Isabella Whitney claims attention as the first Englishwoman believed to have written original secular poetry for publication. Her established oeuvre consists of two short anthologies of lively materials joined in a winsome, original manner. The Copy of a Letter (1567") includes three robust love poems, with an "admonition" appended to the first, written in the personae of jilted (but unconventional) men and women and playing on the debates on women's nature popular in the sixteenth century; A Sweet Nosegay (1573) combines prose and verse in what appears to be an autobiographical narrative. Both works suggest that Whitney was a most unconventional woman, an inference underlined by her seemingly easy publication of breezy, secular verses.

Little is known about Whitney's life. Like most woman writers of her time, she has been neglected by scholars until recently; she is noted only briefly in the Dictionary of National Biography, for example, where two...