THE POEMS OF ISABELLA WHITNEY: A CRITICAL EDITION by ...

the name of the authoress mentioned by bibliographers" (32).
The Sotheby's catalog for the sale of the library of B. H.
Bright, Esq., reprinted twelve lines of Whitney's "Wyll" as
part of its description of the volume. Brydges had not
included it in Restitutia (1814), and Collier was clearly
unfamiliar with the work, but Green, in 1866, had seen a
copy which he identified as belonging to the Reverend Thomas
Corser, the rector of Stand near Manchester (Ixviii, note).
Speculating that the copy was "perhaps unique," Green quoted
parts of Whitney's letters to her brothers Geoffrey and
Brooke, her two sisters serving in London, her sister Ann
Borron, Tho. Bir.'s "commendation of the Authour," and her
cousin Geoffrey's letter to her. William Thomas Lowndes
included the work in his Bibliographer's Manual of English
Literature (1869), calling it "unknown to bibliographers,"
and Edward Arber cataloged the work in the Index (Volume 5)
of his Transcript of the Registers of the Company of
Stationers of London (1875) as a work published by Jones
during the years for which no register exists. No other
nineteenth-century references to A Sweet Nosgay exist.
In the early twentieth century, however, the D. N. B.
mentioned the volume in its entry for Geoffrey Whitney,
calling Isabella "a sister of the poet, . . . likewise a
writer of verses" and listing A Sweet Nosegay [sic] as her
principal work (Sanders 143). In 1972, Ann Stanford
included seven stanzas from "A Sweet Nosgay," and Whitney's
xlvii