During Elizabeth I's reign, love poetry acquired a popularity and brilliance unparalleled in English literary history. Ilona Bell shows how the tropes and rhetoric of love poetry were used to court Elizabethan women (at court, in the great houses, and in society at large) and how the women responded to being wooed, in prose, poetry and speech. Juxtaposing canonical male poets and recently discovered women writers, she investigates texts addressed to, written by, read, or heard by Elizabethan women, and charts the beginnings of a female lyric tradition.