Books like Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720

Did you think that all women married in former centuries? This fine and path-breaking book will put you right.

Amy Froide reveals that about one in five never married, and tells their stories to throw light on lives traditionally overlooked. Among the landed classes, many remained single because fathers couldn’t or wouldn’t raise a dowry to attract a suitable husband. Middle-class girls might be pressed to stay home and look after ageing parents or orphaned siblings. But we learn that other women remained single from choice, prizing their independence.

A lucky few had inherited the means to pay their way, while others opened a shop or practiced a craft, and took pride in supporting themselves.

I found this book fascinating. The guilds of early modern London were a male-only ‘closed shop’. But Laura Gowing’s pioneering study shows how resourceful women found ways to exploit loopholes and carve out a role in the world of skilled trades and crafts.

A guild member’s widow was permitted to continue her husband’s trade (provided she didn’t remarry), and she might take on a female apprentice and use the signing-on ‘premium’ to grow her business. Once the apprenticeship was completed, the young woman would now have the skills to set up on her own in the suburbs or provinces where guilds had no control.

I liked the case-studies where Gowing has been able to reconstruct individual lives to bring this new world vividly to life.   

Men thought women had no place in politics, but when England was engulfed in civil war in the 1640s women couldn’t opt out.

Ann Hughes explores the lives of those trapped in cities and castles under siege, or left to support their families when their husbands went off to war, perhaps never to return. I like the way she widens the scope of her book to show, for example, how both Cavalier and Roundhead propagandists exploited gender images, mocking their adversaries as effeminate cuckolds.

Hughes demonstrates too how the war broke down gender barriers, just as the twentieth-century world wars were to do. Women found a new voice, and played new roles, unparalleled until modern times. 

I love this book because it gives us the stories of two intelligent young women caught up in the turmoil of the civil war, told in their own words. Both belonged to royalist families, and they endured the hardships and dangers that came from being on the losing side.

Halkett’s vivid memoir focuses on her early life as a spirited young woman who engaged in forbidden and risky romantic liaisons. She even joined one lover in a hazardous plot that enabled the king’s younger son (the future James II) to escape from the Tower of London. It reads like the storyline of a historical novel!

Even though it’s a work of fiction, what I found fascinating about this novel was the glimpse into the world of playwrighting and how, for centuries, the playing (or playwrighting) field has not been a level one.

In Elizabethan times, Emilia Bassano writes Shakespeare’s plays and gets kept as a mistress. In modern-day New York City, Melina Green’s work gets read only because it’s been submitted under a man’s name. Not much has changed.

In classical detective fiction, the story of the crime is like a puzzle, and piece by piece, clue by clue, we arrive at the big picture. Subdivision is, in some ways, a classic puzzle mystery (it even involves a puzzle!)—except it doesn’t start at a crime scene. It starts with a woman arriving at a guesthouse in the surreal and Kafkaesque Subdivision where she now lives. She can’t remember why she is there or really anything from her past.
Unlike more classical detective fiction, she is not a guide; I followed her—tracking, assembling, interpreting—but when certain elements of the real (maybe) slid into focus, they did so mostly despite her. I couldn’t put it down, and notwithstanding its fairly cerebral tone, I cried at the end.

As a writer of feminist myths, Kartika Nair’s exquisite poetic retelling of the Mahabharata from the women’s perspective felt like it was written for me. The title is from the African writer Chinua Achebe’s words, "Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Using formal poetry, free verse, and prose, Nair has created a palimpsest of the great Indian epic of kingship and warring dynasties which is several times the length of The Iliad and The Odyssey combined. Here the mothers, wives, sisters, and lovers of the protagonists tell their stories, providing a counterpoint to the much-quoted verse from the epic: "All that is found here can be found elsewhere, but what is not here can be found nowhere."

Wanderers is not a memoir. Andrews, who is a professor of literature in the UK, presents ten chapters on ten famous women writers who also walked.

I found it interesting to learn how some of the women left town before dawn to walk so that they would not be seen. Society at that time felt it was not safe for a woman to walk by herself. I was amazed at some of the distances that they walked; for example, in the early 1800s Ellen Weeton walked 35 miles in a day. 

I found the interconnection of walking to help writing and writing about walking fascinating. I will return to read this again and again. 

This book kicked off my obsession with stories about young women who are trying to make sense of all the versions of themselves they have inside and weighing up which one to present to the world at any given time. The protagonist, Ruth, is an American living in London who works at a department store, spritzing perfume during the day, watching all the people go past, and trying to understand how the other young women who work there seem so self-assured. This is not a plot-driven book so much as a character study of a character who doesn’t know who she is yet.

Kate Zambreno’s writing is absolutely gorgeous. She creates a distance between Ruth—the ‘green girl’—and the world, like she’s looking through a window and can see people inside talking but not understand what they’re saying. At the same time, I recognized myself in Ruth,… show more.

This non-fiction book helped to reshape my reading of historical and mythological women and to understand representation and the voice of the ‘other’. Hall explores the power and (ab)use of language and how feminine myths and symbols are important to be unveiled and celebrated. Her Jungian perspective introduced me to archetypes, especially in mythology, and remains an inspiration to both my theatre work and my writing.