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Elizabeth Major was a religious writer, spiritual autobiographer and poet. She published one book, Honey on the Rod, or, A Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction: with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (1656), under Joseph Caryl’s imprint. The text of Honey on the Rod is a religious disquisition divided into two parts: A Comfortable Contemplation, a dialogue set in prose between incarnations of the ‘Soul’ and ‘Consolation’, and Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered, a collection of poems which explore themes of pride and self-indulgence. Little is known of her, but some information can be gleaned from the preface to the second part of Honey on the Rod, in which she informs the reader that she was raised primarily by a “godly and careful Father” (her mother died while she was in her infancy). During the “fifteenth or sixteenth year of [her] age” Major was sent to live with another family where she enjoyed “a wise and virtuous Governess” for about ten years until she was stricken with lameness. She returned to live with her Father “where [she] persued with an inordinate desire of recovery … and endeavored the accomplishing of that desire, without an humble and obedient submission to the will of God.” At home she mostly wasted time and money and in her preface she looks back on these moments as “folly, “realizing that she “had offended God, and deprived [her]self of that little health [she] enjoyed.”
For more on Major, see entry in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1990) by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy; also Patricia Demers, Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
For the complete text of Major's Honey in the Rod, now available on this site, click here.
Annotated Bibliography
Major, Elizabeth. Honey on the Rod: or, A Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems; etc. [With a prefatory notice by J. Caryl]. London, 1656.
Major’s only publication showcases a combination of both prose and poetry. In the text she deals heavily with what she perceives as her failure to be morally chaste. She laments on this struggle, but she also reveals to the reader that she has grown out of this behavior, juxtaposing her crippled body to the restoring of her spirit. The publishing of Honey on the Rod coincides with the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and despite the political violence going on in England at the time, there is no mentioning of any nation’s affairs. By keeping the focus purely theological, Major demonstrates a common feature of women’s contemplative writing during the tumultuous years following the English Civil War, what Patricia Demers in her book, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England, identifies as the “expression of catharsis and attempted reintegration in the discourse of spiritual abjection” (Demers 110). Major’s preface also utilizes affected modesty, a common literary technique among nonconformist women writers.
References to Elizabeth Major
The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1990) by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy.
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2003) by David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller.
Women in English Society, 1500-1800 (2005) by Mary Prior.
Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England (2005) by Patricia Demers.
Works Cited
Demers, Patricia. Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
Major, Elizabeth. Honey on the Rod: or, A Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems; etc. [With a prefatory notice by J. Caryl]. London, 1656.
This page assisted by Ray Delva, Georgia Southern University
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