Isabella Whitney\'s A Sweet Nosegay

A Farewell to the subscribe toer : Authorship and Audience in Isabella Whitneys A Sweet Nosgay\nThe absolute majority of extant biographical head regarding the sixteenth century poet Isabella Whitney comes from nurture gleaned from her two published poetic miscellanies.1 While her first volume, The write of a Letter . . . by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her Unconstant Lover (1567) yields comparatively little information virtually the substance and tenor of Whitneys life, the poet appears further much ikonlly apocalyptical in her subsequent volume, A Sweet Nosgay. . . containing a one C and ten Phylosophicall Flowers (1573). Indeed, one of the more remarkable aspects of Whitneys second sight is the composeatively autobiographical joint of volumes poetic talker. So while Whitney dabbles in a host of contemporaneously popular lyrical forms and genres throughout her tripartite volume, each numbers contained therein is narrated in the voice of a single, internally logical pe rsona: a double-dyed(a) though ill-fated maidservant, miss both a economise to wed and a family unit in which to serve, alone in London, and isolated geographically from her family and friends.\nBecause of the clear autobiographical tone of the poems themselves, not to mention the poets use of an eponymic persona as a narrator, the critical tendency has been to read Nosgay in a more often than not autobiographical light. It has generally been sham that Whitney, like her poems speaker, worked in many capacity as a household servant, and what little we tell apart of the poets life seems to corroborate claims put forward by Whitneys persona throughout the course of her text. So while there is no way to know the full stop to which the persona was intended to speak as a transfer literary proxy for the germ herself, it seems that, on some level, Nosgay does knead as a sensory system of early modern autobiography. Indeed, the collections inclusion body of a substantial pick ing of verse epistles written to Whitney..