Isabella Whitney\'s A Sweet Nosegay

A leave of absence to the Reader : Authorship and earshot in Isabella Whitneys A lovely Nosgay\nThe majority of extant biographical detail regarding the sixteenth light speed poet Isabella Whitney comes from cultivation gleaned from her two publish poetic miscellanies.1 While her starting line volume, The Copy of a letter . . . by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her Unconstant yellowish brown (1567) yields relatively puny information about the substance and line of Whitneys life, the poet appears far more personally revelatory in her concomitant volume, A Sweet Nosgay. . . containing a hundred and ten Phylosophicall Flowers (1573). Indeed, star of the more remarkable aspects of Whitneys indorsement collection is the putatively autobiographical articulatio of volumes poetic speaker. So spot Whitney dabbles in a force of contemporaneously popular melodious forms and genres throughout her tripartite volume, apiece poem contained thitherin is narrated in the voice of a sing le, internally consistent persona: a virtuous though damned maidservant, lacking both a husband to wed and a ho put onhold in which to serve, unaccompanied in London, and isolated geographically from her family and friends.\nBecause of the distinctly autobiographical forest of the poems themselves, not to mention the poets use of an eponymous persona as a narrator, the critical end has been to read Nosgay in a largely autobiographical light. It has more often than not been assumed that Whitney, like her poems speaker, worked in or so capacity as a household servant, and what little we live on of the poets life seems to affirm claims put forward by Whitneys persona throughout the line of reasoning of her text. So while there is no way to know the degree to which the persona was intend to speak as a direct literary deputy for the author herself, it seems that, on some level, Nosgay does function as a mode of early fresh autobiography. Indeed, the collections inclusion of a straightforward selection of verse epistles indite to Whitney..