Isabella Whitney's Nosegay and the smell of women's writing

Isabella Whitney was the first woman to publish secular verse in English, and her second volume of poetry, A Sweet Nosegay (1573), deploys smell to launch a moral critique of the economic forces and cultural values that leave a woman writer without the material means to support herself. Utilizing smell first to mark her liminal emergence as an author, she subverts traditional associations of smell with women and domestic work and then goes on to emphasize both the material presence of her embodied self as well the dangers that surround her, ultimately forecasting the smell of her decaying corpse. She manipulates cultural associations with olfaction to fashion herself as a woman writer and to lament the fact that she cannot support herself through her labor.