Producing Gender: Mary Sidney Herbert and her Early Editors

The modes of authorship adopted by early modern women writers present multiple challenges to editors. Editing is inevitably a series of choices, set into a hierarchy of value. Often the kinds of materials being edited fall outside the scope and tradition of scholarly editing as it has been understood within the discipline of literature. Texts produced by women writers may be heavily mediated; they may represent an emergent rather than an established genre or form (not necessarily ‘literary’ in the strict sense); they may be decontextualized; they often lack a history of reception. These conditions raise a series of questions about value, canonicity, context, aesthetics, and intertextuality that cannot simply be resolved by reference to the self-evident justification of the gender of the author(s). At the same time, editorial decisions about these questions serve to produce versions of female authorship. Such materials challenge some of the key assumptions of scholarly editing as traditionally understood, despite increasing critical acknowledgement of the difficulties produced by a narrowly defined idea of texts and editing practices: ‘elucidation is...a denial of the essential reality of obscurity’.