VIII * The Earlier Seventeenth Century: General, Women's Writing

This article aims at analysing Mary Pix’s The Innocent Mistress (1697) as a paradigmatic example of the boom in female playwriting at the end of the seventeenth century in England. It is my main aim to determine whether and to what extent Pix’s play can be considered a derivative or innovative text. In other words, does The Innocent Mistress stick to the reformist atmosphere prevailing at the end of the seventeenth century or, on the contrary, is the play fully indebted to the hard Restoration drama of the 1670s? In contrast to the classic view of the Restoration stage as a monolith, this essay shows the evolution from the libertarian Carolean plays to the essentially reformist Augustan drama, and the impact and role of women’s writing in this process. Thus, after briefly delving into the main traits of both traditions –especially those concerning gender relations– my essay concludes that The Innocent Mistress proves to be clearly a product of its time, adapting recurrent Carolean devices to Augustan Reformism, but also the product of a female playwright and her limited room for transgression.

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Ideal Communities and Planter Women's Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

Parergon ◽

10.1353/pgn.2012.0085 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 29 (2) ◽

pp. 69-91 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Marie-Louise Coolahan

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Women's Writing ◽

Women’S Writing

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‘Prolixity is a Woman’s Crime’: Assessing Long-windedness in Seventeenth-century Women’s Writing

Quaker Studies ◽

10.3828/quaker.2021.26.1.3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 26 (1) ◽

pp. 111-118

Author(s):

Eleanor Start

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Women's Writing ◽

Historical Record ◽

Written Discourse ◽

Rhetorical Devices ◽

Female Writers ◽

First Time ◽

Women’S Writing

Gendered critiques of language have long been a feature of written discourse, and perhaps in no era more tellingly than the seventeenth century, a period in which female writers came to the fore and told their stories for the very first time. Through an examination of This is a Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truth’s Sake) of Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers (1662) and Mary Trye’s 1675 treatise Medicatrix, this essay explores the assumption that women’s writing is long-winded. Assessing their religious, medical and even proto-feminist messages, the essay analyses rhetorical devices and their effect, and how context heavily influenced the length of each publication. More than an historical record of their struggle, these texts articulate the voices of women previously unheard. While the two texts would seem at odds, the former concerning Quakerism and the latter medicine, they prove comparable in all their contrasts, revealing how women during this period of history displayed extraordinary innovation in their writing.

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