Weston, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Jane Weston (1581–1612) left England for Bohemia before the age of six yet clung to her Englishness as part of her identity as an exiled but aspiring female poet, prompting her admirers who praised her in Neo-Latin verse and prose to refer to her as virgo angla (an English maiden). Highly educated and well placed in Prague’s social and humanistic circles through her stepfather, Edward Kelley, she frequented a number of poets and scholars, but when he died she and her mother experienced financial ruin; this caused her to fill her poems and letters with plaintive appeals for patronage as an orphaned poet in a foreign land and with expressions of desiderium patriae (nostalgic yearning for one’s homeland), which she grafted onto her self-fashioned persona of virgo angla. As a result of literally crossing a boundary to Bohemia yet keeping part of herself resolutely English, she spent her short life experiencing a dual affiliation. On the other hand, her international renown as a poet enabled her to cross other boundaries metaphorically through her verse. Both situations will be examined in terms of her biography, self-fashioning, ambitious international networking, and the expressions of exile in her Neo-Latin compositions.