Anne, Countess of Winchilsea: A Guide for the Future Biographer

Abstract

A woman must have £500 a year and a room of her own if she is to write well. But how can that be proved? Virginia Woolf thought that the life and work of the first women writers in England should provide ample evidence, but when she tried to obtain some facts for A Room of One's Own, she was shocked to find how little was known about the women of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century England. Indeed, when she came to study a volume of poems by Anne, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), she was forced to say: "She must have shut herself up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection. She "must have", I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds as usual, that almost nothing is known about her." This, in its context, is an indictment of male scholarship. Out of its context, it is a challenge, and one that cannot pass unheeded. Before the challenge is taken up, however, it might be as well to outline what facts have been available during the past two centuries, and how the critics have interpreted them.