Economic advancement and reputation strategies: Seventeenth-century Dutch women writing for profit

This essay examines how economic circumstances and imperatives influenced strategies of self‐representation employed by women writing in the Dutch Republic. At the core of the analysis is the poetry of Maria Margaretha van Akerlaecken (1605–after 1662) and Katharina Lescailje (1649–1711). Economic advancement for literary authors in the Dutch Republic was defined by the marginality of literary patronage in court culture and few possibilities to profit through the market. Van Akerlaecken, however, succeeded in finding patrons abroad, and Lescailje, who ran a publishing house, could print her ow... Mehr ...