Biography
Isabella Whitney
Published works from 1567 - 1573
Isabella Whitney was a sixteenth-century poet, who completed two collections of poetry. Considered by scholars to be one of England’s first female poets, Whitney published her first collection in 1567, titled The Copy of a Letter, lately written in metre by a young gentlewoman to her unconstant lover. With an admonition to all young gentlewomen, and to all other maids in general, to beware of men’s flattery. The Copy of a Letter consisted of four poems: two written by Whitney and two written in response by two separate male poets.
Her second collection of poetry, published in 1573, was titled A Sweet Nosegay or Pleasant Posy. A Sweet Nosegay is a more substantial body of work, which includes over one hundred and ten quatrains, and concludes with her most well-known work, “Wyll and Testament.” A Sweet Nosegay is considered largely autobiographical and includes epistles written directly to Whitney’s family. What we do know about Whitney is primarily extrapolated from her texts, including her work as a maid-servent to an unidentified household in London.
Figure 1.
Not until the mid-twentieth century did scholars begin to study Whitney’s poetry as part of the significant poetic works produced in the Early Modern period. Whitney’s work offers a first-hand perspective on the lived experiences of sixteenth and seventeen-century women, and without her work, we would know even less about women’s lives during this time. Whitney’s “Wyll and Testament” is particularly enlightening due to its content and context. Among the consequences of this satirical poem, Whitney brings into focus two primary concerns: disparities between male and female property ownership and class.*
*It is important to note that in Early Modern England, the term for one’s social status would have been noted as “estate” or “rank,” rather than “class.” Class as a categorical social system was not established formally until the nineteenth century.
Works Cited
Header Image: Whitney, I. (1573). [A sweet nosgay, or pleasant posye] [contayning a hundred and ten phylosophicall flowers &c.] London, R. Jones. Retrieved from https://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/sweet-nosgay-pleasant-posye-contayning-hundred/docview/2264223292/se-2?accountid=1272
"class, n. and adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/33874.
Salzman, Paul. Reading Early Modern Women's Writing. Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. Print.
Travitsky, Betty. “The ‘Wyll and Testament’ of Isabella Whitney.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 10, no. 1, Wiley, 1980, pp. 76–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43446961
Vecchi, Linda. Reading Early Modern Women: an Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550-1700, edited by Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, Taylor & Francis, Inc., New York, NY, 2004, pp. 72–73. Print.