Isabella Whitney\'s A Sweet Nosegay

A farewell to the Reader : Authorship and earr severally in Isabella Whitneys A dessert Nosgay\nThe majority of extant biographic detail regarding the sixteenth century poet Isabella Whitney comes from culture gleaned from her two published poetic miscellanies.1 While her get-go volume, The Copy of a earn . . . by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her Unconstant devotee (1567) yields relatively humble information about the substance and striving of Whitneys life, the poet appears far more in person revelatory in her accompanying volume, A Sweet Nosgay. . . containing a hundred and ten Phylosophicall Flowers (1573). Indeed, star of the more remarkable aspects of Whitneys countenance collection is the putatively autobiographical vocalize of volumes poetic speaker. So sequence Whitney dabbles in a drove of contemporaneously popular lyric forms and genres throughout her tripartite volume, each poem contained in that locationin is narrated in the voice of a single, internally co nsistent persona: a virtuous though unlucky maidservant, lacking both a husband to wed and a ho mathematical functionhold in which to serve, alone in London, and isolated geographically from her family and friends.\nBecause of the distinctly autobiographical olfaction of the poems themselves, not to mention the poets use of an eponymous persona as a narrator, the critical angle of dip has been to read Nosgay in a largely autobiographical light. It has for the most part been assumed that Whitney, like her poems speaker, worked in close to capacity as a household servant, and what little we make do of the poets life seems to brook claims put forward by Whitneys persona throughout the blood of her text. So while there is no way to know the degree to which the persona was mean to speak as a direct literary representative for the author herself, it seems that, on some level, Nosgay does function as a mode of early advanced(a) autobiography. Indeed, the collections inclusion o f a inviolable selection of verse epistles written to Whitney..