Some late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century compilations address both men and women, while employing the topos of the female religious reader to depict the exemplary Christian life for all. Other works offer specific connections with female, particularly aristocratic readers, both secular and religious. Book to a Mother explicitly addresses the mother of the author, a widow perhaps interested in joining a religious community while also addressing a lay public. As well as adapting anchoritic material, compilations also took up the spiritual teachings offered by Richard Rolleߣs vernacular writing. Disce mori, for example, both uses Rolleߣs texts and imitates the dynamics of Rolleߣs relations with his female readers, while also including a more general lay readership. Womenߣs writings, such as the Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden, play an important part too in compilations. Though evidence is scant, the example of Eleanor Hull suggests that women also acted as compilers. Compilations, then, demonstrate both the range and complexity of womenߣs involvement in devotional literary culture, and the wider significance of the female subject for devotional writers, male and female, in later medieval England.

Brandie R. Siegfried “considers three characteristics of [Cavendish's] volume of verse,” Poems and Fancies, arguing first that the book is "thoroughly engaged with philosophers and mathematicians, both ancient and modern: understanding the import of her poems often requires setting them in dialogue with those thinkers.” Second, Siegfried investigates the prefaces of Cavendish's poetry, further contending that they demonstrate a feminist sensibility as they explain her views for an audience that pointedly included women. Finally, Cavendish’s eclectic ideas are not simply the musings of a careless author, but rather are the works of a committed philosopher who uses the form of poetry to clarify her theories, making them more accessible to readers while “enhancing aesthetic pleasure through increased complexity and wit.” Giving special attention to Cavendish’s poetic revisions in Poems and Fancies, Siegfried further emphasizes the importance of Cavendish’s poetry for understanding the natural philosophy espoused in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Philosophical Letters, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.