Self-Fashioning and Poetic Voice: Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Authorial Prerogative

Abstract

Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674-1737) spent forty years negotiating and intervening in the gendered frameworks of the cultural poetics of her time. Nevertheless, despite a number of studies that explore Rowe's engagement with emerging literary trends and her posthumous reputation, little has been said about her self-conscious construction of a literary career trajectory. This essay seeks to address this lacuna by revisiting a number of poems, particularly her famous elegy to her husband, which helped to shape her career and reputation. Rowe's early poems reveal the care and deliberation with which she positioned

Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

“…Some earlier women poets have consistently generated scholarship, notably Anne Finch and Mary Leapor-with Finch recently receiving her own Literature Compass review (Keith, 2018). Elizabeth Singer Rowe may be experiencing a critical renaissance, following excellent accounts of her poetry and literary career from Bigold (2013Bigold ( , 2019 and Clement (2017Clement ( , 2018, as well as Backscheider's (2013) monograph study of her prose fiction. But given Rowe's undeniable importance to eighteenth-century literary history, she has received far less investigation than one might expect.…”