Self Representation In 18th Century Womens Poetry

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marriage and property; the wife's role was expected to be that of a loyal, and preferably silent, supporter. Relations between husband and wife were expressed in terms of duty and obedience and not consultation and consent. "The will of the wife is subject to the will of the husband" stated Lord Chief Baron Hall in 1663, as were the wife's land and goods (Ezell Patriarch 2). Women depended on their husbands as sources of financial support and identity and so it was difficult for them to publish without their husband's permission. Therefore, the earliest women poets tended to be from aristocratic backgrounds and thus financially independent.

The Ladies Defence (1701) written by Lady Mary Chudleigh in the early eighteenth century, a period noted for its considerable frankness in writing (Todd 3). This was Lady Mary Chudleigh's first published work and was discreetly signed as 'M__y C___'. It was written in response to a wedding sermon preached by John Sprint in 1699, in which he 'advocated the total subordination of women to their husbands' (Shattock 102). The Ladies Defence, a long satirical dialogue poem, takes the form of a verse debate in which 'Melissa' argues with three male speakers about wifely duties in marriage. Chudleigh makes clear in her Preface to Essays Upon Several Subjects (1710) that the poem was 'design'd as a Satyr on Vice' and 'not, as some have maliciously reported, as an invective on marriage'. The male speakers consist of Sir John Brute, with his name borrowed from the brutal husband in Sir John Varnbrugh's play 'The Provok'd Wife' (1697). In her Preface to Essays Upon Several Subjects, Chud!
leigh states that he was 'design'd as a Representative not only of all ill Husbands, but of all vicious Men in general'. Sir John Brute's misogynist attitude is countered by Sir William Loveall; who, like his surname suggests, is a bachelor and famed lover of all women:
'To them I've long a Constant Homage Pay'd,
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