Women writers in Tudor England: male occluded female agency and the recovery of authorial voice

This thesis examines the relationship between occluded authorial agency and women writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, looking at the work of four writers – Margaret More Roper, Anne Askew, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Grymeston – and the different genres in which they wrote: religious translation, memoir, secular poetry, maternal advice. Through examining their works, this thesis analyses the ways in which paratextual techniques negotiate women’s precarious position on the margins of mainstream male literary culture. It argues that, despite these patriarchal beliefs, early modern women writers still succeed in achieving agency and an authorial voice. Although More Roper’s religious translation is ushered into print through male intervention and she remains anonymous, paratextual apparatuses disclose who the real author is. Askew, despite heavy intrusion by two major male reformers – John Bale and John Fox – manages to manifest her suffering and consequent death at the hands of the Catholic clergy to the outside world. Whitney moves into the public sphere by writing secular verse which challenges conventional male traditions. Grymeston uses the maternal advice book to showcase her various rhetorical skills while remaining within an acceptable female genre which permits her to make it into print.
In this study, it is contended that precisely due to this complex relationship between female authors and male authorities, sixteenth-century women writers remained side-lined by their contemporary readers and, subsequently, modern critics. By understanding these women’s various struggles – limited educational opportunities with the exception of few women who managed to acquire an instruction, the confinement of women to the domestic sphere, a rigid patriarchal culture, distortion of female-authored texts by male authorities – the twenty-first-century reader can comprehend better these women writers’ contribution to the literary world and admire them not just for their rhetorical skills but also for succeeding in leaving their own legacies.