The Voices of Anne Cooke, Lady Anne and Lady Bacon

Abstract

The twentieth century’s reclamation of Renaissance women’s writing in English Studies has been paralleled by Social History’s exploration of the same women’s social roles. It is an uneasy alliance. While literary critics search for an authentic continuous individual voice, historians stress the radically discontinuous lives of Renaissance women, cast successively as daughters, wives, mothers and widows, often with major financial and domestic realignments accompanying each shift in their social state. In this essay, I argue that early modern English readers were sensitive to the ramifications of this latter, discontinuous model when responding to texts attributed to women. Far from recognizing a ‘women’s literature’ or even a ‘woman’s voice’, they heard a number of different women’s voices — the maiden, the wife, the mother, the widow — and it was to these differentiated voices that they responded. These were voices that were at once tacitly doubled by the man who defined that woman’s social role (the father, the husband, the son), and yet clearly heard as the voices of women. It was only when the silent ‘double voice’ of the man was absent — for example, when the woman became a widow — that the woman’s voice was heard ‘single’ for the first time. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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