Article: Literary property and the single woman in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay.(Critical Essay)

The mid-Tudor poet and maidservant Isabella Whitney (fl. 1567-73) published her second book of verse, A Sweet Nosgay (1573), from a stance perhaps surprising to readers of Renaissance women's writing--as a poor, single woman who explicitly claims to write for money. Describing herself in "The Auctor to the Reader" as "Harvestlesse, / and servicelesse also," Whitney bases her volume on a dynamic tension between the penury of the single life and the elusive comforts of domesticity. An epistle to her married sister, Anne Barron, compares their respective situations:

 
Had I a Husband, or a house, 
and all that longes therto 
My selfe could frame about to ...

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