On 25 July 1652, George Thomason, owner of a collection of tracts now in the British Library, purchased a slim duodecimo volume titled Eliza's babes: or, the virgins-offering. Like The countess of lincolns nurserie (1622), Eliza's babes is often mistaken for a children's book; but in fact the ‘babes’ are poems and prose meditations, brought forth through the ‘marriage’ of the author to Christ. ‘Looke on these Babes as none of mine’, she cautions in the prefatory poem ‘to my sisters’:

As even that brief epigraph suggests, the metaphor of marriage to Christ serves as a primary vehicle of poetic authority in this small but remarkable volume. It consists of ninety-five devotional poems (seventeen of four lines or shorter) followed by thirty-two prose meditations (ranging in length from a few lines to a few pages) and closed by a statement beginning ‘Wings my Doves you have now obtain'd’ that is obviously derivative of Herbert's ‘Easter Wings’. The mere existence of such a printed collection of devotions from a woman not associated with a radical sect is unusual in itself. Even more exciting for scholars of early modern women is the controlling presence of marriage and birth metaphors that justify the author's ‘publique thankes’, as she calls the act of sending her ‘babes’ out into the world.