The image of the 'fallen woman' was a common one in Elizabethan literature. This 1990 study, translated from the original German by the author, deals with an unconventional aspect of the motif; the genre of 'complaint' in which writers enabled women to put their own case, bewailing their fate, invoking pity, and stressing private rather than public virtues. The book begins with a group of Elizabethan poems in which women lament their unfortunate lives. It goes on to deal with a range of works, tracing the complaint from classical models such as Ovid's Heroical Epistles to Chaucer's Legend of...