“ ‘By a Lady’: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century Print Culture”

Abstract

It is a commonplace among literary critics that early modern women writers as a group shared a need for anonymity and developed authorial strategies to protect their reputations as socially acceptable females. Virginia Woolf s observation in A Room of One’s Own that “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” is frequently taken as being not only a description of an authorial practice, but also as a critique of the patriarchal culture which demanded that women artists—if they indeed could exist—hide their gender as a price for their artistic expression. We expect early modern women writers to give up their individual names, not because they wished to do so, but because of the cultural constraints placed upon them.

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