Beatrice Cox O'Brien

Thesis Title: Networks of Exile: Collaborative Early Modern Female Authorship in the Verse Manuscripts of Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish

Supervisor: Professor Adam Smyth

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

My doctoral thesis examines how the familial, political and religious networks formed by early modern women enlightened their production and circulation of manuscript verse. 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 particularly interested in the Cavendish sisters, as well as other exiled networks of women in either political or religious contexts during the early seventeenth-century. 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.