Early Modern Women's Complaint

Abstract

Calling attention to the Ovidian contours of Isabella Whitney's cursus litterarum, this essay reconsiders the literary heritage of the personae she adopts in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566) and A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Existing analyses of Whitney's Ovidianism have tended to emphasize her debts to the female-voiced epistles of the Heroides while simultaneously overlooking profound intertextual connections between A Sweet Nosgay and Ovid's exilic writings. In contrast, this essay argues that the outlines of a self-consciously classical career trajectory (its stages demarcated by Whitney's subtle aesthetic shift from Heroidean amatory complaint to Tristian exile complaint) can be detected when The Copy of a Letter and A Sweet Nosgay are read contiguously.