Taking the Woman’s Part: Gender and Scholarship on Love Elegy

Abstract

Abstract When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognized conventions for its production, according to which woman is generally the mistress over whom the male ego has erotic and poetic mastery, the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia’s unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’.