Drawing upon modern theoretical precepts and presenting new research on tombs of English women writers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this study investigates the ways in which early modern women writers construct and are constructed by discourses of mortality. Marion Wynne-Davies analyses how women wrote about mortality, how they ‘staged’ death, how they were written about when they died and the construction of their tombs as a final statement of public gender roles. Each chapter focuses upon a key women writer from the period Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn to present a new way of understanding female identity in the English Renaissance. In each example, Wynne-Davies presents her research on the woman writer’s tomb in order to explore the parallels and contrasts between how the writers constructed themselves and how they were constructed after death. Engaging with the theoretical approaches and undertaking research on texts and monuments, this book explores memorialisation in order to demonstrate that death is essential to our understanding of the subjectivity of women writers in early modern England.

Considering the most recent scholarship on early modern English women writers, memorialisation discourses, and textual evocations of female subjectivity, this study brings together a radical evocation of otherness that serves to challenge the dominant political, religious and social discourses of the day.