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While Hester Pulter may not have been known for anything specific, her poems hold historical significance for different reasons. She wrote about subjects like science, religion, politics, the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the execution of Charles I. What makes this particularly remarkable is the fact that she was a woman—and a woman of high social status at that.
Although Pulter’s works are freely available online through The Pulter Project, it’s unlikely that she intended for them to be published in the 1600s, as noted by Samantha Snively, a Ph.D candidate in Early Modern Literature at the University of California, Davis.
"To avoid scandal, the few women who did publish typically focused on subjects deemed appropriate for women: household manuals, devotional texts, diaries, or memoirs of their husbands," Snively explained for The Conversation. "An aristocratic woman like Hester would have been expected to behave modestly, stay silent, and focus on domestic matters rather than engage in writing about political upheaval and scientific endeavors."
As reported by Smithsonian magazine, Pulter's poems remained largely forgotten for centuries until 1996, when a graduate student from the University of Leeds discovered them while working on a project to digitize 17th-century poetry manuscripts at the university's Brotherton Library. The online collection features both digital versions of Pulter’s original manuscripts and transcriptions of her works.
Born in or around Dublin in June 1605, Pulter composed most of her poetry during the 1640s and 1650s, a period marked by the English Civil War. Her poems thus capture her "profound reactions to the devastation and turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century, as well as to the personal griefs and losses she experienced," according to The Pulter Project.
Although the daughter of a chief justice in Ireland, Pulter expressed criticism of various political groups, including the Parliamentarians and the ruling elite, while also showing admiration for monarchs such as Charles I.
Snively highlighted that Pulter’s works contain "early feminist ideas and explore, in nuanced ways, how society restricts women’s actions, undervalues their contributions, and diminishes their intellectual worth."
Pulter, the daughter of James Ley, the first Earl of Marlborough, gave birth to 15 children and rarely ventured outside her home. In one of her poems, she laments, "Why must I thus forever be confined / Against the noble freedom of my mind?"
