Authorship, Attribution, and Voice in Early Modern Women’s Writing

This chapter examines how questions of authorship, attribution, and voice have shaped the critical field of early modern women's writing and continue to underwrite its investments, determining authors and texts that are studied, taught, and canonised. A consequence of the field's emphasis on authors as embodied women has been its occlusion of texts of uncertain attribution that are linked indirectly or partially to historical women subjects through signature, voice, or prosopopoeia. This chapter examines how such problematic cases might be considered within studies of early modern women's writing. In particular, it will address Stephen May's recent case against the attribution of an early sonnet sequence to Anne Locke, arguing that May provides a telling example of the ways in which the investments in the embodied author continue to shape the field in ways counter to wider studies of early modern literature and revisions within early modern women's writing itself.