Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda Format: Paperback

Scholars who study early modern women’s writing have been eager for a full-text edition of the works of Hester Pulter since her manuscript was discovered in the mid-1990s. Now that Alice Eardley has brought together all of Pulter’s writing—poetry, emblems, and a prose romance—in a modern-spelling edition, students and academics will be able to access a remarkable body of work. The introduction does a brilliant job of situating Pulter in various milieux (the Civil War, religion, science) and in assessing the genres in which she worked. Eardley’s edition is clear and comprehensive enough to be useful to a wide audience of non-specialists, but its learned glosses are also illuminating for more experienced readers of early modern texts.

Alice Eardley has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool and is now Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Southampton. She has worked on the “Constructing Elizabeth Isham” project at Warwick University and the “Verse Miscellanies Online” project at the University of Reading and has contributed to editions of Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (OUP) and John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (OUP). Her publications include articles on early modern women’s writing and editorial theory in Studies in English Literature and Women’s Writing.