Sarah C. E. Ross

‘Give me thy hairt and I desyre no more’: The Song of Songs, Petrarchism and Elizabeth Melville’s Puritan Poetics

Our map of puritan theological, literary, and intellectual cultures in early modern Britain, and our sense of women’s place in these cultures, is incomplete without a discussion of the Scottish poet Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (c. 1582–1640).1 Melville has long been known as the author of Ane Godlie Dreame, a 480-line dream-vision poem first printed in Scots at Edinburgh in 1603 and republished at least thirteen times down to 1737 in Scots and in English (the first English version was 1604).2 We have also long known that Melville had a reputation for her devout poetry before 1603. Alexander Hume, minister of Logie dedicated his Hymnes, Or Sacred Songs (1599) to her ‘because I know ye delite in poesie your selfe, and as I vnfainedly confes, excelles any of your sexe in that art, that euer I hard within this nation. I haue seene your com-positiones so copious, so pregnant, so spirituall, that I doubt not but it is the gift of God in you’.3 Hume’s description of Melville as a prolific and accomplished spiritual poet has recently been validated. Jamie Reid-Baxter uncovered in 2002 a large cache of verse at the end of a bound manuscript volume of sermons by Robert Bruce, the ‘father’ to the early covenanting movement banished from Edinburgh in 1600.4 The twenty-nine poems in the Bruce manuscript, ranging from sonnets to extended verse meditations,5 can confidently be ascribed to Melville.

Regeneration, Redemption, Resurrection: Pat Barker and the Problem of Evil

Is Pat Barker a feminist or a realist novelist? Barker’s early novels, Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and Liza’s England (1986), all focus on working-class women, victims of poverty and violence, factory workers and prostitutes: ‘women who have got short shrift both in literature and in life’.1 But her great success, particularly in the 1990s (the first novel in her acclaimed Regeneration trilogy was published in 1991), has to a large extent been associated with a move away from feminism, ‘to male protagonists, a favouring of the masculinised spheres of pub, battlefield, hospital or government, and a leaning towards the epic rather than domestic scale’.2 The Man Who Wasn’t There (1988), the Regeneration trilogy (1991–5) and Barker’s subsequent three novels, Another World (1998), Border Crossing (2001) and Double Vision (2003), all focus primarily on male protagonists, and it has become something of a commonplace to say that Barker has become no longer (just) a feminist, that she has achieved ‘double status as [a] feminist and mainstream writer’.3 Barker has been hailed for her exploration of manhood and masculinity, and her ability to ‘write outside her experience’.4 As Maya Jaggi writes, ‘By the late 1980s Barker had published three highly praised novels, but she was pigeonholed as northern, working-class, feminist and gritty’; in 1999, Michael Thorpe wrote that ‘If any contemporary English novelist has made redundant that male reviewer’s discriminatory phrase woman novelist, it is Pat Barker’.5