behn’s “Oenone to Paris,” John Dryden, and the

11 Complaint in the Wilderness: Mary Rowlandson Speaks

12 Anne Killigrew and the Restoration of Complaint247

Part IV Representing Complaint: New Digital Forms 267

13 From Manuscripts to Metadata: Understanding and

14 Women’s Complaint, 1530–1680: Taxonomy, Voice, and

15 “Past the Help of Law”: Epyllia and the Female

Jake Arthur is a DPhil candidate at Oxford University. His thesis recon-

Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (1995),

Early Theatre, The Seventeenth Century, Studies in Philology, and

Micheline White is an Associate Professor in the College of the

ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Fig. 13.1 The entity-relationship model assumed to underlie all

Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s

Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith

Upon My Lady Desmond’s Reproaching of Me Wrongfully

What planet ruled at my unhappy birth

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Sometimes I mourn my losses and the dead,

“Upon My Lady Desmond’s Reproaching of Me Wrongfully” is written

authored.4 Danielle Clarke, in foundational work on women writers’ use

subject to express experiences of grief, protest, and loss. This volume

Forms of Complaint: Mode, Genre, Voice

He later identifies “a certain lover’s complaint made to like effect” in a

Anne Lock, Katherine Parr, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth

Complaint and the Early Modern Woman Writer:

early education, at least in lyric and musical and dramatic performance.

No Muse suggests the pitty of my case,

For Rosamond, competitive advantage is achieved by mobilising “compas-

together stages Daniel’s emergence as a public writer, in a form of literary

Ovid and Beyond

“theologically-inflected” complaint: the prophetic, the petitionary, and

1 Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s Complaint 1

Part I Sixteenth Century 27

2 Anne Lock and the Instructive Complaint 29

3 Katherine Parr and Royal Religious Complaint:

4 “Ane Wyfis Quarrel”: Complaining Women in Scottish

5 The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From

Part II Seventeenth Century 115

6 Acts of Will: Countersovereignty and Complaining

7 The Politics of Complaint in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory

8 Animating Eve: Gender, Authority, and Complaint157

10 Aphra Behn’s “Oenone to Paris,” John Dryden, and the

11 Complaint in the Wilderness: Mary Rowlandson Speaks

12 Anne Killigrew and the Restoration of Complaint247

Part IV Representing Complaint: New Digital Forms 267

13 From Manuscripts to Metadata: Understanding and

14 Women’s Complaint, 1530–1680: Taxonomy, Voice, and

15 “Past the Help of Law”: Epyllia and the Female