‘My Dejected Sad Estate’: Hester Pulter’s Country House Poetics

Abstract This essay proposes that Hester Pulter can be profitably read as a country house poet. As it argues, Pulter revises the genre in line with her particular experiences: not as an honoured poet-guest, nor even as a lord, but as the lady of the house. Unlike many country house poets, Pulter does not praise her estate, Broadfield: rather, she singles it out for condemnation. Across a series of poems, Pulter resists country house poetry’s emphasis on order and continuity, exploring instead her vexed relationship with family, fertility, and futurity. More so even than other early modern women, who likewise evoked and then revoked these conventions, Pulter offers a profoundly critical response to the genre, which stresses the country lady’s painful seclusion within her country house.