Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689 [Hardcover]

Royalist Women Writersaims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalized. Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, it argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender. In this way both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.

1. The Gallery of Heroick Women': Margaret Cavendish and the Images of the Author
2. 'Her Harmonious Numbers': The Politics of Friendship in the Poems and Plays of Katherine Philips
3. 'Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne': Cavendish, Philips, and the Potency of Feminized Retreat
4. 'Secret Instructions': Aphra Behn's Negotiation of the Political Marketplace
Bibliography