Sharpening Her Pen

Book excerpt: Sharpening Her Pen demonstrates how six early modern authors exploit, or evade, a rhetorical discourse founded upon images, tropes, and dialectics of violence to secure authorization for their work as writers and empowerment for the personal agendas unique to each of them. Rhetorical violence functions both as a literary phenomenon, facilitating the polemics of each author, and as an analytical methodology enabling scholars to derive meaning from a particular organic facet of a writer's intellectual structure. The subjects of the study represent a balance between writers who have received considerable scholarly attention (Elizabeth I, Aemilia Lanyer, and Lady Mary Wroth) and those who have received relatively little (Anne Askew, Anne Dorwiche, and Lade Anne Southwell). Exercising rhetorical strategies that reflect their idiosyncrasies as intellectuals, they share a canny awareness of the persuasive power, of violence in their age as physical reality and as metaphor.