The image of the 'fallen woman' was a common one in Elizabethan
literature. This 1990 study, translated from the original German by the
author, deals with an unconventional aspect of the motif; the genre of
'complaint' in which writers enabled women to put their own case,
bewailing their fate, invoking pity, and stressing private rather than
public virtues. The book begins with a group of Elizabethan poems in
which women lament their unfortunate lives. It goes on to deal with a
range of works, tracing the complaint from classical models such as
Ovid's Heroical Epistles to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and
Shakespeare's Lucrece. However, Dr Schmitz shows that the mode is not
confined to historical tales, nor to the early or early modern periods.
In Elizabethan times it occurs in novellas and meditations and can be
seen as the inspiration for eighteenth-century Roxanas and the
nineteenth-century Magdalen.