Performing Privacy and Gender is a superb monograph that provides a model for contemporary scholarship on early modern women writers. Balancing contemporary theoretical paradigms with historical sensitivity, it demonstrates how early modern women manipulated ideas of privacy to transform established literary traditions and to engage with contemporary political debates. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking book, one that suggests new ways of thinking about early modern women’s textual production and their participation in public life.

First-wave scholarship on early modern women writers assumed a strict division between public and private spheres. This division, the argument goes, limited women’s participation in public life. In Performing Privacy, Trull draws upon recent work in counterpublic theory to argue for “a plurality of public spheres, each characterized by different modes of inclusion and exclusion” (11). Counterpublic theory asserts that public life includes a variety of counterpublics, each with their own internally regulated structures of discourse and conventions of decorum. Representations of privacy in early modern literature, then, do not necessarily reflect women’s lived experience; instead, they are performances designed to reinforce literary, religious, and political beliefs. “The early modern public/private boundary,” concludes Trull, “was the site of both discipline and self creation for women” (1).

In Performing Privacy Trull explores the representation of gendered privacy in works by Anne Lock, Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, and Shakespeare. Trull is interested in gender as an analytic category, so she does not limit her analysis to women writers, although five of the six chapters focus on female authors. An introductory chapter provides a valuable overview of counterpublic theory; chapter 2 looks at poetry, specifically the construction of privacy in Anne Lock’s 1560 sonnet sequence, the first sonnet sequence in English. Chapter 3 turns our attention to a less self-consciously literary genre by exploring the intersection of privacy and gender in household orders, lists of rules written by a master (or mistress) for their servants. Chapter 4 focuses upon representations of privacy and gender within All’s Well That Ends Well. It demonstrates how the play connects Helena with female lamenters of the ballad tradition and how Helena blocks this representation by defining herself as a female knight of romance. Chapter 5 examines representations of overheard female laments in Mary Wroth’s Urania; chapter 6 argues that Aphra Behn represents privacy within her poetry to critique a rationalist public sphere. Performing Privacy and Gender concludes with a chapter analyzing the performance of privacy on contemporary social-media sites.

There is much to praise in this carefully written, theoretically sophisticated, and insightful monograph. Of the many excellent chapters, I’ll single out two. Trull’s second chapter, “Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock,” explores how the lament, a literary genre traditionally associated with private grief, structures early modern understandings of religious community. In her poetic paraphrase of the 51st Psalm, Lock creates a series of sonnets that dramatize David’s movement from the isolated privacy of a sinner lamenting his inability to address God to the regenerate soul’s friendship with God. For Lock, the “intimate privacy” of this friendship serves as a model for the community of the elect. “By reading the psalms as laments,” Trull concludes, “Protestants participated in a kind of communal privacy” (50). And in chapter 5, Trull examines Mary Wroth’s depiction of the overheard lament. Wroth draws upon the lament’s long-standing association with the exposure of female privacy to emphasize the erotic pleasure of the male speaker who overhears the female lamenter; she thus underscores “the voyeuristic aspect of overheard laments and the artifice that eroticizes woman’s entrance into public view.” Trull points out the resonance between such representations and Wroth’s troubled personal and professional life: “In a sense,” concludes Trull, “Wroth’s many lamenting heroines are lamenting for her, and the Urania itself constitutes an intentionally overheard complaint” (115); but she never reduces Urania to biography. This is balanced, informed, and insightful scholarship; to my mind, these two chapters stand alongside the very best scholarly work on on these two authors.

Trull’s theoretical sophistication is balanced by her recognition of historical difference. She carefully considers the interaction of gender and form, and she provides perceptive, original, and illuminating readings of a variety of early modern women writers, readings that reveal early modern women’s engagement with established literary traditions and seventeenth-century politics. Scholars interested in the public sphere, women writers, gender, or literary form will find much of value in Trull’s engaging, sophisticated, and readable narrative.