Abstract
Scholarship on early modern women's writing has for decades centred on the figure of the early modern woman herself. Margaret More Roper and the Cooke sisters as humanist-educated prodigies, Mary Wroth holding an archlute in the Penshurst portrait, Margaret Cavendish propounding her selfgenerated model of literary fame, and Katherine Philips monumentalized in the folio-sized bust in her posthumous Poems (1667): all are historical entities that supplant the ghostly figure of Virginia Woolf's Judith Shakespeare, an embodied female parallel to the curiously bodiless William, whose texts are more real than he is. Because the study of early modern women's writing since the 1980s has to a large extent been driven by a desire to locate foremothers, the woman writer has most frequently been constructed as an essential and biographically determined concept. One of the most significant explorations of women's writing in the past two decades, the Perdita project, itself embodies in its nomenclature the search for the 'lost woman' - and its success, as well as that of other recuperative enterprises, is measured by the number of new women who have been added to the (counter-)canon of early modern women writers.
Published Version
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