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This chapter examines women's place in the mid-seventeenth century understanding of politics, what might be called the political imaginary, from distinct, even opposite, vantage points. It pursues the question of the way women's poetry imagines politics. Discussing the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Lucy Hutchinson, this chapter investigates the political and poetic projects of these far from royalist poets during the upheavals of the 1650s and 1660s. Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse gives a disciplined typological poetic history, starting with elements and humours, and building up to an analysis of national histories that uses fifth monarchist ideas. Fifth monarchist ideas were long-lived, widespread, and part of controversies over church discipline and the future of the republic. Hutchinson is relatively unusual because of her deep and rigorous engagement with the materials of elite masculine culture. Most of her extensive writings remained in manuscript throughout her life.

This chapter begins by discussing Margaret Cavendish's representation of Authorship. It examines her work entitled Poems and Fancies, and describes her of having a possessive and protective attitude towards her writing. It provides a discussion on women and drama from 1553 to 1650. It examines Cavendish plays' natural dispositions and practices. It then talks about the reputation that Margaret Cavendish acquired. The chapter also compares the writings and reputations of Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson. It describes Hutchinson as someone who is drawn into poetry. Her work is an ordered and disciplined account, motivated by her ongoing commitment to the same political and religious principles as those held by her husband.

This chapter shows that in the seventeenth-century elegy was alive to various formal re-workings. Poets since Ovid had used the elegy to write erotic love poetry, while it had also developed its modern sense of poetry written for the dead. Lucy Hutchinson's Elegies develops an unusual and original kind of elegy, fusing the form's erotic, mourning and political functions and creating poems which are intensely both political and personal. Using original manuscript evidence from Hutchinson's poems and commonplace book, this chapter reveals Hutchinson alluding to Virgil's Dido (in the translation of courtly poet Sidney Godolphin), alongside the more troubling model of female articulacy presented by Eve; both figures are evoked in the Elegies. It also shows how three of Hutchinson's poems on her Nottinghamshire estate, Owthorpe, are elegiac and dystopian country house poems, developing the genre as used by Ben Jonson and Aemilia Lanyer.

This chapter demonstrates how Margaret Cavendish's literature differs from that of Lucy Hutchinson in reference to the judgement of Norbrook that they have this “unique common ground.” Embellished in this part of the book are the skills and styles/orientation of Cavendish as opposed to Hutchinson and comparison of sample verses from their literary works. As a result, Cavendish is believed to be concise and fantasy-driven in her endeavour and to have embraced lesbian representation or same-sex relation (although some assert that it is more than that) as the cornerstone of identity formation. Hutchinson, on the other side, is accredited for her “shadow” idea, which somewhat reflects her status in the family, and is well-known for talking about materialism in the context of Christianity. With all the presented writing strokes by the two literary makers, Cavendish and Hutchinson have distinguishable techniques in writing, though both are developers of Epicurean atomism.

Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson were both brought up in puritan-leaning households with high-profile literary connections; both were connected by friends and relatives to John Milton, for instance. Both wrote primarily in manuscript, with ambivalent attitudes to the print publication which some of their works would undergo. Their poems share similar themes of lost love and friendship, political hope and disillusionment. Politically, however, they wrote from opposing viewpoints; after the Restoration Philips wrote increasingly in praise of the monarchy, while Hutchinson's poems from the same period mourn her regicide husband and his hopes for a Godly republic. This chapter–the first study of the two poets in parallel–reveals surprising and illuminating crossover in their reading and influence, the intimate and even erotic tone of their poetry, and their negotiations of form and imagery. More specifically, it will reveal and analyse their shared use of erotic lyric poems from John Donne's ‘Songs and Sonnets’, showing how both women rewrite Donne's seductive poems through their own gender and state politics and also suggesting direct allusions between the works of Orinda (Philips) and Orena (Hutchinson).

This chapter shows how Lucy Hutchinson politicized the process of reading in her long biblical poem Order and Disorder. The poem and its marginal notes show her guiding her Restoration readers into an appropriate way of interpreting the Bible, and her poem. This chapter shows that Hutchinson used biblical references to create a radical subtext for the poem, threatening the restored monarchy with her presentation of kings whose rule is 'despised' by their subjects. It is argued that Hutchinson develops a poetics of not knowing, of willing uncertainty, in order to counter skeptical thought. This chapter will reveal connections with Guillaume Du Bartas's Divine Weekes, Abraham Cowley's Davideis, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Order and Disorder presents fascinating evidence of how seventeenth-century poets perceived the epic to be gendered, and the ways in which it became both a vehicle for political comment and a form with which to experiment.

Since its first publication in 1806, Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson has been praised for its sensitive political analysis and its literary excellence. However, both these features are editorial constructions which conceal aspects of the text’s revolutionary energy and smooth over its syntactical rough edges. The beginnings of this process may be viewed in the manuscript annotations of Hutchinson’s nephew, the text’s early custodian, whose response to the growing tide of anti-regicide literature was to conceal his aunt’s republican writings from public view. The main responsibility for reshaping Hutchinson’s prose and injecting a Whiggish flavour into the text was Julius Hutchinson the younger, the text’s first editor. His work formed the basis of all nineteenth-century editions, but eventually led to a bifurcation in Hutchinson scholarship between those who emphasized the text’s feminine literary qualities, and those who questioned its authority as a historical record.

This chapter argues that the key to Lucy Hutchinson's political imagination lies in the relation between her two epics, the De rerum natura translation and Order and Disorder. In both poems, Hutchinson tells a story of how humans came to be who they are and how best they can live in the world; and she grapples with a world riven with conflict and distrust, constituted by betrayal and changeability. Her answer to the problem of conflicting obligations turns this problem into a resource by understanding these threats as integral to human existence. Drawing on Epicurean friendship doctrine and Lucretius' modifications of it, Hutchinson describes the origin of human society in chosen associations between friends rather than biological ties within families. This leads, in Order and Disorder, not only to a mitigation of procreation as a dominant structure, but also to a larger scope for wifely prudential counsel.

One of the activities within classical scholarship which long attracted women excluded from formal education or academic institutions was translation. Although some women translated for money, others did so for pleasure, in order to alleviate boredom, to stimulate their intellects, and provide relief from domestic responsibilities and drudgery. This chapter looks at pleasure as a motive for female scholarly activity and translation in Early Modern English treatises on women’s education, especially those by Bathsua Makin and Mary Astell, before conducting a comparative discussion of two important translations by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English women, Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius and Sarah Fielding’s Xenophon.

This chapter explores the reception of Lucretius’s account of the origins of the state in his fifth book in England from the 1650s to the 1680s. It argues through close attention to key passages that Lucretius’s poetic language and structure have often been over-systematized, and that his ambiguities leave the poem open to divergent readings across a spectrum from the Hobbesian to the republican, from the atheist to the anticlerical. After a discussion of Hobbes and Gassendi as readers of Lucretius, it focuses on a key episode, Lucretius’s narrative of the fall of monarchies, by three contemporary translators, Evelyn, Hutchinson, and Creech, showing how their translators were affected by contemporary responses to the regicide in England. There is a brief discussion of Dryden’s Lucretius translations and of Tonson’s edition.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer different ways of looking both at what was — the figurations of loyalty and betrayal; the relations of gender and political obligation; the work of literary texts in shaping and expressing those ideas — and what might have been — a theory of political obligation modelled on friendship. The central claim of this book is that two exceptional women, independently of one another, take up the discourse of friendship and in so doing offer new ways of understanding the most important intellectual problem of their time. The women are Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. The chapter presents a reassessment of the classical friendship tradition and its Renaissance manifestations; a discussion of women's political subjectivity that shows why they could exploit this tradition; and a consideration of alternative political models in relation to friendship.

This chapter begins with an overview of translations of classical poetry by women translators through the ages, examining, in particular, their prefaces and author statements, including those by Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anna Swanwick, and H.D., through to Mary Barnard, Diane Rayor, and Sarah Ruden. It concludes with Josephine Balmer’s own personal statement, exploring the paths that led her to classical poetry translation.