SUSAN WISEMAN. Conspiracy & Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England.

Abstract

In a mind-stretching journey through genres as diverse as prophecy and the epistolary novel, Conspiracy and Virtue uses textual evidence to produce a compelling exploration of women's relationships to the political sphere in the period 1620–88. Wiseman argues persuasively that women's exclusion from more direct modes of political engagement leads to ‘a figurative, oblique, complex, politics’ (p. 3) expressed not in the traditional canon of political theory but in the wider realm of literature and culture. Yet what is most valuable and timely about this book is that it provides a counterweight to the existing body of studies that investigate women's place within royalist or sectarian discourse. Without collapsing vital divisions of religion and politics, Wiseman resists a misleadingly polarising literary history and deploys fresh juxtapositions to broaden our conception of the links between women, politics and writing during the seventeenth century. While the structure of the study is loosely chronological it avoids a linear approach to non-conformist or royalist writing through time, preferring instead to focus on ‘moments and kinds of writing which reveal something about women's relationships to politics’ (p. 30). In the first of the book's four sections of paired chapters, Wiseman examines the political rhetorics used by contemporaries in considering women and politics: first, by demonstrating the centrality of literary example in figuring connections between the two and secondly, by juxtaposing the correspondence of Parliamentarian Brilliana Harley with the diaristic writings of Anne Clifford to extend the possible definition of a political text by a woman.