Isabella Whitney

First Professional Woman Poet in England

Para1Scholars consider Isabella Whitney (c.1540–1580?) the first professional female poet in England because she was the first woman to publish a collection of original poetry. Unlike many other female poets of the day, Whitney was from the middle class rather than a noblewoman. Whitney wrote poetry designed to appeal to public taste rather than focusing on devotional literature and translations like many other female authors.
Para2She published A Copy of a Letter, a series of poems about love and inconstancy, in 1567 and followed that with A Sweet Nosegay or Pleasant Posy: Containing One Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers, a series of short adages and verse epistles, in 1573. Her poem, To her sister, Mistress A.B comments
Had I a husband, or a house,
and all that longs thereto
My self could frame about to rouse
as other women do:
But till some household cares me tie,
My books and Pen I will apply.
A pioneer in many ways, Whitney wrote poems specifically to sell them. She also rebelled against the current style of ornate, metaphorical, or pastoral poetry. Her poems are about some challenges that women faced, including the legal prohibition against them writing wills. Her final poem in A Sweet Nosegay is entitled Will and Testament and it critiques the culture of commerce and institutions that limit its gentlewoman speaker as she leaves the city.

Biography

Para3Relatively little is known for certain about Isabella Whitney’s life, other than that she was the sister of Geoffrey Whitney, the author of the popular 1586 book of short poems with illustrations, A Choice of Emblemes. Her writings indicate that she was familiar with the city, so she likely lived in London. Her poems say that she was a servant, and they reveal knowledge of the tasks she would have completed as a lady-in-waiting or other type of upper-servant. Scholars infer that she lost her post during a time of economic contraction and that financial need may well have prompted her to write and publish her poems. She does claim to be weak on purse in one poem. Other autobiographical details in her poems indicate she had at least two sisters. It is not known whether or not Whitney ever married, although she may have been jilted by a man named William Gruffith in about 1562, perhaps giving her the inspiration for the theme of her first volume of poetry.

Key Print Sources

Gregerson, Linda. Isabella Whitney: c. Mid-Sixteenth Century. Poetry, vol. 187, no. 6, Mar. 2006, pp. 502–504.
Stevenson, Jane, and Peter Davidson. Early Modern Women Poets (1520–1700): An Anthology. Oxford UP, 2001.
Travitsky, Betty S. Whitney, Isabella (fl. 1566–1573). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Isabella Whitney. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/women%20writers/whitney.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Isabella Whitney. The Map of Early Modern London, https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/WHIT15.htm. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Isabella Whitney. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/isabella-whitney. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Whitney, Isabella. A Sweet Nosegay. Wikimedia, 1573, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_Sweet_Nosgay.gif#filelinks.

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Isabella Whitney
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Document status published
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
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