This paper situates the Cavendish sisters’ poetry within the context of house arrest endured by them from 1644, at Welbeck Abbey in Nottingham. It posits their poetry may be read not simply as a form of prison poetry, so popular to royalists at this time, but that
their songs provide earlier examples of tropes and metaphors common to royalist writers in the 1650s — an important precedence which has hitherto been unacknowledged by scholars. Through their juxtaposition of despair and resilience the Cavendish sisters align both the desolate present in which they were literally confined alongside a desired future, thus conveying the very real temporal stasis experienced by royalists during the wars. Further, this paper argues that as their motifs of confinement poignantly iterate the royalist condition during the early 1640s, they preempt the work of renowned royalist poets, such as Richard Lovelace, for example. Thus, this paper argues for the Cavendish sisters to be recognised as not simply as aristocratic women writers, but as women writers of the internal exile endured by royalists during the early war years and calls scholars to acknowledge their contribution to the evolution of the trend of royalist prison poetry of the period.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 