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Playing The Waiting Game: The Life And Letters Of Elizabeth Wolley, Elizabeth Mccutcheon
Playing The Waiting Game: The Life And Letters Of Elizabeth Wolley, Elizabeth Mccutcheon
Quidditas
Almost fifty years ago Wallace Notestein, an English historian, commented that while both the men and the women of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England remain "strangers" and “shadowy figures” to us, the women are “much more shadowy.” Pointing out that “Our knowledge of women comes largely from the incidental mention of them by men who seldom took pains to characterize and individualize them,” he insisted that “It is as individuals that we must know them, if we are to understand them as members of a sex.” Obviously a great deal has changed for the better. We know much more about the …
Allen D. Breck Award Winner: “Ples Acsep Thes My Skrybled Lynes”: The Construction And Conventions Of Women’S Letters In England, 1540–1603, James Daybell
Quidditas
The central themes of this essay are delineated by the contrasting examples of two female correspondents. Both women are from similar gentry backgrounds and wrote in the late 1570s to early 1590s. The first is Mary Harding, the court maid of Lady Bridget Manners, herself the daughter of Elizabeth, countess of Rutland, famed for her marriage to Robert Tyrwhit in 1594, which so greatly incurred the wrath of Elizabeth I. Only four of Mary Harding’s letters have survived, all of which were sent to her mistress’s mother in order to keep her abreast of court news, her daughter’s progress, and …