During Elizabeth I's reign, love poetry acquired a popularity and brilliance unparalleled in English literary history. Ilona Bell shows how the tropes and rhetoric of love poetry were used to court Elizabethan women (at court, in the great houses, and in society at large) and how the women responded to being wooed, in prose, poetry and speech. Juxtaposing canonical male poets and recently discovered women writers, she investigates texts addressed to, written by, read, or heard by Elizabethan women, and charts the beginnings of a female lyric tradition.

This book focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth represented herself in her own words, especially in speeches, reported conversations, and private poems from the first half of her reign when she was simultaneously establishing her political authority and negotiating marriage at home and abroad. Although Elizabeth's novel and unprecedented art of courtship garnered considerable resistance and disapproval, by the end of her reign it had sparked or merged with a wider, ongoing social controversy over conjugal freedom of choice and women's lawful liberty that helped make the Elizabethan era an...

During Elizabeth I's reign, love poetry acquired a popularity and brilliance unparalleled in English literary history. Ilona Bell shows how the tropes and rhetoric of love poetry were used to court Elizabethan women (at court, in the great houses, and in society at large) and how the women responded to being wooed, in prose, poetry and speech. Juxtaposing canonical male poets and recently discovered women writers, she investigates texts addressed to, written by, read, or heard by Elizabethan women, and charts the beginnings of a female lyric tradition.