Dare you but write, you are Minerva’s bird,
The owl at which these bats and crows must wonder,
They’ll criticise upon the smallest word:
This wanteth number, case, that tense and gender.

If​ you think you know what the 17th-century poet Anne Southwell means by referring to Minerva’s owl, you are probably wrong. Southwell is alluding to Ovid’s story of a jealous crow, who worries that the owl has usurped his position as Minerva’s favourite. The owl is Nyctimene, a princess who was raped by her father and who was then, out of pity, transformed into a bird by Minerva. As an owl, Nyctimene must ‘hide her shame in darkness’. Southwell’s poem is an address to women who emerge from suffering to undertake the task of writing. Through their work, they are transformed. This might save them from oblivion or self-denial, but it also exposes them to the jealousy of other creatures.

In her 1975 essay on écriture féminine, Hélène Cixous encouraged her female readers to ‘write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery… big bosses don’t like the true texts of women – female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.’ Would Southwell have shared Cixous’s belief in a distinct style of writing rooted in women’s experience? Elizabeth Scott-Baumann’s new book, Sex and Style, investigates something like écriture féminine in the work of nine women poets writing in early modern England. Scott-Baumann’s claim is that these writers share a recognisable literary style, expressed both in the formal texture of their work and in the way they described their poetic ambitions.

Southwell is the earliest poet Scott-Baumann considers. Born in 1574, she lived between England and Ireland, had two husbands (a knight and an army officer) and is memorialised at St Mary’s Church in Acton. Southwell had no interest in publishing either her poetry or her criticism, and for centuries remained in obscurity. When her commonplace book was discovered in the 1960s, Jean C. Cavanaugh celebrated the discovery of ‘one of the earliest known essays of literary criticism in English by a woman’. Southwell’s essay takes the form of a letter to her friend Lady Ridgway, who had told her that she prefers prose. ‘How falls it out (noble lady),’ Southwell begins, ‘that you are become a sworn enemy to poetry?’ The publication of two of Southwell’s manuscripts, containing political poems, sonnets and other verse, in 1997 led to increased scholarly interest in her work, and she is now regarded as one of the most important female poets of the early 17th century.

The latest author Scott-Baumann deals with is Aphra Behn (1640-89). Behn had a short career as a spy for Charles II, was probably imprisoned and was among the first women to make a living from her writing. Behn represents ‘a very important corner on the road’, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. With Behn, ‘we leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone.’ In their place, we encounter ‘a middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage’ who had ‘to make her living by her wits’. For Woolf, Behn’s work is a stepping stone towards ‘the extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later 18th century among women – the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics’. Scott-Baumann suggests that such work was underway much earlier. Her chosen poets were already engaged, she argues, in critical debates about literary style. Early modern women ‘theorised literature as much as men did’.

In La Jeune Née (1975), Cixous lists a set of binaries that structure our collective thinking: activity/passivity; sun/moon; culture/nature; day/night; father/mother; head/emotions; logos/pathos. In this list, the second term is considered inferior and is associated with women. Cixous hopes to undo this hierarchy and offers in its place what Toril Moi describes as ‘an invigorating utopian evocation of the imaginative powers of women’. Instead of falling in with a feminism she saw as a capitulation, a strategy for women who wanted ‘a place in the system, respect, social legitimation’, Cixous rejects the system entirely. (At the International Women’s Day march in Paris in 1968, members of the collective Psychanalyse et Politique, with which Cixous was associated, carried signs saying ‘Down with Feminism’.)

For Scott-Baumann, one of the most important binaries at play in 17th-century English verse concerned rhyme: monosyllabic/polysyllabic or masculine/feminine. The notion of feminine rhyme – a rhyme between two or more syllables in which the final syllable or syllables are unstressed – had come into fashion in the 16th century as translators tried to justify the vogue for French and Italian poetry, both of which regularly employed it. Although Chaucer used this form of rhyme across the Canterbury Tales, with pairings such as ‘gentillesse’/‘hoolynesse’ and ‘cloystre’/‘oystere’, it was only in the late 1500s that it began to be theorised in terms of gender. Feminine rhyme was ‘sweeter’, John Harington wrote in 1591, in the preface to his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. It could also be comic, as Christopher Marlowe realised when writing his Hero and Leander two years later – a poem which, in describing the beauty of Leander’s body, pairs ‘tell ye’ with ‘belly’.

According to Scott-Baumann, the proliferation of feminine rhyme in the work of 17th-century female poets was not accidental. They did not use it for sweetness, or for comedy, but to make a point about gender. To strengthen her case, she turns to the work of Mary Wroth, the author of Love’s Victory (c.1617-19), perhaps the first example in English of a dramatic comedy written by a woman. After the publication of her prose romance Urania in 1621, Wroth became embroiled in a literary feud with the MP Edward Denny, who was outraged that she had drawn on members of his family for the allegorical characters in her book. He aired his grievances in a poem that took exception to women writing anything at all: ‘Work o th’ works, leave idle books alone,/For wise and worthier women have writ none.’ Denny also brought Wroth’s gender into question. Wroth composed a line-by-line response. To his ‘Hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster,/As by thy words and works all men may conster,’ she shot back: ‘Hermaphrodite in sense, in art a monster,/As by your railing rhymes the world may conster.’ Scott-Baumann cites this exchange as proof that feminine rhyme was used when talking about gender in 17th-century verse. But this seems a stretch given that the monster/conster couplet is one of only two feminine rhymes in Denny’s poem – the other eleven are all masculine. Perhaps he just wanted to call Wroth a monster.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, the only one in which he deploys feminine rhyme throughout, provides stronger evidence of its use in contemporary poems about gender. Though the poem is presumably addressed to the ‘fair youth’ who is the subject of most of the sonnets, he is described here as both female and male, ‘the master mistress’ of the speaker’s passion:

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false women’s fashion.

Of the nine poets Scott-Baumann discusses, Hester Pulter comes closest to illustrating her point that female poets consciously manipulated feminine rhyme when writing about gender. Born in 1605, Pulter was a ‘royalist, writer of poetry about death, alchemy, politics and myth’. Like Wroth, Pulter had some access to a literary community: John Milton wrote a sonnet to her sister; the romance writer George Pettie was a relation of her mother’s; and, since her manuscripts were first discovered in a library in Leeds in the mid-1990s, some scholars have argued that her work may have influenced Andrew Marvell. In more than half of her poems, Pulter uses feminine rhyme, often to pair technical words: ‘dissolution’/‘revolution’; ‘salvation’/‘transmigration’; and, in a poem about the loss of Sir William Davenant’s nose to syphilis, ‘gnomon’/‘no man’. Scott-Baumann suggests that Pulter was attempting to change the connotation of feminine rhyme. This was not sweet rhyme, but rhyme that drew attention to itself, that was virtuosic, intellectual and went ‘against the grain’.

Southwell is mentioned to support this point, thanks to her rhyming of pairs such as ‘wonder’/‘gender’; ‘hierarchy’/‘felicity’; ‘fantasy’/‘destiny’. It seems reasonable to suggest that Southwell’s rhyming of ‘wonder’ and ‘gender’ in her Nyctimene poem is not accidental. Here the word ‘gender’ – which in the context means grammatical gender – becomes a pun because of its positioning as a feminine rhyme. This expands the meaning of the lines ‘They’ll criticise upon the smallest word:/This wanteth number, case, that tense and gender.’ When women write, they will not only be criticised for getting singulars and plurals mixed up, as well as nominatives and accusatives and pluperfects and perfects, but they will also be chided for choosing specifically feminine words, which really should be masculine.

While two of Scott-Baumann’s nine poets may have tried to change the connotations of feminine rhyme from sweet to intellectual, Wroth was happy to continue to use sweet couplets (‘folly’/‘holy’) and Katherine Philips criticised the use of feminine rhyme in certain contexts. There is no single strategy at play. In French poetry of the period, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura has pointed out, feminine rhyme ‘gets used for everything and, in consequence, means nothing’. The same may be true of Scott-Baumann’s chosen authors. Feminine rhyme is used pointedly, stays sweet or is avoided. Can a collective story be told?

Perhaps – but only if there was a real difference between female and male poets’ use of feminine rhyme. In what way is Pulter’s use of feminine rhyme different from Marlowe’s (‘gnomon’/‘no man’ v. ‘tell ye’/‘belly’)? How is Southwell’s rhyme of abstract nouns different to some of the pairings in Orlando Furioso: ‘consiglio’/‘periglio’; ‘errore’/‘dolore’? Or those that are ubiquitous across the second half of The Faerie Queene (‘merit’/‘spirit’/‘disinherit’)? It is certainly possible that women poets thought carefully about feminine rhyme and wanted to reject the misogynist way in which it was discussed, but Scott-Baumann fails to demonstrate this. The more plausible argument seems to be that feminine rhyme was sometimes used by 17th-century women and men to say interesting things about gender.

‘It is worse to be a learned poet, than a poet unlearned,’ Margaret Cavendish wrote in 1655. The head of the learned poet ‘is nothing but a lumber stuffed with old commodities’, whereas the head of the unlearned poet is full of observation, experience and thinking. Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, former attendant of Queen Henrietta Maria and erstwhile resident at the court of King Louis XIV, is the most remarkable author in Scott-Baumann’s study. She published twelve works under her own name, spanning natural philosophy, science fiction, plays, letters, poems, dialogues and romances. Though well known in her lifetime (‘all I desire is fame,’ she once wrote), she fell into obscurity until the early 20th century.

Cavendish was unique, but was she original? Countless early modern female poets were described as ‘peerless’, ‘matchless’, ‘singular’ and ‘incomparable’ in their time. Today we would interpret these as affirmations. Not so in the Renaissance, a period in which imitation was esteemed and originality viewed with suspicion. An original writer was untutored, somebody who knew nothing of the ancient past. As the philosopher Walter Charleton wrote to Cavendish, ‘you are the first great lady, that ever wrote so much and so much of your own: and, for ought, we can divine, you will also be the last.’ Though Cavendish received worse insults – Samuel Pepys called her ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’, John Evelyn ‘a mighty pretender’ – originality was a backhanded compliment, a word that a man might throw at a woman whose writing unnerved him.

Cavendish desired imitators as well as fame. ‘If any do write after the same manner,’ she said, ‘they will remember my work is the original of their discourse.’ Her friend and lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Toppe, imagined this process of authorial imitation in terms of needlework: Cavendish will be the pattern ‘from whence they take their sample’. Cavendish also advertised her ‘unlearned’ idiosyncrasy. ‘Her library on which she looks/It is her head her thoughts her books,’ went one poem, which circulated with her portrait.

The OED locates the modern meaning of the word ‘original’ in a 1756 entry: ‘having the quality of that which proceeds directly from oneself; such as has not been done or produced before; novel or fresh in character or style’. Scott-Baumann argues that Cavendish anticipates this sense of originality a century earlier, suggesting that her usage aligns more closely with our contemporary understanding than with the dominant 17th-century meaning of an original as a source. But although Cavendish clearly considered herself an innovator – ‘whatsoever is new is my own, which I hope all is,’ she wrote in 1655 – her use of ‘original’ seems to imply that she is imagining herself as the origin of her imitators’ discourse, not necessarily as producing that which ‘has not been done before’. A more tempered claim therefore seems warranted. Women, constrained by limited access to formal learning, could not invoke the same scholarly authority as men. Instead, they made a virtue of their intuitive poetic talent – privileging nature over culture, to continue Cixous’s dichotomies. This alone would justify what Scott-Baumann calls a ‘critical poetics’: an intervention of women into questions of literary theory.

Was there, then, such a thing as a female style in early modern England? For several of Scott-Baumann’s authors, valorising originality meant claiming legitimacy in a society that gave them little chance to learn and would likely dismiss them as pretenders. As Nancy Fraser observed in Unruly Practices (1989), her critique of French psychoanalytic feminists, if we wish to locate a gendered language, we must begin by studying the ‘possibilities available to agents in specific societies’. Sex and Style rarely does this. Scott-Baumann risks reigniting what Luce Irigaray called ‘womanspeak’. Such approaches to female style have long been challenged for their essentialist connotations.

To adopt a distinction once made in relation to Black aesthetics, we might instead differentiate between two kinds of particularity. The first is an authentic particularity, where expression bears the marks of constraint and marginalisation. The second is an artificial particularity: a specificity that persists even after those conditions have improved, sustained less by necessity than by expectation or convention. In conditions of subjugation, women’s writing will bear the traces of a forced particularity; in conditions of freedom, it need not do so any longer.