Hannah Jeans’ work begins by presenting the area of discourse on women’s reading in the early modern period as a vital plane in which to engage with the subject of readership in this period and with the construction of identity and representation. Jeans sets out in her introduction that ‘reading was a way of performing and representing identity, particularly, but not solely, gender identity’.[1] Jeans incorporates a range of seventeenth century case studies and women that will be familiar to those engaged in this field of scholarship, but also draws more widely across the period, offering a distinctly broad view of women’s construction of identity through readership over the whole century.[2]

Each chapter of this text clearly demonstrates the intentionality of the construction of identity and gender identity for women readers of this period. Jeans profiles women who are aware of the societal expectations of their gender. Through evidence such as letters, inscriptions, and marginalia, we are able to explore in detail how women readers chose to present themselves as conforming to, or subverting the expectations of their identity through what they chose to read. Drawing from extant evidence of early modern women readers, and the surrounding body of scholarship, Jeans presents the early modern period of women’s readership as varied, rich, engaged, and conscious.

Jeans achieves her aim of providing her reader with a broad and varied understanding of women’s construction of identity in seventeenth century England by offering a clear structure against which to explore this territory. Jeans organises her work into five chapters, each of which addresses a different type of reading according to the different types of book being explored. In organising this piece into chapters on different types of text, Jeans is careful to signpost that her work is not necessarily about genre, but how women readers of the period interacted with notions and expectations placed on them by engagement with particular genres or types of text.

The first chapter of Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England focuses on women’s religious reading habits. [3] It is instantly captivating, and in the opening paragraphs Jeans makes clear that the reading we will see will be rich, diverse, and multi-faceted. Jeans draws upon inscriptions, annotations, and dedications to present her thesis that the identity constructed thereof is both ‘performative and performed’ and often ‘sociable or relational’. [4]

To draw on one rich example, in the case of Susanna Beckwith, believed to have been a Jacobean woman of the gentry or similar social standing. In Beckwith’s Bible, we see the choices made by Beckwith to present herself as a devout and pious woman not only in society, but in the place of her family by the inscription of a note to her daughter. Beckwith inscribed: ‘Reade it with a zealous harte to understand truly’, through which Jeans argues ‘Beckwith portrayed herself as embodying commendable feminine traits, underlining her piety and constructing an identity both for herself and for any other potential readers of the text.’[5] Fleshing out Beckwith’s construction of identity, and how this is passed on to her family of female readers portrays a rounded picture of the choices made by female readers of this period and the influence it had on other women readers of the time.

Jeans’ second chapter, on gender, identity, and the romance genre, addresses the complexity of the construction of gender identity. Where chapter one showed examples of women aware of building their identity around notions of piety and devotion, romance reading presents something of a contrast, where women readers were acutely aware of the ‘disapproval surrounding female romance reading’. [6] Indeed, Jeans portrays this area as one of some contention amidst the scholarship where romance reading has been presented in some cases as ‘frivolous’ or passive. However, in this chapter, Jeans argues that women readers of romance during the early modern period were active, and were acutely aware of constructing their identity based on what they chose to read In the example given for cases of women making inscriptions in their romance books Jeans shows how women readers were potentially making a subversive statement in not hiding their romance readership, strengthening the argument that romance reading could not be considered ‘passive’.

Drawing on epistolary evidence, we see women writing to others about the romance books they have read, as in the case of the English gentry woman Dorothy Osborne, later Lady Temple. Jeans explores how in the letters we can sense Osborne finding and relating to models of female behaviour within these romance books. Jeans further describes the letters of courtship between Osborne and her fiancé Lord Temple, concluding that they show a ‘complex character construction’, which did not wholly conform to feminine ideals of the period but which can indeed be seen to engage with these concepts.[7] Jeans concludes that romance books allowed women readers the space to explore their identity, and the evidence in letters and inscriptions shows a particularly individual response to the texts.

The third chapter, on women news readers, places Jeans’ reader in a space in the scholarship that on first glance is notable by an absence of extant sources. Jeans is swift to establish that the scarcity of sources on women’s news readership in the early modern period should not lead to the conclusion that women did not read news materials. On the contrary, Jeans exposes the varied evidence of women’s news readership amongst gentry women of the seventeenth century. Jeans concentrates on the ‘how’ of women’s readership of news within domestic spheres in the form of letters, and also in the form of news manuscripts. The very fact we have letters between friends engaging with current affairs, Jeans argues, shows women readers had an appetite for the news.[8]

On manuscript ownership, Jeans presents the example of Anne Pole, a Derbyshire gentry woman who, in her widowhood, took on the news manuscript subscriptions of her late husband. Jeans notes that Pole did not simply take receipt of her husband’s manuscripts—the subscription under her own name was a significant statement in her construction of identity as a woman politically, socially, and intellectually engaged with the world around her.  Jeans writes ‘the fact that the newsletters address her specifically is significant— these letters, and the information contained within them, belonged to her’.[9] Her ownership of the newsletters was a distinct cornerstone in the construction of her identity, a position which is drawn into Jeans’ conclusion that newsletter ownership could demonstrate a woman’s independence, and social and political position[10].

Following this robust conclusion, Jeans moves into her fourth chapter, on medical, culinary, and philosophical knowledge. Again, Jeans presents women readers who are making active choices in the reading they are doing, signifying that they were particularly ‘educated experimenters’ in this genre.[11] As Jeans concluded in relation to romance reading, she highlights that women are not hiding their reading in this area. In the presentation of reading inventories, again it is clear that women readers of the early modern period were keen to communicate their identity as one linked with their choice of reading material.

Mary Astell was an early English feminist author and philosopher, who advocated for women’s education and wrote texts including A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Some Reflections Upon Marriage. In looking at Mary Astell’s reading notes on Descartes’ Les Principes de la Philosophie Jeans shows that women readers were really engaging deeply and critically with these works. Astell used her notes not only to think about the ideas presented in Les Principes but to show her understanding of the most up-to-date scholarship, making reference to this also in her notes.[12]  Further in the chapter, Jeans again deftly presents the notion of the complexity of the construction of identity through readership, as Astell reads and engages critically with texts that offer significantly opposing philosophical principles.[13]

As part of her conclusion on medical, culinary, and philosophical knowledge, Jeans emphasises the significance of manuscript ownership, and of the ability this presents for the reader to re-read a text multiple times. The fifth chapter on (re) reading and record-keeping explores how the interventions of marginalia and notes in a text alter the experience of reading or re-reading. Here Jean proposes an additional facet to this area of women’s readership, ‘demonstrating the mutable and temporally specific nature of identity that is displayed and negotiated through reading acts.’[14] Jeans continues by proposing the thesis that if reading is indeed an act of identity construction, then the idea of re-reading adds further complexity: ‘one is continually re-constructing and creating identity even in returning to the same text.’[15]

This final chapter sees Jeans at her most theoretically dexterous, showing women writing about their books and that narrative voice in itself showing a multi-faceted construction of identity. Of the seventeenth-century women readers Jeans explores, she writes:

‘All of these women used their reading notes to create a textual identity for themselves which was continually in formation; on each reading and re-reading, their identity was built. Therefore, it did not just happen in the act of writing, but in the act of reading.’[16]

Sarah Cowper, a diarist and devout Anglican, explicitly described re-reading the texts she possessed. Jeans shows how this process enabled her to affirm her identity and  derive comfort during difficult circumstances. Jeans sees Cowper’s annotations, and the compulsion she had to return to these annotated texts, as evidence of Cowper’s need to return to her own individually constructed sense of self, which was much more evidence in the annotated texts than in the un-annotated copies.

Jeans highlights that it is not only the books and manuscripts that are to be re-read, but the annotations themselves. In understanding that the annotations are part of the re-reading experience, Jeans brings to the fore a notion of identity construction in the early modern period that is ‘fluid’, being continually reviewed and engaged with at different times and levels. [17]

In her conclusion to Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England, Jeans returns to the principle established in earlier chapters—that reading and writing about text in the early modern period was performative.[18] Through marginalia in books, manuscripts, letters, and the construction of book lists we can see early modern women readers’ understanding of what certain types of reading signified to society. In offering this conclusion Jeans is careful again to present her reader with the balance and nuance this takes: the early modern women readers she uses to support her thesis do not project identity as simple or, at all times, conforming. It is complex, nuanced, and critically aware. Central to Jean’s argument is the ‘inextricable connection between reading and identity’[19], which the preceding five chapters have indeed impressed upon the Jean’s readers. In the women and texts profiled, Jeans has portrayed the early modern woman reader as one who has choice, understanding, and a desire to critically engage with society and scholarship, who through reading can do so in a fluid way.

Jeans’ text expands the field of the construction of early modern gender identity to present her reader with new ways of looking at extant marginalia, inscriptions, and epistolary evidence. In her work on re-reading, we are invited to consider the nuances and facets of the early modern woman reader in a way that scholarship has thus far not given space to. The clear organisation of Jean’s book into five chapters focusing each on a different genre or type of reading provides her reader with a clear narrative through which to engage with this subject area. Jeans offers engaging and diverse insights on the available material, and places her work well within a field that has thus far not exposed the complexity of women’s readership and of reading as a way of performing the construction of identity.

[1] H. Jeans, Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England, (London, 2025), p.1.

[2] Ibid, p.3.

[3] Ibid, p.19

[4] Ibid, p.27.

[5] Ibid, p.33.

[6] Ibid, p.60.

[7] Ibid, p.82.

[8] Ibid, p.98

[9] Ibid, p.109

[10] Ibid, p.118

[11] Ibid, p.132

[12] Ibid, p.136

[13] Ibid p.138

[14] Ibid, p.159

[15] Ibid, p.160

[16] Ibid, p.169

[17] Ibid, p.179

[18] Ibid, p.188

[19] Ibid, p.190

Helena Hoyle King, PhD University of Bristol – reader response theory: the canon of classical literature and contemporary feminist fiction, 2014