Awakening other spirits

Dorothy Stanley's Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia' Moderniz'd (1725) establishes ambivalent relationships with the text from which it takes its origins. While Stanley's prefatory material proclaims her adherence to Sidney's work, it also contains a defence of independent authorship, making claims for a writer's capacity to interpret and reproduce a text, which other features of her work uphold. Stanley's Arcadia was also involved in complex networks of relationships with readers, as the frst edition of Arcadia to be a subscription text, and therefore partially dependent on the support of buyers. As a rewriting, inspired by Sidney's invitation to other spirits to take up his work, it is also a transitional text, indicating some of the possibilities for, and constraints on, women's writing towards the end of the early modern period.