Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance

This book traces the progress of Renaissance romance from a genre addressed to women as readers to a genre written by women. Exploring this crucial transitional period, Helen Hackett examines the work of a diverse range of writers from Lyly, Rich and Greene to Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Her book culminates in an analysis of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621), the first romance written by a woman, and considers the developing representation of female heroism and selfhood, especially the adaptation of saintly roles to secular and even erotic purposes. This Book Offers An Original Study Of Lyric Form And Social Custom In The Elizabethan Age. Ilona Bell Explores The Tendency Of Elizabethan Love Poems Not Only To Represent An Amorous Thought, But To Conduct The Courtship Itself. Where Recent Studies Have Focused On Courtship, Patronage And Preferment At Court, Her Focus Is On Love Poetry, Amorous Courtship, And Relations Between Elizabethan Men And Women. The Book Examines The Ways In Which The Tropes And Rhetoric Of Love Poetry Were Used To Court Elizabethan Women (not Only At Court And In The Great Houses, But In Society At Large) And How The Women Responded To Being Wooed, In Prose, Poetry And Speech. Bringing Together Canonical Male Poets And Recently Discovered Women Writers, Ilona Bell Investigates A Range Of Texts Addressed To, Written By, Read, Heard Or Transformed By Elizabethan Women, And Charts The Beginnings Of A Female Lyric Tradition.--book Jacket. Acknowledgements -- List Of Abbreviations And A Note On The Text -- Introduction -- 1. The Readership Of Renaissance Romance -- 2. Renaissance Romance And Modern Romance -- 3. Novellas Of The 1560s And 1570s -- 4. Spanish And Portuguese Romances -- 5. Fictions Addressed To Women By Lyly, Rich And Greene -- 6. The Arcadia: Readership And Authorship -- 7. The Arcadia: Heroines -- 8. The Faerie Queene -- 9. Shakespeare's Romance Sources -- 10. Lady Mary Wroth's Urania -- Epilogue: The Later Seventeenth Century -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index. Helen Hackett. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 216-229) And Index. This book, first published in 2000, traces the progress of Renaissance romance from a genre addressed to women as readers to a genre written by women. The Elizabethan period saw a boom in the publication of romances by male authors. Many of these, Helen Hackett argues, were directed at an imagined female audience, advertising to male readers the voyeuristic pleasures of fictions supposedly read in women's bedchambers. Yet within a hundred years this imagined audience gave way to real women romance-readers and even women romance-writers. Exploring this crucial transitional period, Hackett examines the work of a diverse range of writers from Lyly, Rich and Greene to Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Her book culminates in an analysis of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621), the first romance written by a woman and considers the developing representation of female heroism and selfhood, especially the adaptation of saintly roles to secular and even erotic purposes This book, first published in 2000, traces the progress of Renaissance romance from a genre addressed to women as readers to a genre written by women. It encompasses a diverse range of texts, including work by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare and the first romance written by a woman, Lady Mary Wroth's Urania. Various kinds of evidence support the view of Louis Wright and others that the commercial success of Renaissance romances was attributable to a new female readership.