Navigating Fame and Publication: Female Complaint in Isabella Whitney and Mary Wroth

Abstract: This article examines how Isabella Whitney and Mary Wroth pursued their literary careers as female writers who published their work. Since publication could provoke scandals for women writers by breaching the conduct code that required women to remain unheard in public, Whitney and Wroth adopted an accepted mode of female voice popularized in late sixteenth-century England by male poets: the female complaint. Both writers drew on the tradition of abandoned women's voices but asserted their authorial positions by emphasizing the virtue of constancy and the authority of their work in accordance with their social status: Whitney, as a maidservant configuring the value of her labor; and Wroth, as a noblewoman expanding her readership from aristocratic circles to the public. By exploring their engagement with the male-dominated literary scene of publication, this article contributes to the studies of Renaissance women writers and their positions in English book history.