Beatrice Cox O'Brien

Thesis Title: Female Networks in Seventeenth-Century Verse Manuscripts: Four Case Studies

Supervisor: Professor Adam Smyth

Research interests: Women's writing, verse manuscripts, materiality, the history of the book

My doctoral thesis explores four manuscript miscellanies compiled by seventeenth century women to explore wider questions about women’s writing in the period. The two main areas of exploration I am particularly interested in are the differing kinds of network within which such writing occurred (religious, familial, political) and the relationship between poetic form and gender. With particular attention to formal analysis, I am interested in how women participated in literary culture through their manuscript production, and how collaborative modes of authorship were forged through social aspects of their poetry collection. I am interested in the materiality of these texts, and how the physical space of the manuscript or book contributed to collaborative or social modes of authorship.