By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Who are the funniest female authors – whether poets, novelists, or writers of short fiction or non-fiction – in the English language? Reducing the number to just ten names is going to be a challenge, but here’s our essential pick of the funniest female voices in English (or English-language, more accurately) writing.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Isabella Whitney is not a familiar name to many readers of poetry, and in many ways this is hardly surprising. But here at Interesting Literature we like to keep one eye out for the curious but overlooked, the obscure but interesting – and the life and work of Isabella Whitney fit the bill, we’d say. In this post we offer a very brief biography of one of the first English female poets.
That said, writing such a biography of someone like Isabella Whitney might be easier said than done, for very little is actually known about her life. We don’t even know when she was born or when she died. She is said to have ‘flourished’ (the ‘fl.’ abbreviation, standing for ‘floruit’ – Latin for ‘he or she flourished’ – is how her dates are usually rendered in biographical sketches of her) in the years 1567-73. Michael Schmidt’s indispensable Lives Of The Poets