Brandie R. Siegfried “considers three characteristics of [Cavendish's] volume of verse,” Poems and Fancies, arguing first that the book is "thoroughly engaged with philosophers and mathematicians, both ancient and modern: understanding the import of her poems often requires setting them in dialogue with those thinkers.” Second, Siegfried investigates the prefaces of Cavendish's poetry, further contending that they demonstrate a feminist sensibility as they explain her views for an audience that pointedly included women. Finally, Cavendish’s eclectic ideas are not simply the musings of a careless author, but rather are the works of a committed philosopher who uses the form of poetry to clarify her theories, making them more accessible to readers while “enhancing aesthetic pleasure through increased complexity and wit.” Giving special attention to Cavendish’s poetic revisions in Poems and Fancies, Siegfried further emphasizes the importance of Cavendish’s poetry for understanding the natural philosophy espoused in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Philosophical Letters, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.

situates Lady Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) in the political crisis of 1618-21 to argue that its domestic discourse of legitimate rule grounded in consensual contract and liberty of conscience has political meaning. Carefully policing the boundaries between anarchic libertinism and “lawfull and Juditiall libertie,” Wroth echoes contemporary parliamentary debates about the freedom of the subject. Figuring the danger of false counsel and the threat of tyranny within both marriage and kingdom, Wroth repeatedly stages princesses liberated from threatened or real captivity to become powerful political forces in their own right. Their struggles for outward liberty are matched by struggles for freedom from inner captivity evident in female-voiced poetic complaints that move from lamenting the abandoned and betrayed Calvinist subject to seeking redress against tyranny.

This chapter argues that the early published texts of the Sonnets, including The Passionate Pilgrim and the 1609 Quarto, misrepresented them in such a way as to estrange them from their potential readers. The Sonnets make no inroads into early modern anthologies, and are generally ignored in favour of the narrative poems. They were condemned for licentiousness, whilst also not being sexy enough. The baffling plot, lack of characterisation, and confusing physical layout of the Quarto made them difficult for readers to engage with and affected their appropriation. Admiration for the Sonnets seems to have been confined to their manuscript circulation, particularly among the literary coterie of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who played a pivotal role in the dissemination of Sonnets 116 and 128.

This chapter is concerned with Sulpicia’s female-authored elegies, Mary Sidney’s translations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, and of Robert Garnier’s Antonie, both texts which make prominent use of a female voice of desire, and Mary Wroth’s first sonnet from her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The argument here is not so much that Sulpicia is a model for Sidney and Wroth as an exploration, in each period, of what happens when a female author/narrator inserts herself into a discourse which is primarily gendered masculine. It analyses how previous instances of ventriloquised female voices in male authored elegy and Renaissance love poetry open up a space into which it is possible for a female author to insert herself. Of special interest is the question of what happens when the female beloved speaks up, speaks back, speaks for herself.