"A Farewell to the Reader : Authorship and Audience in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay The majority of extant biographical detail regarding the sixteenth century poet Isabella Whitney comes from information gleaned from her two published poetic miscellanies.1 While her first volume, The Copy of a Letter . . . by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her Unconstant Lover (1567) yields relatively little information about the substance and tenor of Whitney's life, the poet appears far more personally revelatory in her subsequent volume, A Sweet Nosgay. . . containing a hundred and ten Phylosophicall Flowers (1573). Indeed, one of the more remarkable aspects of Whitney's second collection is the putatively autobiographical voice of volume's poetic speaker. So while Whitney dabbles in a host of contemporaneously popular lyrical forms and genres throughout her tripartite volume, each poem contained therein is narrated in the voice of a single, internally consistent persona: a virtuous though ill-fated maidservant, lacking both a husband to wed and a household in which to serve, alone in London, and isolated geographically from her family and friends. Because of the distinctly autobiographical tone of the poems themselves, not to mention the poet's use of an eponymous persona as a narrator, the critical tendency has been to read Nosgay in a largely autobiographical light. It has generally been assumed that Whitney, like her poems' speaker, worked in some capacity as a household servant, and what little we know of the poet's life seems to corroborate claims put forward by Whitney's persona throughout the course of her text. So while there is no way to know the degree to which the persona was intended to speak as a direct literary proxy for the author herself, it seems that, on some level, Nosgay does function as a mode of early modern autobiography. Indeed, the collection's inclusion of a substantial selection of verse epistles written to Whitney's friends and family, complete with several replies, impart a particularly strong air of autobiographical verisimilitude to the text. Of course, part of this is merely done in imitation of the system of textual circulation that was integral to earlier manuscript culture “ as a rhetorical strategy to justify the existence of the book itself. Nevertheless, the technique is also effective in grounding the text in a poetic space that is putatively "real,  and, as such, it is perhaps unsurprising then that Whitney's narrator functions as a largely consistent and believable character throughout. Obviously, whoever it was who complied Nosgay for publication, be it the author, her printer, or someone else entirely, he or she seems to have intended for the volume to be taken by readers in its totality. While its three major sections are printed each in a distinct typeface, the text's self-referential narrative progression and internal cohesion suggests specifically that the author herself was likely aware of, if not responsible for, the volume's sequencing and make-up. The inclusion in particular of minor, interstitial poems like "The Auctor to the Reader  and "A farewell to the Reader  show the intense degree to which the author was fully-cognizant of her sequence's eventual existence as a unified book-object “ a self-contained poetic miscellany whose constituent poems work effectively to speak to and illuminate one another. Given the intensely dialogic relationship that exists between the individual poems in Nosgay, it is perhaps no surprise that the collection reads, on some levels, as a sustained poetic sequence. While the poems can surely be read, understood, and enjoyed piecemeal, they work most effectively when taken within the larger context of the volume. This is all the more true when we consider the large degree to which the collection's primary speaking persona appears to be invariant and internally-consistent throughout.2 Yet while all but three of the poems in Nosgay are narrated by a single persona, the "Is W.  who signs most of the works, the collection's diegetic audience is kept by the speaker in a state of gradual limitation throughout the text. At times, this effect is subtly achieved by the poet: a sense of increasing familiarity and intimacy with her audience is implied by slight variations in the speaker's tone and poetic voice. Occasionally, the persona is much more direct, turning away from a particular audience to another with explicit deliberateness. For example, one of the more puzzling aspects of the collection is the rather odd placement of Whitney's "farewell to the Reader  at what is roughly the volume's midpoint. While the poem is a rather unremarkable plea for the general reader's good will towards Whitney's humble textual offering, it is curious that the speaker is moved to "make an end  “ to sever the relationship with her audience “ only halfway through her text (39). Significantly, this is not the only point in which the