Conclusion

The woman reader presented in this book is a diverse one. In reading and writing about reading, women were continually engaged in a process of self-making that allowed them to negotiate their gender, religion, politics, intellectualism and social and sociable positions. In doing so, women entered into a discourse with contemporary gender norms. The prevailing cultural conversation about reading and gender, at least in the early seventeenth century, declared that devotional texts were key to ideal femininity, demonstrating piety and modesty. Romances, however, were largely seen as transgressive, encouraging the threateningly sexual side of female nature. This binary did of course change across the course of the century, and had variations according to age and social status, but it was broadly influential on both early modern and modern discourses about gender.

In writing about their reading of these two types of book, then, women revealed their reactions to these gender norms. Figures like Elizabeth Delaval could demonstrate their piety by showing their changed habits, drawing on advice literature tropes to present themselves as ideal feminine figures, consuming devotional literature and eschewing romances. However, they also moved far beyond this gendered binary. Margaret Hoby and Anne Sadleir read about theology and religious controversy, using texts to support and form their religious identity and to debate with others. Some women such as Dorothy Osborne also critically analysed romances and looked for role models within the genre, particularly by the later seventeenth century, and found profit in their emotional responses to the texts, dismantling the active/passive binary. Moreover, women such as Anne Pole, Judith Barrington, Mary Astell and many others advertised their interest in political events and scientific theories, mathematics, medicine and international current affairs, often working to place themselves in intellectual, social, political, religious and economic networks. Their representations of this reading in diaries, memoirs and letters, or in their annotations and manuscript notebooks, allowed them to negotiate their identity. This was sometimes an effort to construct an identity for oneself in a text retrospectively or to manipulate the self into a certain figure, informed by contemporary gender norms, such as in the cases of Grace Mildmay and Delaval. Or it could be a continual process of self-fashioning, with identity being formed in the process of both reading and writing about reading, and in the process of re-reading, as we saw in the final chapter.¹

Reading and writing about text were therefore performative. In making marginal notes, inscribing names and dedications, excerpting passages, making book lists or discussing reading in personal writings, women were able to express aspects of their identity. This identity, however, should not be solely reduced to their gender. It is possible to question the category of the ‘woman reader’ itself. While I have used sex as a primary method of selection, there are many other issues at play. They almost certainly would have all considered themselves women, but this does not mean that they can be taken as representative of all women readers in the seventeenth century. The women explored here were all from wealthy families, largely classed as gentry or, in some cases, nobility. They had the ability to read and, perhaps more importantly, to write about their reading. They also had the financial resources to buy books and paper, and the time in which to read and write. They were also almost certainly white.² Race was as performative as class or gender, therefore women were engaging in a representation of their whiteness and socio-economic status alongside their femininity.³ This may not have always been conscious, but, as demonstrated in this book, reading was a marker of identity. In paying attention to the different and overlapping forms this identity could take, we can gain a more complex picture of how early modern readers used their reading habits and understood themselves.

Throughout this book, the multiplicity of ways in which women responded to cultural norms has been demonstrated. They adopted and adapted humanist reading practices based on their own personal needs and circumstances. They read the news in a variety of forms, using it as a way of engaging with events, people and places from which they were physically removed. Moreover, they used reading as a way of constructing a character for themselves in text, often influenced by, but not necessarily directly based on, contemporary gender norms. Class identity, politics and sectarianism all played significant roles in the identity construction seen in early modern women’s personal writing. Anne Clifford is perhaps the most obvious example of this, using her reading to signify her aristocratic position, influenced by her long battle to reclaim her inheritance. However, she was not the only one. Even the women who made an effort to conform to a particular idealised image of early modern womanhood did so in a way that influenced their (often politically infused) religious identity alongside their femininity.

This idea of reading as performative, as the action of constructing identity, follows the argument put forward by Judith Butler that ‘Gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence … in this sense, gender is always a doing.’⁴ Reading is therefore one action by which people can perform gender. This is not to put the agency of the experience on to the text; rather, the reaction to and use of the culturally constructed gender of the text by the reader in any given moment is what constitutes the experience of gender. Gender is thus located in the gap in between the reader and the text: in the act or event of reading itself. If we take this approach, the reader becomes more of an imaginative construct, detached from the sex of the individual. Gender could be determined by cultural norms, with the ‘feminine’ embodying a specific set of characteristics and behaviours, but this would be separate from the actions of women. The ‘woman reader’ as a category is destabilised. As has been shown throughout this book, the ‘woman reader’ cannot be seen as a single entity, but instead should be nuanced by intersections with other categories such as wealth, social status, religion and political position.

Further studies in the history of women’s reading could draw on feminist, postcolonial and queer historiography to complicate our analytical categories of gender and sex. It has been demonstrated by many scholars, particularly from postcolonial and queer studies, that the tendency to see ‘women’ as a uniform group (often united in being subject to patriarchal oppression) obscures the many and varied other forms of oppression that operated along class and race lines.⁵ If another cross-section of source material had been used, perhaps highlighting the reading experiences of lower-class women, or that of Catholic women either within Britain or on the continent, the results would be different again. This is not to render the category of woman irrelevant but to argue that we need to recognise the many, multifaceted aspects of identity. Moreover, when we talk about narratives of reading, we need to be aware of the many social and cultural factors that influenced the practice of reading.

The history of women’s reading therefore needs to be more nuanced and to move beyond the chronologies and questions that have held sway for so long. In doing so, we can better understand the experience of reading in early modern England and open up our studies to groups that have so often been overlooked. This book has demonstrated how we can move away from the active/passive reading binary, seeing all uses of reading, whether for pleasure, education or devotion, as part of a process of identity formation. Texts provided many uses for people, often at the same time – one could, for example, as Osborne did, both read romances for pleasure and critique their writing style – but they were always, consciously or not, implicated in the process of representing and creating a ‘self’ for the reader. Moreover, this shows the important opportunity that books and reading presented women. They were able, through their reading, to construct themselves as figures of learning, scientists, political observers and theologians. This allowed them to participate in worlds that were often closed to them, perhaps through their exclusion from institutions or through their physical distance from places of politics. By reading about these topics, and crucially by representing that reading to the world, they were able to claim a place in the spheres of politics, science and religion. This is not just a story of print: in order to properly understand women’s participation in the world, we have to look at manuscript reading as well, as the continued importance of manuscript newsletters, for example, demonstrates. Participation through text should be recognised as just as important as other forms of participation in these worlds, otherwise we severely restrict our understanding of early modern politics, science and religion.

This emphasises the importance that reading and books have for understanding identity in the early modern period; it allows us to move beyond actions and instead see how individuals wanted to represent themselves, giving a much greater insight into concepts of gender and the self. In doing so, we can also create a more nuanced understanding of gender, by demonstrating the many ways in which one could act as a ‘woman’ by seeing it as a category that every individual constructs for themselves. At the heart of my argument is the close, almost inextricable connection between reading and identity. This was an ongoing process, and one which involved many layers of influences, be they social or cultural. I have shown the range and breadth of women’s reading habits across the seventeenth century, and argued that although cultural conversations about gender may have been preoccupied with controlling reading, this was only partially influential on women readers themselves. They may have sometimes used the language of conduct literature to present themselves as an ideal feminine reader (as in the case of Delaval, for example, or Hoby), but this was rarely one-dimensional; there were almost always other facets of identity demonstrated through their choice of text. They were, moreover, certainly not constrained or limited by contemporary gender ideology. Instead, they created a much more individualised representation of their identities, just as often rejecting gender norms as replicating them, and showing the ways in which their political, economic, social and religious identities existed alongside and as part of their femininity. This identity was not static, often changing with each reading and/or writing act or experience, and was frequently informed by interactions beyond the page and the interior self. The sociality of women’s identities has been recognised by feminist scholars, but there has been less attention paid to the temporally fluid and changeable nature of that identity. Women in the early modern period used their reading and the experiences, relationships and actions that were linked to that reading to engage in an ongoing process of identity construction, one which could change based on time and circumstance, and paying attention to this can help us to understand early modern gender and selfhood much more clearly.