Joanne Gates

Women writers have used metaphors of sewing and embroidery to represent creativity in all forms. Alice Walker’s "In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens" is one popular example. When I teach the labyrinth of Lady Mary Wroth's Crowne of Sonnets, I remember a fellow student in a Princeton seminar joking that Wroth may have "cross stitched" her second part of Urania after the published first part it was summarily withdrawn from circulation. (It borrowed fictional characters from real people at court. Where would scholarship on Wroth be, without the dedication of Josephine Roberts and her associates who finished the work of publishing Part Two?) (more…)