THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

writing has all too frequently been ascribed in over-neat socio-historical terms to the rise of the bourgeoisie and
bourgeois reading habits or to the impact of certain Protestant sects. The poems of the emigrant Puritan, Anne
Bradstreet (c.1612-72), were clearly admired enough by certain of her American co-religionists to be sent to London
for publication in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Quakerism too laid great stress on the
equality of the spiritual experience and testimonies of women and encouraged the forthright witness of female
Friends. Many of the most prominent women writers of the Restoration period would, however, have eschewed all
connection with either the merchant class or with the still déclassé extremes of sectarian Puritanism. Women found
their own voice, and made that voice respected, in the face of manifest disadvantage but not necessarily by
confronting the intolerance of any given ‘establishment’. The extraordinarily well-connected Margaret Cavendish
herself partly disdained female pretensions to fashion rather than intellectual pursuits: ‘Our sex takes so much delight
in dressing and adorning themselves ... and instead of turning over solid leaves, we turn our hair into curles, and our
Sex is as ambitious to shew ourselves to the eyes of the world when finely drest, as Scholers do to express their
learning to the ears of the world, when fully fraught with authors ...’ Most gentlewomen, whether or not they had a
rudimentary education, were, like their middle-class sisters, primarily required to be efficient and skilled managers of
their sometimes considerable households rather than blue-stockings manquées. Piety and Christian observance were,
however, never regarded as exclusively male preserves and the very emphasis on the niceties and complications of
religious affiliation, which is so characteristic of seventeenth-century writing, inevitably influenced the expression of
female spirituality. The upheavals of the Civil War and the Commonwealth seem also to have prepared the way for
the more general acceptance of the authority of women’s voices, not all of them conventionally pious or decorous. The
impulse to speak out was as much Anglican and royalist as it was Dissenting and republican, as chaste as it was
licentious.
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To some of her twentieth-century cultural heirs the work of the pioneer feminist Mary Astell (1666-1731) has
seemed enigmatic and contradictory in its impulses. Astell’s best-known work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for
the advancement of their true and great interest (1694), argues that unmarried women of the upper and middle
classes should use their dowries to establish and endow women’s ‘seminaries’, colleges which would serve both as
educational institutions and as refuges for ‘hunted heiresses’ and the aged. The second part of A Serious Proposal
(1697) advocates the importance to women’s intellectual development of the kind of abstract reasoning too often
regarded as an exclusively masculine pursuit, and her Some Reflections on Marriage (1700) warns women of the
seriousness of committing themselves to the potential tyranny of a husband. The vast body of Astell’s writing is not,
however, exclusively concerned with women’s prospects. She uses poetry primarily to express her religious hopes.
‘Ambition’ was first published in a collection of poems presented to her patron, Archbishop Sancroft, in 1684. It is a
poem which asserts the spiritual rights of women but which scorns temporal ambition; it looks to the pleasures of
retirement from the world but it also lays an emphatic claim to equality in the sight of both posterity and God. When
in January 1688 she writes ‘in emulation of Mr Cowley’s Poem call’d The Motto’ she pursues a series of brief
meditations on worldly limitation as opposed to heavenly freedom. She acknowledges her divine calling, but modestly
recognizes the restraints imposed on her mission by her gender:
How shall I be a Peter or a Paul?
That to the Turk and Infidel,
I might the joyful tydings tell,
And spare no labour to convert them all:
But ah my Sex denies me this,
And Marys privledge I cannot wish
Yet hark I hear my dearest Saviour say,
They are more blessed who his Word obey.
Astell seems to be thinking less of Cowley and more of that other confounded missionary and revolutionizer of
women’s lives, St Theresa. But Astell was no Papist. Her determined polemical support for the Church of England
against the claims of Dissenters, in such conservative essays as Moderation Truly Stated and A Fair Way with
Dissenters and their Patrons (both 1704), can be seen as integral to her claim to be a respected participant in the
intellectual debates of her time.
Aphra Behn (1640-89) has long been claimed to have been the first professional woman writer in England. She
was a professional not by inclination or choice, but of economic necessity. Like her less talented contemporary
Delarivière Manley (1663-1724), Behn wrote fiction for easy domestic consumption and comedy as a proven way of
making money in the theatre. If much was once made of the contrast between the reputations, styles, and