Manchester University Press Women Poets of the English Civil War

This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the five most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War period: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. This group represent the very best of how, why and what women poets wrote in seventeenth-century England. They participated in elite poetic culture at the highest level, writing elegies, panegyrics and epics; they are politically engaged; and their female authorship strategies are nuanced but clear, as they take diverse approaches to publication in manuscript and print. Their poetry is at the centre of discussion and debate about early modern women’s poetry, but until now, substantial edited selections of their work have not been readily available. The anthology brings together the most innovative, complex poems of each writer, revealing the diversity of women’s poetry in the mid-seventeenth century, as it traversed political affiliations and material forms. This anthology presents poems in modern-spelling, clear-text versions for classroom use, and for ready comparison to mainstream editions of male poets’ work. Notes on the poems and an introduction explain the contexts of the Civil War, religious conflict, and scientific and literary development, and will serve students’ and academics’ needs alike. Women poets of the English Civil War is ideal for use alongside mainstream anthologies of early modern poetry, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of seventeenth-century women’s poetic culture, in its own right, and in relation to prominent male poets such as Marvell, Milton and Dryden.