Elizabeth Hodgson
Book Review
Alice Eardley, ed., Lady Hester Pulter: Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The
Toronto Series, 32, ITER (Toronto, 2014), 420 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7727-2164-8
1>
This volume represents a fascinating and new contribution to the “other voices”
of English literature. Lady Hester Pulter’s recently discovered 17th
century MSS. of poems, emblems, and a prose romance are published here in a
complete edition for the first time, in a handsomely produced volume. Hester Pulter (1605-78) seems to have
assembled her 160 poems and a prose romance in a fair scribal copy in about 1660,
making her a contemporary to Cavendish, Philips, Marvell, Cowley and other
midcentury English writers. Though her
work appears not to have circulated during her lifetime, Pulter was clearly
writing into her own cultural milieu, with royalist laments like Philips’,
devotional poems like Herbert’s, and prose romances like Cowley’s. Alice
Eardley has done us a great favour in bringing her work to view.
2>
Eardley’s editorial introduction provides us with a much-needed biographical
profile of Pulter: her aristocratic father, her position as a royalist in a
pro-Parliament district, her numerous children, and the political dissension
within her extended familial network. Eardley also provides a brief
introduction to the texts themselves, providing very useful comments on the
topicality of Pulter’s romance, her unusual emblem-poems, and the metrical
borrowings of her devotional poems. It
would have been helpful to have more of this kind of analysis and situating of
Pulter’s texts, given how new these works are to readers, but this is a
productive framing of Pulter’s oeuvre.
3>
As with other editorial introductions in this series, Eardley’s historical contextualization
of Pulter’s work is somewhat unexpected in its tone. I have trouble imagining
that this book would actually be assigned as a classroom text; at the very
most, I would assign a few poems or one part of the romance to students. The
introduction’s descriptions of the Civil War and its discussions of science and
religion seem nonetheless deliberately geared to this neophyte audience. Eardley’s
comments suggest that Laudianism and Presbyterianism are terms which require
basic definition, that Galileo needs an introduction, and that we might not
know that James I is Charles I’s father. The editors of this series would do well to
recognize that the most probable purchasers of this series are more much more
likely to be scholars than students. What we want is not only the fruit of
Eardley’s archival work—the biographical treasure-- but also her suggestions
about how to contextualize Pulter’s writing more richly. Eardley refers briefly
to fascinating material on the fad for French romances in this era, on the
local wartime violence in Pulter’s neighbourhood, and on the complex politics
of London soldiers during the wars; it would be wonderful to let her loose on
these concepts to add value to the introductory frame for its scholarly
readership.
4>
Pulter’s writing itself is quite interesting indeed; Pulter is clearly
well-read and well-educated, with a lively and immediate voice and some quite
interesting experiments in form. The strikingly Herbert-like devotional poems
with their short lines and metrical variation are particularly notable, as are
the unusually frank and unmannered personae in her poems to and about her
children. A particularly ribald satire on Davenant’s syphilis is remarkable
amongst the pieties of her elegaic verse, and her frequently royalist diatribes
form an important adjunct to our understanding of this genre. The striking
moments both of racist and proto-feminist commentary in the romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, are worth
considerable discussion. I am particularly interested in the
comparative-religion trope running through the narrative: Jews, Mahometans, and
Christians are all described almost anthropologically. There are also
occasional gems like the delightful moment in which Pulter’s heroine says to a
misogynist that since he persists in rejecting women, she can only “wish his
father had been of the same mind” (333).
5>
As a body of work, Pulter’s oeuvre raises fascinating questions about the
nature of women’s writing in this period. This collection was written apparently
without an actual effort to publish or circulate in manuscript, but Eardley
rightly notes that Pulter had “an imaginary
audience for whom she crafted her thoughts and feelings into literary
works.” These very allusive, literarily self-conscious works which comment
equally on personal and political affairs beg for discussions about publicity
and politics in “domestic” writing, and I hope that Eardley will follow up on
her extensive archival and editorial work with more critical studies of Pulter.
6>
The textual editing of this volume seems to follow the series standards in
being skewed toward popularizing the work: spelling is silently modernized, a
glossary is provided, and prose sentences are silently shortened. Modernized
spelling is not uncommon in early modern editions, but I have myself some
difficulty with the decision to silently shorten sentences. As a scholar who
works extensively on prose rhetoric, I would not be able to use this edition of
The Unfortunate Florinda for my own
research. Given that this is the first complete edition of Pulter’s work, I do
wish that the volume had been edited with more of an eye to being the edition
of record for this writer. It seems to me that shortening the sentences is
unlikely to move Pulter into the ‘greatest hits’ column for undergraduates, and
it is likely to make this volume less
trustworthy for research.
7>
Along these same lines, I do find the somewhat unusual decision to provide
asterisks and a glossary at the back rather than footnotes or even marginal
glosses quite distracting and less useful than the alternatives. There are two
different minor but persistent issues here. First is the mechanism for
annotation; I think terms could be glossed in footnotes the first time they are
used if their meanings are really imagined to be unclear, and then readers can
manage from there. We are used to this convention in heavily annotated texts
like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Having to
read a poem with a finger in the back of the book is less than comfortable and
potentially less than effective, if the reader gives up and ignores all of the
asterisks. The second issue here is the
density of the glossary notations. Even an undergraduate has been reading
Shakespeare since high school, and I think fewer of these terms need
explanation than the editing suggests, many fewer if I am right about the
volume’s likely readership. The very interesting glossary definitions of terms
which might seem obvious (like “atom” or “dust”) are invaluable editorial
interventions; I would just prefer them on the page with the text itself. I
should contextualize these minor complaints by saying that the actual footnotes
are rich and helpful, which is a real help with Pulter’s often quite allusive
texts. We can all be grateful for the impeccable care Eardley has taken with
the sources and allusions, contexts and concepts, referred to in Pulter’s work.
8>
I am pleased to have this edition out in the world. Hester Pulter is going to
be an interesting addition to our developing canon of “other voices” in early
modern English writers. Every editor of a new text has to make her own way to a
first printed edition, and Eardley has clearly invested her considerable
talents and research in making this a welcome introduction to Pulter’s work.
_____
Elizabeth Hodgson is
an Associate Professor in English at the University of British Columbia. She
has published on Donne, Milton, Lanyer, Philips, Wroth, and Shakespeare. Her
most recent monograph is Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance
(Cambridge UP, 2015).
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Eight (2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
_____
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