First she says that she always wished him well and
always will, and that if he is determined to be a hus-
band, she hopes God will send him a good wife. But
then she reminds him that he will always be able to
boast about how faithful she was, and she suggests that
her love could be his again if he wanted it. She gives up
this hope since he is going to marry; however, she sug-
gests that if he needs to marry, he could marry her and
so keep the promises he made.
At this point Whitney makes the fi rst of many classi-
cal allusions. She tells her love to choose between hon-
esty or “Sinon’s trade” (l. 28). Sinon, the Greek soldier
who allowed himself to be captured by the Trojans and
then persuaded them to take the Trojan Horse into
their city, was a symbol of deception and treachery.
Whitney also mentions many other treacherous men
from classical mythology, such as Aeneas, who aban-
doned his lover Dido; Theseus, who deserted Ariadne;
and Jason, who betrayed Medea after she had saved his
life several times. She notes the shame attached to such
people, and she advises her lover not to follow such
examples, nor to be like Paris, who brought about the
destruction of Troy by betraying his host, Agamem-
non, and running away with Agamemnon’s wife,
Helen. Instead, she counsels her paramour to be her
Troilus, or her faithful lover, since Troilus, a brother of
Paris, died faithful to his lover, Cressida, and became a
symbol of constancy.
After this list of unfaithful men, Whitney lists the
virtues that she hopes her lover’s wife will have so that
he will not regret his decision. Again she takes her
examples from classical fi gures, and she hopes that his
wife will have the beauty of Helen, the faithfulness of
Penelope, the constancy of Lucrece, and the true love
of Thisbe. In case he thinks it unlikely for one woman
to have all of these qualities, she reminds him that she
had all of them except Helen’s beauty. She then quickly
notes that she is not saying this to turn him from his
new love, as he already knows from experience what
she, I. W., deserves. She only wishes that she possessed
the gift of prophecy, like Cassandra, so that she could
foresee the future and prevent either her own misfor-
tune or his, but since she cannot have this, she resigns
herself to her fate and prays for God to guide her. She
then closes with a few more classical allusions, wishing
her inconstant lover the long life of King Nestor, the
wealth of King Xerxes, and the gold of King Crœsus,
along with as much “rest and quietness” as any man on
earth may have.
By writing this poem in the form of a letter from an
abandoned woman, Whitney is working, as she often
does, in the tradition of OVID’s Heroides, which were
verse epistles written from the point of view of an
abandoned woman speaking to the man who had
betrayed her. Whitney’s many allusions to classical fi g-
ures that appear in Ovid’s Heroides emphasizes this
connection. However, as critics have often noted,
Whitney does not confi ne herself to the traditional role
of an abandoned woman. She does not simply lament
being abandoned; rather, she offers advice to her lover
about what he is losing and how he should behave. In
offering this advice, Whitney is taking the moral high
ground. She not only attempts to correct his mistakes
and guide him in a better direction, but she also does
not criticize him or the woman for whom he has left
her. Rather than portraying herself as a victim, she is
portraying herself as a virtuous woman and a morally
superior individual who can instruct her weak and
inconstant lover. Her wavering back and forth between
the role of adviser and the role of the abandoned
woman at once mirrors his fi ckleness and, ironically,
emphasizes her own constancy, since she remains
faithful and true enough to offer him good advice even
when he has abandoned her. Some critics have exam-
ined Whitney’s work in relation to GEOFFREY CHAUCER’s
The LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN, which is also based on the
Heroides, particularly in light of the difference between
the male and female perspective on faithfulness.
See also “ADMONITION, BY THE AUTHOR, THE.”
FURTHER READING
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Con-
duct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics.” In
The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History
of Sexuality, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
Tennenhouse, 39–72. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Marquis, Paul A. “Oppositional Ideologies of Gender in
Isabella Whitney’s Copy of a Letter.” The Modern Language
Review 90, no. 2 (1995): 314–324.
Donna C. Woodford“I. W. TO HER UNCONSTANT LOVER” 229