English 310 - Writing Women: Early Modern Women and the
                                                                                                            Art of Self-Fashioning
                                                                                                              Sharon Cadman Seelig
                                                                                                                M W 2:40-4:00 p.m.

Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own (1929) that "Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman" and that "it would have been impossible, completely
and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare."
But women did write, sometimes prolifically, in Shakespeare's lifetime and throughout the seventeenth century. They circulated their work among friends; they saw it into print. How then did Woolf reach her conclusion? Why do we know so little about the work of early modern women writers? Under what circumstances did they write and for whom? What models did they use (romance, religious autobiography, poetic or narrative conventions, expectations of an ending); in what ways did they conform to or transform these models? What kind of assumptions or preconceptions does the modern reader bring to these texts? To what extent are these helpful or misleading?

These are some of the questions that will concern us as we consider a great variety of seventeenth-century texts--diaries, letters, and memoirs; poems (sonnets, personal and religious lyrics); drama; and prose fiction. We'll read diaries by Lady Anne Clifford and Lady Margaret Hoby; autobiographies by Lady Anne Halkett and Lady Ann Fanshawe; translations by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; poems by Lady Mary Wroth, An Collins, Aemelia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips; drama by Elizabeth Cary; fiction by Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn.

The class will emphasize close reading of texts, placed in their historical context. Students will be asked to take a significant role in class discussion, write frequent informal responses, and two longer papers (6-8 and 10-12 pages) and make one or more in-class presentations. Since these writers were products of, as well as contributors to, their own time, a previous course having to do with the literature, history, philosophy, art history, or religious thought of the period is strongly recommended.

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