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The Female Advocate

Merchant’s 2010 edition of The Female Advocate uses the 1686 text of Sarah Fyge Egerton’s earliest printed poem and adds something never previously attempted, a full critical apparatus. Forty-four pages of added matter, in an edition which the Egerton volume in the Ashgate Early Modern Englishwoman series has termed “very handsome and richly annotated,” pay careful attention to the language and context of the poem. They seek to expose the premises on which its rhetoric is founded and to take the pulse of the long-running debate in which Egerton, chronologically positioned midway between Milton’s divorce tracts and Pope’s Epistle to a Lady, has remarkably and very precociously intervened.