Isabella Whitney\'s A Sweet Nosegay

A valedictory to the Reader : Authorship and sense of hearing in Isabella Whitneys A tonic Nosgay\nThe majority of extant biographical detail regarding the sixteenth century poet Isabella Whitney comes from tuition gleaned from her two produce poetic miscellanies.1 While her premiere volume, The Copy of a letter . . . by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her Unconstant raw sienna (1567) yields relatively exact information about the substance and melody of Whitneys life, the poet appears far more personally revelatory in her attendant volume, A Sweet Nosgay. . . containing a hundred and ten Phylosophicall Flowers (1573). Indeed, i of the more remarkable aspects of Whitneys min collection is the putatively autobiographical utter of volumes poetic speaker. So epoch Whitney dabbles in a innkeeper of contemporaneously popular melodious forms and genres throughout her tripartite volume, to each one poem contained at that placein is narrated in the voice of a single, internally consistent persona: a virtuous though luckless maidservant, lacking both a husband to wed and a ho engagehold in which to serve, alone in London, and isolated geographically from her family and friends.\nBecause of the distinctly autobiographical disembodied spirit of the poems themselves, not to mention the poets use of an eponymous persona as a narrator, the critical angle of inclination has been to read Nosgay in a largely autobiographical light. It has in the main been assumed that Whitney, like her poems speaker, worked in close to capacity as a household servant, and what little we realise of the poets life seems to back claims put forward by Whitneys persona throughout the gradation of her text. So while there is no way to know the degree to which the persona was think to speak as a direct literary deputy for the author herself, it seems that, on some level, Nosgay does function as a mode of early contemporary autobiography. Indeed, the collections inclusion of a essential selection of verse epistles indite to Whitney..