courtly love,” The Romance of the Rose, de Pisan sought to repair a woman’s reputation that had been ruined by the popular epic poem.
After a writing career that lasted twenty-nine years, Christine retired to a convent. In 1429, just before her death, she wrote a book honoring Joan of Arc. It was, wrote Vicki León in Uppity Women of Medieval Times, “the only French book ever written about the Maid of Orleans in her lifetime.”
While she was alive, Christine de Pisan received unstintingly positive reviews for her work and was compared favorably to Cicero and Cato. Her work stands the test of time. In 1521, Le Livre du duc des vraies aman was published in England as The Book of the Duke of True Lovers, the first book by a woman published in English. Her City of Women was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is taught in literature courses worldwide.
ANNE BRADSTREET Pilgrim’s Progress
Fifty years before Aphra Behn shocked English society, Anne Bradstreet wrote the first book of poetry published in the American colonies. Upon arriving with her family in 1630, Anne Bradstreet saw the raw new America as an opportunity to create a new way of being: “I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose,” she wrote.
She was at once a pioneer and a typically religious member of her Puritan community. She had come from a privileged background afforded her by her father, Thomas Dudley, who ran the estate of an earl of Lincoln. Anne Bradstreet was allowed to visit the earl’s library freely, and she took full advantage, reading religious texts, poetry, and classics exhaustively.
In 1628, she married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge who worked as a steward for the earl. Anne’s husband was nine years older than she and equally educated. Life on the earl’s estate was filled with ease, comfort, and security, but that soon changed. The devout religiosity of the Dudleys led them to believe they should prove their devotion to God through trials and tribulations. These they found in plentitude in the New World. The whole family moved lock, stock, and barrel to the Massachusetts colony, where Anne’s father and husband both served as governors. They suffered from the cold, malaria, starvation, and the harsh, unforgiving climate of this savage new world.
Part of the Puritan ethos included stringent second-class status for all women, for it was God’s will that a woman should be subordinate, a constant helpmate to man, and humble, with no personal ambitions. In these circumstances, writing was dangerous. In 1645, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop lamented the sad straying of “a godly young woman” who was mentally unstable and who in a weakened, fallen state, gave “herself wholly to reading and writing, and [had] written many books.” He had banished Anne Hutchinson seven years earlier for daring to interpret religious doctrine in her own way.
But Anne Bradstreet’s brother-in-law John Woodbridge didn’t hold to the belief that women couldn’t have their own intellectual lives. He had Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, collected in The Tenth Muse, printed in London, where it had proved to be highly “vendable,” according to London booksellers. Woodbridge provided a foreword to the book making clear that it was “the work of a woman, honoured and esteemed where she lives, for…the exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and these poems are but the fruit of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.”
A devoted mother, Anne Bradstreet gave birth to eight children, and in her role as helpmate, she saw her husband rise to considerable prosperity and power in the colony. With little time to rest or write, her literary output ceased. She suffered from continuing symptoms of the smallpox she had contracted as a child and died in 1673.
Though she was forgotten for centuries, twentieth-century poets, particularly Conrad Aiken and John Berryman, have recognized her contribution in various tributes. Adrienne Rich demands her genius be honored: “To have written…the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children on the edge of the wilderness, was to have managed a poet’s range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.”
Fool, I do grudge the Muses did not part
Twixt him and me that overfluent store….
From the Prologue, Anne Bradstreet
MARY MANLEY the first bestselling woman author
It is amazing that Mary Manley is not better known; she was the first British woman to have a career as a political journalist, the first female author of a bestseller, and the very first woman to be jailed for her writing. Born in 1663, she was ahead of her time in her advocacy for women’s rights and her willingness to take risks with her own comfortable life to fight for these rights. Manley decried the inequity that saw women punished for acts any man could freely engage in. Her greatest passion was that women should as writers have equal opportunity with men.
She herself was prolific, authoring short stories, plays, satires, political essays, and letters. She replaced Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame as the editor of the Tory paper, the Examiner, yet she remains relatively unknown, while he has a permanent place in the canon and is widely read and widely taught. Swift’s achievements seem Lilliputian in comparison to Mary Manley’s feat.
Her bestselling satire, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes from the New Atlantis, an Island in the Mediterranean, was aimed at the opposition to the Tory party, the Whigs. The poison prose swiftly hit its target. Manley and her publishers were thrown in jail, and the adage about any kind of publicity—even bad publicity—being good held true. Readers bought the book in droves to figure out who the real people were behind the thinly veiled biographical sketches. Clever lass that she was, Manley’s absolutely public Secret Memoirs included much to titillate and tantalize, including Corinna, the maiden who staunchly refuses to get married, and a mysterious lesbian group called the Cabal.
As a challenge at the height of her fame, Mary Manley described herself as “a ruined woman,” and in a fictionalized autobiography revealed her betrayal and entrapment into marriage to a cousin who took her money and ran. Inspired by her father, a writer who held a high office, Mary wasn’t ruined at all, but was a huge success as a writer who chose lovers of standing as peers and lived life on her own terms. Before there was J.K., Danielle, or Nora, there was Mary! This seventeenth-century virago paved the way for Joe Klein’s bestselling political satire, Primary Colors, and for every female who ever mounted the bestseller list.
She who has all the muses in her head, wanted to be caressed in a poetical manner.
Mary Manley from Secret Memoirs
LUCY TERRY PRINCE pioneer and poet
As one of the first Black American poets, Lucy Terry has yet to receive her due. She was born in 1730 in Africa. After being kidnapped as a baby, she was brought to the colony of Rhode Island by slavers and was purchased at the age of five by Ensign Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts, to be a servant. Wells had Lucy baptized on June 15, 1735, at the insistence of his mistress, during the “Great Awakening,” an effort to root Calvinism in New England. As many Black people in America as possible were baptized in this mass conversion effort.
Little is known of her life until age sixteen, when she was inspired to poetry by the bloody massacre of two colonial families by sixty Indians in “the Bars”—a colonial word for “meadow”—an area outside Deerfield. George Sheldon, a Deerfield historian, declared Lucy’s ballad, “The Bars Fight,” to be “the first rhymed narration of an American slave” and believes it was recited and sung by Lucy. He further describes it as “the fullest contemporary account of that bloody tragedy which has been preserved.” While the original document has been lost, it was passed down in the oral tradition and printed for the first time by Josiah Gilbert Holland in 1855.
PHILLIS
