Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

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GENRE AND WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of singleauthor studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in this series include: Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700 Edited by Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America Angela Vietto Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800 Nicole Pohl Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 Marcus Nevitt Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England Edith Snook

Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England

Edited by MICHELLE M. DOWD University of North Carolina-Greensboro, USA and JULIE A. ECKERLE Framingham State College, USA

© Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiﬁed as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Genre and women’s life writing in early modern England : re-imagining forms of selfhood. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. Women’s studies – England – Biographical methods 2. Women – England – Social conditions – 16th century 3. Women – England – Social conditions – 17th century 4. Autobiography – Women authors 5. Biography as a literary form I. Dowd, Michelle M. II. Eckerle, Julie A. 305.4’2’092242 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Genre and women’s life writing in early modern England / edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle. p. cm. — (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5426-1 (alk. paper) 1. English prose literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. English prose literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Literary form—History. 4. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—16th century. 5. Women and literature— Great Britain—History—17th century. 6. Women and literature—Great Britain. I. Eckerle, Julie A., 1971–. II. Dowd, Michelle M., 1975–. PR756.A9G46 2007 828’.3099287—dc22 2006032254 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5426-1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents List of Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle 2 “Free and Easy as ones discourse”?: Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen Helen Wilcox 3 Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing Margaret J.M Ezell

vii ix xi 1

15 33

4 “Many hands hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books Catherine Field

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5 Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford Megan Matchinske

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6 Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs Mary Ellen Lamb

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7 Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface As Autobiographical Space Julie A. Eckerle

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8 Structures of Piety in Elizabeth Richardson’s Legacie Michelle M. Dowd

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9 Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish Elspeth Graham

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10 Margaret Cavendish’s Domestic Experiment Lara Dodds

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11 “That All the World May Know”: Women’s “Defense-Narratives” and the Early Novel Josephine Donovan

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Bibliography Index

183 205

Abbreviations

ACMRS

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

DNB

Dictionary of National Biography

ELH

ELH: A Journal of English Literary History

ELR

English Literary Renaissance

JEMCS

Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

SEL

Studies in English Literature

RETS

Renaissance English Texts Society

UMI

University Microfilms International

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Notes on Contributors

Lara Dodds is Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. She has published essays on Thomas Browne and John Milton and is currently at work on a book project about Margaret Cavendish and literary history. Josephine Donovan is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine. She is the author of Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (St. Martin’s P, 1999), Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, 3rd ed. (Continuum, 2000), and other books and articles in critical theory and literary history. Michelle M. Dowd is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her publications include essays on Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker, and Hannah Woolley. She is currently at work on a book project that examines how literary narratives shaped cultural perceptions of women’s labor in seventeenth-century England. Julie A. Eckerle is Assistant Professor of English at Framingham State College. Her publications include essays on Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, and narrative and rhetorical strategy in early modern literature. She is currently working on a book project titled “Heere this my story”: Attending to the Female Storyteller in Early Modern Romance. Margaret J.M. Ezell is the John Paul Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University and the author of The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (U of North Carolina P, 1987), Writing Women’s Literary History (Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), and Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Johns Hopkins UP, 1999). Catherine Field recently completed her doctorate in English literature at the University of Maryland College Park with a dissertation titled “Many Hands Hands”: Early Modern Englishwomen’s Recipe Books and the Politics of Writing Food for the Nation. Her essay, “‘Sweet Practicer, thy physic I will try’: Helen and Her Good ‘Receipt’ in All’s Well That Ends Well,” is forthcoming in an essay collection on All’s Well That Ends Well, edited by Gary Waller.

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Elspeth Graham is Reader in Early Modern Studies and Head of English Literature & Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published on a variety of early modern topics, including women’s writing; selfwriting; religious radicalism; animal (especially horse) cultures; and land, space, region, and environment. Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, editor of the Sidney Circle Journal, and author of Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (U of Wisconsin P, 1990) and Popular Culture in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (Routledge, 2006). She has published essays in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Survey, Review of English Studies, and Criticism. Megan Matchinske is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has published articles on a wide range of feminist issues. Her writings on early modern women have appeared in journals such as English Literary Renaissance, English Literary History, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and Shakespeare Quarterly. She has also published Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 1998) and is currently completing a second book, titled Strategies for Survival: Gender, Ethics and History in Early Modern England. Helen Wilcox is Professor of English at the University of Wales, Bangor. Her research in early modern literature has focused on such topics as Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, the lyric, devotional writing, autobiography, literature and music, and women’s writing. Her publications include Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (coedited, Routledge, 1989), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge UP, 1996), Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts (coedited, Macmillan, 2000), and a newly annotated edition of The Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge UP, 2006). She is also the editor of the forthcoming All’s Well That Ends Well for the Arden Shakespeare (3rd series).

Acknowledgments

This project officially grew out of a panel we developed for the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies conference in November, 2002. But one might say that the seeds for collaboration were planted even earlier: when we first met each other at the Attending to Early Modern Women conference in November, 2000. It seems more than appropriate that the pursuit of early modern women’s textual literacies that we undertake in this volume itself began in a setting of extraordinary intellectual cooperation among scholars of the early modern period. Like the work done at that conference and the work done by all of the contributors to this volume, the intellectual work performed by early modern women in their various forms of life writing is rarely a product of isolation but instead a logical result of the thinking, reading, and exchanging of ideas that occurs among men and women in a range of settings: educational, religious, domestic, and literary. To begin, then, we thank the organizers of the GEMCS and ATW conferences for allowing regular opportunities for scholars like ourselves to meet, share ideas, and develop projects. We would also like to thank Jean Howard for her insightful advice during the early stages of this project, especially as we were developing our initial proposal. Most importantly, of course, we wish to thank the contributors who have made this volume what it is and who so patiently endured the several rounds of revisions that we requested of them. We feel privileged to have worked with such a fine group of scholars. Working with Ashgate Publishing has also been a particularly rewarding experience for us, and we especially thank Erika Gaffney for her faith in the project, constant support, and ever-helpful guidance from the earliest stages of our work. We also thank Ann Newell at Ashgate for her prompt and useful responses to our steady stream of questions about editorial details, including the mysteries of Camera Ready Copy. Finally, we thank Ashgate’s readers for the comments that allowed us to frame our project in the most useful and productive way. Two graduate assistants at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro— Michelle Coppedge and Monica Heintzman—helped us with numerous editorial aspects of the project, and a UNCG New Faculty Grant made it possible for us to work together in the same geographic space during the last stages of editing. Again, we are grateful for this assistance.

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Michelle Dowd wishes to thank her friend and collaborator, Julie Eckerle. Her insightful comments, astute editing skills, and unwavering meticulousness—not to mention her patience and humor—have made working on this project both an intellectually stimulating and a truly enjoyable experience. She would also like to thank Fran Dolan, Jane Donawerth, Julie Crawford, and her colleagues in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, all of whom have given advice and encouragement at various stages of the project. Finally, she would like to thank her parents, Frank and Pat Dowd, and her husband, Mike Cowie, for their continual love and support. Julie Eckerle wishes to thank Michelle Dowd for her belief in this project, extraordinary editorial skills, like-minded attention to detail, and astute critical insights. Such a productive and enjoyable collaboration is not easy to come by. Julie is also grateful for Michelle’s patience with the childbearing and early parenting responsibilities that also demanded Julie’s loyalties during the years in which this project has come to fruition. Julie also notes that, in many ways, this project is as old as her firstborn, Anya Anisse, who was in the womb during our first conversation about the volume at GEMCS 2002; a newborn in arms during the first intensive research, reading, and brainstorming stages; a sleeping bystander during our first conversation with Erika at ATW 2003; and a curious, crayon-armed toddler during the intensive final editing process. It is impossible, in other words, to think of this project without also noting her presence in it. But Julie also thanks her other daughter, Katya Rae, who so willingly helped her hone her organizational and multitasking abilities, and her husband, Michael. His useful feedback and constant encouragement and support have kept her going through all stages of this project.

Chapter 1

Introduction Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle

As growing numbers of Englishwomen participated in manuscript and print culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, they produced a remarkable number of autobiographical narratives, or life writings.1 Historical developments during this period, including the spread of Protestant doctrines about introspection and unmediated relationships with the divine, the political and religious upheavals of the Civil Wars, and the development of experimental science, helped to produce a cultural environment that privileged both self-reflection and an ideologically nuanced approach to individuality that set the stage for women’s unprecedented production and publication of life writings.2 These texts took many forms, ranging from the more explicitly autobiographical—such as diaries, letters, and memoirs— to less obvious choices like religious treatises, fictional romances, and even cookbooks. In still other cases, writers combined generic elements from traditional forms in new and creative ways. In the process, they produced rhetorically sophisticated discourses of the self and demonstrated how textual form and the subjectivity it produces are mutually constitutive. Significantly, these life writings were ultimately circulated to a wide variety of readers, and they played an important role in women’s understanding of—and articulation of—female identity in early modern manuscript and print culture. The essays in this volume, the first critical collection that focuses exclusively on women’s life writings during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England,3 consider the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing. By working at the intersection of genre and personal identity, the contributors reveal early modern women’s familiarity with various aspects of an increasingly textual world,4 as well as the creativity with which women sought suitable forms for the expression of unique selves. The volume as a whole thus demonstrates how generic choice, mixture, and revision shape the construction of the female self in early modern England. To this end, we have collected essays on a range of female writers, including well-known figures like Margaret Cavendish alongside more obscure ones like Martha Moulsworth, and on a range of textual forms, from the preface to

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the novel. In other words, we bring together the familiar and the unfamiliar, the now canonical and the noncanonical. By situating women’s life writings within the broader literary culture of which they were a part, this volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about early modern women and to scholarship that has attempted to position women’s texts, which are often still marginalized in critical discourse, within a wide range of historical, textual, and social perspectives. Through our focus on genre, we offer a new and illuminating context for reading Englishwomen’s life writings that eschews the tendency to read these texts as unmediated representations of the experiences of “real” women. Our contributors demonstrate that the rich and varied literary tradition of early modern England was as valuable a resource for these writers as were the events and emotions that made up their daily lives. Diarists and letter-writers, for example, could deploy the strategies of romance or chronicle history to produce politically motivated narratives of the self. Women writers could also marshal the seemingly marginal space of the preface or the literal margins of a cookbook to create intimate bonds with their readers or to legitimize their domestic knowledge. In short, by interrogating the discursive contours of gendered identity, our volume suggests new ways to understand the textual production of women’s “selves” in early modern England. Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England has been influenced and, indeed, made possible by the nuanced historical and theoretical work done on early modern Englishwomen’s life writings in recent years. Scholars have brought these life writings to the public eye; reexamined theories of the self, self-construction, and autobiography that may have inhibited critical attention to these texts before; demonstrated how life writing considerably blurs the distinction between public and private experience; and highlighted the perhaps unexpected diversity and richness of women’s lives in early modern England.5 All of this work has helped to break down significant if erroneous assumptions about early modern England’s social landscape and has given new credibility to early modern Englishwomen’s life writing. Moving beyond traditional approaches to genre, particularly autobiography, has been a crucial first step in the study of women’s life writing from any period. Numerous feminist critics, for example, have critiqued traditional definitions of autobiography, such as those posited by influential theorists James Olney and Georges Gusdorf. In Gusdorf’s foundational essay, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” he asserts that autobiography is simultaneously “a document about a life,” “a work of art,” and most importantly “a work of enlightenment,” for “[t]he author of an autobiography gives himself the job of narrating his own history; what he sets out to do is to reassemble the scattered elements of his individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch.”6 According to Mary Beth Rose’s useful articulation of this approach, autobiography is “an individual’s struggle to define his or her experience by the narrative creation of a

Introduction

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unified personality, through which the author attempts to reconcile the public and private aspects of being, often represented as conflicting.”7 However, although Gusdorf’s arguments are more complex than traditionally assumed, Shari Benstock and others have noted that such theories rely on the construction of a cohesive self over time and on an authoritative perspective that consistently controls the presentation of this self, neither of which is realistic or always appropriate to women’s experience. Indeed, Gusdorf seems to assume a mature man of some importance reconstructing his life from a moment of apparent leisure. By contrast, Benstock argues, “The self that would reside at the center of the text is decentered—and often is absent altogether—in women’s autobiographical texts. The very requirements of the genre are put into question by the limits of gender.”8 Other critics join Benstock in arguing that gender fundamentally affects the way in which we read autobiography and the “self” it purportedly creates. In order to challenge the traditional understanding of autobiographical writing, scholars have developed a series of creative approaches to generic categorization. Some distinguish between the forms of “diary” and “autobiography” or propose new terms entirely,9 and others highlight the fictionality of the autobiographical act. Perhaps most notably, scholarship on autobiography has emphasized the way in which these texts frequently resist generic categorization altogether. By reconsidering definitions of a variety of forms, as well as juxtaposing texts from multiple genres in order to highlight the indeterminacy of generic labels, scholars have contributed to a new perception of autobiographical texts not as one genre or another but as “an amalgamation of autobiography and/or biography and/or fiction and/or chronicle, thus defying traditional generic classification.”10 Consequently, literary critics and historians have increasingly turned to the term “life writing,” defined by Marlene Kadar as “a less exclusive genre of personal kinds of writing.”11 This term is particularly useful for describing the writings of early modern Englishwomen since, as scholars have noted, their personal narratives were characterized by numerous subgenres of autobiographical expression, including conversion narratives and diaries. Indeed, Elspeth Graham argues that “[t]he exploration and exploitation of a variety of forms, rather than adherence to a recognised format for articulating the self” is the most significant characteristic of women’s life writings during the early modern period.12 We thus use the term “life writing” throughout this volume to emphasize the diversity and formal fluidity of these texts. In whole, by questioning the distinction between the genres of “life writing” and traditional autobiography, investigating subgenres of life writing, and asking why life writing as a genre might appeal especially to women writers, scholarship on this genre—and on early modern life writing in particular—has usefully interrogated the nature of generic categorization.13 But it has rarely explored how autobiographical texts intersect and engage with other genres, such as romances, novels, prayer books, or recipes, and it has only recently begun to consider the productive relationship between the “life” or “self” represented in a text and the

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mechanics of that text.14 By contrast, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England shifts focus to the textual, artistic, and rhetorical choices that inform individual texts. Our contributors thus consider not only the genre or genres of each text but also how autobiographical narratives are in dialogue with other textual forms. In unearthing the formal complexity of early modern women’s life writings, the essays in our volume pay homage to the genre’s linguistic roots, demonstrating exactly how, “[i]n the word ‘autobiography,’ writing mediates the space between ‘self’ and life.’”15 The contributors of the present volume focus their critical energies on personal narratives written by women in the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. This particular period in English history witnessed exciting developments in both the theories and forms of genre and the opportunities for written expression available to women. Influenced by classical texts by Cicero and Quintilian, early modern writers published widely popular and highly influential rhetorical handbooks that attested to the growing interest in wordplay and language theory in the period.16 These linguistic interests in turn produced a literary culture that was fascinated with genre theory and generic innovation. Rosalie Colie, for example, claims that “literary invention—both ‘finding’ and ‘making’—in the Renaissance was largely generic.”17 Generic modes were thus not viewed as fixed entities or strict rules for literary production in the period but as flexible guidelines that were constantly evolving and yielding new meanings. This rich literary environment provided “a diversity of narrative models upon which autobiographers could base their textualised self-portraits”18 and encouraged writers of the period to experiment with various combinations of different forms. As the essays in our collection demonstrate, the penchant for generic experimentation that characterized sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary production opened up a variety of textual possibilities for those Englishwomen who chose to write about their lives in manuscript or print.19 Not only were these life writings produced “before the advent of autobiography as a recognized genre,”20 but, as noted above, the experimentation with form was a fundamental characteristic of women’s life writing in early modern England.21 In Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660, Nigel Smith argues persuasively that the “generic inventiveness and eclecticism” among seventeenth-century women authors was directly related to genre’s ability to construct identity and to serve as “a means through literary structure of exploring potentials and acknowledging limitations in relation to the world.”22 The categories of genre, gender, and identity were thus mutually constitutive in early modern England. Women such as Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, Dorothy Osborne, and Anne Halkett took full advantage of the wide range of generic and rhetorical models at their disposal, and in the process they produced self-narratives that are more textually (and intertextually) complex than previous scholarship has tended to acknowledge. Clearly, then, early modern England was a particularly important period in the development of women’s life writings. But we have also chosen to use the phrase

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“early modern” to characterize the scope of this study because it helps to highlight the historical emergence of new discourses that were significant to women’s personal narratives. The essays in our volume, for instance, point to several historical trends in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that would eventually result in recognizably modern literary, political, and cultural phenomena. As Josephine Donovan’s essay attests, seventeenth-century women’s life writings often experiment with narrative structures that would, by the end of the century, come to characterize the early novel. As Catherine Field and Lara Dodds demonstrate, women’s recipe books and the writings of women such as Margaret Cavendish discursively engage with new scientific developments, particularly the emerging interest in experimentation. The political turmoil of the Civil Wars and the religious and cultural transformations that they produced influenced the writings of Lady Anne Halkett, as Mary Ellen Lamb makes clear in her contribution to the volume. More generally, many of the essays in the collection discuss the significance of the development of print culture during the period as well as the effects of the Protestant Reformation, which encouraged a heightened focus on introspection as a component of personal and religious identity. As a whole, this volume reveals the formal and cultural developments in women’s life writing that were unique to the early modern period. The essays in the collection differ in their individual approaches to these narratives and in their particular thematic and historical concerns, but they all share methodological interests in feminist, historicist, and formalist inquiry. Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England is committed to a historicist reading practice that insists on situating women’s life writings within their multivalent historical contexts, including the textual. This emphasis stems in part from feminist theories of women’s autobiographical narratives, such as those previously discussed, which understand the self as a socially constructed entity whose coherence or unity is a textual fiction. But the historicist readings of early modern Englishwomen’s life writings in the present volume also constitute a continuing refusal to essentialize or universalize women’s experience. Literary scholars frequently tend to read the work of women writers—far more so than their male counterparts—in terms of its relationship to the writer’s biography, assuming an important and potentially illustrative connection between the writer’s life and her text. Too often this critical impulse decontextualizes female identity by positing a female “experience” that exists independent from or even in opposition to language. We maintain instead, as Joan W. Scott has argued in her essay “Experience,” that “it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience”; “the emergence of a new identity” is thus always “a discursive event.”23 Women’s visibility as subjects and individuals, in other words, occurs only through language, and as scholars interested in literary history, we need to look to the details of that language if we want to discern how women’s “experience” manifests itself in it. By interrogating the relationship between “self” and “text” that is often over-

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simplified in contemporary criticism, the essays in our volume reveal the various ways in which early modern Englishwomen’s selves became visible in discourse. The feminist and historicist commitments of our volume, grounded in the belief that language and selfhood are mutually constitutive, also carry over to our interests in early modern forms. In arguing that women’s use of generic structures in their life writings helped them to produce historically specific narratives of the self, we join practitioners of a critical methodology within literary studies that has come to be called “historical formalism.” As an approach to literary analysis, “historical formalism” builds on the work of Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson in theorizing the ways in which form mediates between the content of a text and its historical context, including the social and economic conditions under which it was produced.24 If language constitutes women as subjects, as Scott argues, then language and the specific forms that it takes deserve precise, historical analysis. As we have seen, generic forms, narrative structures, and rhetorical tropes were not fixed, ahistorical categories in early modern England, but rather rich and evolving resources from which women could draw when composing their life writings. In their work on these writings, the contributors to the present volume speak to the cultural significance of early modern forms and the roles they played in shaping women’s “selves.” In thus attending to the complex textual genealogies of early modern Englishwomen’s life writings, the essays in our volume ask the following kinds of questions: How exactly do generic conventions influence narrative constructions of women’s selves? What representations or subject positions do they make available for early modern women writers? How do differences between print and manuscript mediums affect the generic development of these writings? How did women’s life writings from the period engage with the disciplines of science, history, religion, culinary arts, housewifery, and legal theory? And how did women’s life writings influence or even spawn other genres? By posing these types of questions, this collection aims to situate women’s life writing within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular formal mechanisms and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. It seems logical, therefore, that our volume trace the generic development of women’s life writing loosely in terms of England’s transition from a manuscript to print culture, especially since—as Margaret J.M. Ezell argues so convincingly in her contribution to this collection—“our understanding of the authorial practices of life writing” is deeply affected by the material form such writing took. The transition from manuscript to print was, of course, a complicated one, and many of the writers addressed in this collection produced writings in both forms. The way in which we have organized these essays is, therefore, necessarily imprecise. But we have chosen to begin with those essays primarily about manuscript documents and to move toward those essays primarily about print documents in order to highlight how intimately linked were issues of genre, form, medium, and textual

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self-presentation, as well as how the development of women’s life writing reflected larger trends in England’s textual culture. The first two essays, Helen Wilcox’s “‘Free and Easy as ones discourse’? Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen” and Ezell’s “Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing,” establish many of the terms, theories, and avenues of inquiry that are central to Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England. Wilcox, for example, offers an overview of the constraints of genre on the rhetoric of self-expression, arguing that early modern Englishwomen’s self-representation varied according to the “‘masks’ or ‘dress’ of language.” In other words, through her case studies of two letter writers (Arbella Stuart and Dorothy Osborne) and two poets (Mary Wroth and Martha Moulsworth), Wilcox demonstrates that the aspects of selfhood expressed through different literary forms will themselves vary according to the individual generic or rhetorical context. This is, of course, a central argument of our volume as a whole. As Wilcox notes, “Each genre comes with its inherited conventions, contexts and functions; these make possible, but also determine and limit, the expression of identity that might occur within it.” Ezell broadens this line of thought to consider the impact of the manuscript or print medium on a woman’s self-presentation, as well as on our understanding of the genre of life writing itself. As she asks in her essay, “what issues might be revealed about the genre of early modern women’s life writings when one takes as the primary focus the mode of their textual creation and transmission[?]” To demonstrate just how women’s reading, writing, and thinking practices—in addition to their approach to genre—are affected by the physical materials with which they compose, Ezell draws our attention to the “‘fossil’ remains” of women’s handwritten documents that appear in other texts and to women’s “domestic papers,” specifically “manuscript spaces which served writers for more than one purpose” and, at times, accommodated more than one writer. None of these forms are considered “genres” in the conventional sense of the word, and yet they are forms of life writing that emerge distinctly from a manuscript culture. Further, they reveal conventions of life writing and attitudes toward life writing that are not evident in print variations. Ezell’s assertion that the study of life writing in manuscript has much to teach us becomes immediately apparent with the next essay, Catherine Field’s study of early modern women’s manuscript recipe books. In “‘Many hands hands’: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books,” Field gives much-needed attention to this genre, arguing that it “allowed for the construction of a female self that was ... fluid and in flux between individual practice and coterie. Through the receipt book’s close relationship to the house ... , its emphasis on collaboration as well as empirical practice, and its foregrounding of the female body, it became a textual space that enabled women’s positive expression of the self.” Through Field’s thorough examination of how women constructed and used recipe books in

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their daily lives, she further demonstrates how the genre calls into question theories of authorship, ownership, and textual stability that have heretofore been used to define and categorize early modern women’s textual production. Although Megan Matchinske considers a more conventional autobiographical form—the diary—in her study of Lady Anne Clifford, she, too, interrogates our traditional understanding of how the form works to construct and convey identity, especially the identity of a woman in a male-defined world. In “Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford,” Matchinske explores Clifford’s extensive autobiographical writings in multiple manuscripts as both private history and history-in-progress. She argues that Clifford’s serial navigation of her environment (as she moves from room to room and from property to property) and the work-in-progress state of her diaries are a direct result of her need for documentary evidence in her ongoing legal battles for her land and property. Matchinske further links Clifford’s approach to the plight of early modern women generally, asserting that the “peculiar iterative patterning” used by Clifford is necessarily distinct from men’s use of the diurnal form and particularly suited to women’s needs at this time. In Clifford’s case, for example, the “diaries offer constant and repetitive pronouncements that operate directionally, spatially, and metaphorically in opposition to patrilineal networks that would regularly deny such connections.” In “Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs,” Mary Ellen Lamb turns to the issue of generic hybridity in another familiar autobiographical form, the memoir—specifically Halkett’s romantically thrilling spiritual autobiography. Indeed, it is precisely this generic complexity that makes Halkett’s manuscript an ideal case study of “the entanglements possible between subject positions,” as well as “the forms of religious selfhood available to Royalist women during and after the Interregnum.” In her examination of this text, Lamb explores the dynamic relationship between its secular modes (such as romance and tragicomedy) and its devotional modes (including the confession, the Puritan “case of conscience,” and the defense), arguing not only that they are quite compatible in Halkett’s construction of subjectivity but also that in their interaction one can trace the most difficult conflicts in Halkett’s intensive self-examination and ultimate construction of a devout, Royalist selfhood. Implicit in many, if not all, of the essays in this collection is the recognition that early modern women’s self-presentations in even the most personal autobiographical texts are constructed with a reader or readers in mind; Halkett, for example, seems deeply concerned about defending her reputation in her memoir even though it was never intended for publication. With women’s movement into the print sphere, however, concern for the reader’s response by necessity takes a much more prominent role. As Julie A. Eckerle notes in “Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space,” this is especially apparent in writers’ prefatory statements. In her essay, Eckerle considers the preface as genre and examines early modern women’s

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unique use of the prefatory space, a space that has its own very specific generic requirements and yet is, significantly, remarkably open to innovation. Because women entering the world of print needed not only to defend their authorial choices (as all preface writers must do) but—in the process—their very identities as respectable women, Eckerle argues that they manipulated conventional prefatory strategies and developed new ones to suit their needs. She considers a number of women’s prefaces from the period, considering both the particular rhetorical strategies early modern women used to authorize themselves as authors in and from the space of the preface and the use of autobiographical accounts in this space to produce a new conception of women’s selves. Ultimately, Eckerle argues that these writers used the preface to create new identities for themselves (and for women in general) as authors, as women, and as women with authority enough to enter the public stage. While attending to generic innovation in the mother’s manual genre, Michelle M. Dowd also demonstrates how a woman could construct a textual identity that defied an easy division between public and private personae. “Structures of Piety in Elizabeth Richardson’s Legacie” is a study of Richardson’s 1645 mother’s manual and its structural basis in a series of prayers to be said on specific days of the week or on specific occasions. As Dowd convincingly demonstrates through her analysis of A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters, generic hybridity could be a politically useful and spiritually efficacious literary tool for Richardson and other authors of mothers’ legacies. Through an in-depth exploration of the historical and textual idiosyncrasies of Richardson’s book, Dowd details exactly how it participates in mid-seventeenth-century Protestant print culture and enables the construction of a maternal self. But the study further demonstrates how attending to formal hybridity—one of the key structural features of Richardson’s text—can offer a new critical method for studying the mothers’ advice manuals as a genre. Like many of the other women writers considered in this volume, Richardson’s creative use of form and her attentiveness to the needs of both her family and spiritual community suggest a woman in command of multiple discourses and textual styles. In the first of two essays on the prolific and autobiography-obsessed Margaret Cavendish, Elspeth Graham considers a quite different kind of writer, but one whose self-presentation is also intimately linked to questions of form. Indeed, as Graham argues in “Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish,” Cavendish’s “scientific thought and her experimentation with form provided an intellectual correlative to her personal dilemmas.” Graham’s essay offers a new approach to Cavendish by refusing to isolate particular genres within Cavendish’s corpus as objects of study but instead considering the autobiographical impulse that characterizes all of her work. The essay thus “explores a range of texts, connecting them through [Cavendish’s] recurrent return to the autobiographical.”

10


While Graham argues “that Cavendish’s generic innovations derive from a coincidence of the very particular forms and circumstances of her subjectivity, her life, and her literary preoccupations,” Lara Dodds considers Cavendish’s particular appropriation of scientific discourse in her development of a theory of life writing. In “Margaret Cavendish’s Domestic Experiment,” Dodds offers a quite different perspective on Cavendish’s use of science, by approaching it through the lenses of the romance and domestic conduct book genres. Dodds begins by arguing that Cavendish “replac[es] romance with ‘work,’ ... and appropriates and contests the model of the female self constructed by the domestic genres of housewifery manuals and cookbooks, transforming the language of domesticity into the basis for a writing self.” In so doing, Dodds suggests, Cavendish “interrogate[s] the construction of women’s experience” and, in turn, traditional approaches to experience itself. Finally, Dodds links this critique to Cavendish’s critique of experiment, a concern that inevitably encompasses contemporary scientific theories and methods. Addressing several of the genres and discourses that appear in Cavendish’s work, Dodds offers a compelling argument for how Cavendish’s theory of life writing connects to and in fact depends on her philosophical and scientific concerns. Such generic experimentation and innovation necessarily lead to new forms and, as in the case of Cavendish, to new theories of life writing itself. In the final essay of the volume, “‘That All the World May Know’: Women’s ‘DefenseNarratives’ and the Early Novel,” Josephine Donovan adds an important closing chapter to this study of early modern women’s life writing by considering its influence on yet another genre, the novel. In so doing, Donovan brings us a long way from the manuscript fragments with which we begin. And yet, her essay makes similar arguments to those that come before it, thus demonstrating once again that generic innovation is a consistent thread in early modern women’s life writing. By tracing how women’s need to “defen[d] themselves in writing” becomes the subgenre Donovan calls the “women’s defense-narrative” and that this subgenre in turn becomes a common ingredient of the novel, Donovan argues for women’s rhetorical ingenuity in their textual self-presentations. But she also provides a new and significant perspective on the history of the novel itself. As she notes, “none of the major histories of the novel has recognized the role played by the women’s defense-narrative in its formation.” Like Donovan’s essay, our volume as a whole works to resituate early modern women’s life writing in the history of early modern writing generally. Although life writing has traditionally been understood as a less important genre than high literary forms and women’s life writing as somehow less valuable than men’s because of women’s supposed isolation in the private and domestic spheres, the essays in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England demonstrate just how intimately connected to the larger textual world were these seemingly self-concerned texts. The result is a fresh look at early modern women’s textual

Introduction

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literacy and their contributions to the exciting experimentation with genre that characterized the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

On women’s participation in manuscript and print culture, see Margaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993); and Margaret W. Ferguson, “Renaissance Concepts of the ‘Woman Writer,’” Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 143–68. For good overviews of these and other explanations for the increased production of autobiographical writings during the early modern period in England, see David Booy, general introduction, Personal Disclosures: An Anthology of Self-writings from the Seventeenth Century, ed. Booy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–19, esp. pp. 15–16; Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, introduction, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Graham et al (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–27, esp. pp. 1–2; and Mary Beth Rose, “Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography,” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986), pp. 245–78, esp. p. 247. There are, however, several useful anthologies devoted exclusively or in part to early modern Englishwomen’s life writing. These include Personal Disclosures; Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Her Own Life. See also Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c. 1670–c. 1730, ed. David George Mullan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), and—for a comprehensive overview of early modern women’s autobiographical expression, including their use of a number of textual models—see Sheila Ottway, “Autobiography,” A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 231–47. For women’s literacy in the early modern period, see David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980); Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981); Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475– 1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982); and Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). Texts include The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988); Women’s LifeWriting: Finding Voice/Building Community, ed. Linda S. Coleman (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1997); Rose; and Helen Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen,” Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992), pp. 47–62.

12 6

7 8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” ed. and trans. James Olney, Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), pp. 28–48, esp. p. 43, p. 45, p. 35. Rose, p. 249. Benstock, “Authorizing the Autobiographical,” The Private Self, pp. 10–33, esp. p. 20. See, for example, Harriet Blodgett, introduction, “Capacious Hold-All”: An Anthology of Englishwomen’s Diary Writings, ed. Blodgett (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1991), pp. 1–14, esp. p. 10; Elizabeth Clarke, “Diaries,” A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 609–14; Judy Nolte Lensink, “Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography,” Women’s Studies 14.1 (1987): 39–53; and Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic 22.3 (1989): 57–65. Gusdorf, too, distinguishes between a journal, created “without any concern for continuity,” and autobiography, which requires the creation of a “unity and identity across time” (35). Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, introduction, Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender, ed. Bell and Yalom (Albany: SUNY P, 1990), pp. 1–11, esp. p. 5. Marlene Kadar, “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice,” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, ed. Kadar (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992), pp. 3–15, esp. p. 4. Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self,” Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, pp. 209–33, esp. p. 213. See also Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox, introduction, Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Dragstra et al (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 1–13, esp. pp. 4–7. Pertinent texts that discuss genre and early modern life writing in particular include Betraying Our Selves; Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self;” The Rhetorics of LifeWriting in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, ed. Thomas F. Mayer and D.R. Woolf (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995); and Rose. The editors of Betraying Our Selves, for example, stress the relationship between self, life, and textual mechanics in the introduction to their volume. Mayer and Woolf note in their introduction to The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe that they “are concerned less with the accuracy of any biographical or autobiographical representation than with the manner of its presentation.” See pp. 1–37, esp. p. 4. Benstock, “The Female Self Engendered: Autobiographical Writing and Theories of Selfhood,” Women’s Studies, 20.1 (1991): 5–14, esp. 8, emphasis added. Booy similarly argues that “the way [these authors] understood themselves and the meaning of their lives was dictated by a particular genre and its ideological matrix.” See his introduction to Personal Disclosures, p. 6. Aesthetic manuals such as Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577 and 1593), and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) are notable for their widespread appeal and their impact on a variety of writers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For a useful discussion of rhetoric and rhetorical manuals in early modern England, see Marjorie Donker and George M. Muldrow, Dictionary of Literary-Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1982). See also Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), esp. chapter 2,

Introduction

17

18 19

20 21

22 23

24

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“Shaping the Language: Words, Patterns, and the Traditions of Rhetoric”; Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995); Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989); and Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976). Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973), p. 17. See also Jean E. Howard, “Shakespeare and Genre,” A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 297–310, esp. p. 300. Dragstra et al, introduction, Betraying Our Selves, p. 4. Of course, the emphasis on rhetoric and genre in the early modern period also allowed male writers to experiment with generic forms in their own life writings. Though the present collection is limited in scope to the works of early modern Englishwomen, the generic and rhetorical dimensions in the writings of their male counterparts certainly deserve further critical study. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing marks an excellent step in this direction. Dragstra et al, introduction, Betraying Our Selves, p. 1, emphasis added. See also Rose, who argues that the lack of a stable form at this point actually allowed women to write more freely and thus to contribute more fully to the genre’s development (247). Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), p. 5. Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 22–40, esp. pp. 25–6, p. 34. See also Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), who argues that “the ‘self’ is an ideological construct that is recruited into place within specific historical formations.” See introduction, pp. xi–xxii, esp. p. xii. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), esp. pp. 187–8; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconsciousness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981); Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002).


Chapter 2

“Free and Easy as ones discourse”?: Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen Helen Wilcox

Introduction: “Masks” of Selfhood The process of self-expression is not only one of the most intriguing riddles of early modern literature, but it is also a persistent source of fascination in our contemporary world. Indeed, richly rhetorical texts that eloquently express individual identity—often while paradoxically asserting the impossibility of doing so—are a thriving sub-genre of our own time.1 Moreover, although the question of identity is fundamental to human nature, its exploration continues to be of particular necessity for women, whose sense of selfhood has traditionally been defined in (and as) the shadow of patriarchy.2 In her recent collection, Life Mask, the Scottish poet Jackie Kay explores the many ways in which women wear, or have imposed upon them, “masks” of apparent individuality.3 The poem titled “The Model” takes as its central metaphor the process of making a face mask: The face was painted onto mine. My smile froze under the thick white. Friends held my hands for auld lang syne; and winter staggered into spring. When the hard face is well shed, do nothing; don’t settle old scores. To live bitter is to live dead. Turn to life; keep the head. (5–12)

The lyric contrasts the speaker’s “hard face”—frozen, wintry, “bitter,” deathly— with the smiling face which could be seen both before the making of the mask and

16


after it is “shed” for the reassertion of spring and new life. Kay’s vivid metaphor, suggesting that shifts of mood or even personality may be likened not only to the changes of the seasons but also to the imposition of certain kinds of masks of personality, raises the perpetual problem of the artistic representation of an individual. As the poem’s title hints, the speaker is akin to an artist’s model, and the process of making the mask is that of having a “face”—a new or other personality—artificially “painted” onto her own. Under the “thick white” of the imposed face, her real “smile froze.” Is this the inevitable consequence of the attempt to recreate an identity in the images of art, whether in wax or in words? To what extent is selfhood frozen under layers of representation, particularly in the faces “painted” by the colors of rhetoric and the conventions of genre in early modern texts? In attempting to answer these questions, it is important not to fall into the trap of imagining that there is one “real” self to be found, and, by implication, that she is located in the very part that is absent from the work of art—the flesh. We should note that the speaker in “The Model” does not totally abandon the mask; she decides to “turn to life” and “keep the head.” This implies a sense of balance (oddly enough, the very capacity that we might call keeping one’s head), in this case between living a life and expressing that life in art. The woman and her masks, a facial cast and its mold, the poem and the life, are all fundamentally interlocked and together form identity. As recent critical and psychological theory has shown,4 there is hardly such a thing as an essential self behind the mask but instead a series of constantly shifting identities created and revealed as fully in works of art as in the material life of an individual body. Indeed, even that bodily identity can be seen as just another layer, as is implied in Henry Vaughan’s seventeenth-century definition of earthly existence as “this fleshly dress.”5 Identity may perhaps be seen as a wardrobe full of such “dress”—or of masks. Selfhood is undoubtedly best understood as a plural rather than singular concept and as a creative and expressive process rather than a series of fixed entities. As Kay writes in another poem (“Mid Life Mask”), “My face splits, fresh skin under the hard white. / I say, you are never the same woman twice” (17–18). This essay explores the self-representation of early modern Englishwomen through what we might call the “masks” or “dress” of language. It offers an overview of the issues raised by the interaction of gender, writing, and identity in seventeenth-century England by means of a small number of case studies highlighting the function of literary genres in the construction of selfhood. I contend that the texts of these early modern women, like Kay’s, rarely reveal them as “the same woman twice,” and that this is not only to be deduced from our own contemporary understanding of identity but also to be discerned in the seventeenthcentury women’s choice and use of literary genres. Early modern women wrote in a variety of literary forms—a much wider and more ambitious range, in fact, than previous generations of critics have assumed—and many of these genres allowed a degree of direct or indirect autobiographical expression. Diaries, letters, conversion

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narratives, devotional meditations, lyric poetry, advice books, family biographies, philosophical treatises and polemical pamphlets, and even drama in comic and tragic form, all allow us a glimpse, and sometimes go so far as to present a portrait, of the characters of their authors in an age before the invention of autobiography as a separate form.6 Each genre comes with its inherited conventions, contexts and functions; these make possible, but also determine and limit, the expression of identity that might occur within it. What, then, is the relationship between the kind of identity that is being expressed and the particular genre in which it is given shape? To what extent and by what rhetorical means do the writings of early modern women “paint” a face and “freeze” a smile, to borrow Kay’s metaphors? In what ways does self-expression take a different form or “mask” depending on the chosen kind of text? The literary genre is itself, perhaps, the “mold” which must be broken open in order to reveal the individual formed within its frame. Many early modern women writers were evidently conscious of the formal qualities and expectations associated with the different literary genres, even though few women were as thoroughly educated in the classical literary tradition as their male counterparts. Dorothy Osborne wrote in 1653 to Sir William Temple that “All Letters mee thinks should be free and Easy as ones discourse, not studdyed, as an Oration, nor made up of hard words like a Charme.”7 Osborne’s comment not only indicates her ideal of epistolary exchange but also offers an astute observation on the constraints of genre on the rhetoric of self-expression. In a formal speech, the mode must be “studdyed,” careful of convention and deliberately skillful; in a “Charme,” the emphasis is on riddling wordplay and teasing complexity, but in a letter the style should be “free and Easy,” imitating as closely as possible the manner of ordinary conversation. It is likely, therefore, that the aspects of selfhood—indeed, the very nature of the personalities expressed through these different literary forms—will themselves vary according to the individual generic or rhetorical context. This essay explores and compares the possibilities for self-expression in two of the genres most frequently used autobiographically by early modern Englishwomen: poetry and letters. What could Martha Moulsworth, for example, write about herself in her poetic Memorandum, and to what extent was her representation of her life constrained by her chosen genre? On the other hand, was Osborne really able to be as “free and Easy” in her letters as in a spoken exchange of ideas, and in what degree was her written self shaped by the specific requirements of epistolary conversation? As case studies of the interrelatedness of genre and identity, I shall draw on the work of two pairs of seventeenth-century English women writers, each consisting of a letter-writer and a poet from the same part of the century: Arbella Stuart and Mary Wroth from the early decades, followed by Moulsworth and Osborne from the mid-century. 8 Before concluding, the essay will focus briefly on the poems and letters of one seventeenth-century woman—Margaret Cavendish—in order to highlight the differences of emphasis and rhetorical strategy in a written personality when the same author chooses to

18


express herself in more than one genre. I hope to demonstrate the extent to which Cavendish and her contemporaries create written selves that are dependent on their generic embodiment and thus are “never the same woman twice” in their literary manifestations.

“Scribling melancholy”: Stuart and Wroth Lady Arbella Stuart (1575–1615) was the unfortunate cousin of James I whose desire to choose her own husband was not in tune with the royal restrictions on her existence and who died in the Tower of London as a martyr both to her own longing for romantic love and to the paranoia of absolute monarchy.9 Much of what we know of her colorful and ultimately tragic experience derives from the evidence of her own letters, one hundred of which survive and are available in Sara Jayne Steen’s excellent edition.10 But to what extent are letters an accurate or reliable account of the life or personality of the woman who writes them? They are, after all, utterly context-specific, determined in tone and subject-matter by the interests of the anticipated reader and the nature of the relationship between writer and recipient. This is especially true of the letter-writing of an early modern woman of high birth, well versed in the models of courtly behavior and the level of linguistic eloquence appropriate to particular occasions and persons. Stuart’s letters vary substantially in rhetorical style and relative formality according to their purpose—whether a means of social contact, conveyance of news, entertainment of both writer and reader, self-defense when in difficulty, necessary confession, angry defiance, or explicit persuasion of the addressee. The self that is encountered in letters is thus not only enormously variable but also, fundamentally, socially determined; it is shaped by the genre and constructed in a range of dialogic social contexts. The physical circumstances of Stuart’s correspondence highlight two further ways in which letters are not a transparent or unmediated genre of self-expression. First, she wrote them in different hands, depending on the extent to which the correspondence was formal.11 This immediately gives the impression of identity putting on a “mask,” in this case the material sign of calligraphy. Since this is consciously chosen and put on, the handwriting must to some extent hide, while simultaneously expressing, Stuart’s identity. The link between writing and personality is well recognized, as indicated in the use of the term “character” for both.12 Samuel Richardson demonstrates the intimate connection between epistolary handwriting and private individuality when Mr. B. insists on seeing the heroine’s “hand” (as a preliminary to discovering a great deal more of her) in the opening letter of Pamela.13 However, unlike Richardson’s servant-heroine, Arbella Stuart had a courtly education and so could choose her “hand,” thereby emphasizing a parallel opportunity for a more profound choice—of personalities.14 The epistolary genre, with its material and social conventions of self-presentation,


19

guides the personality constructed within it. Second, her letters were physically vulnerable to interception and were undoubtedly read by many more people than the specific addressee, as the additional copies of the surviving letters demonstrate.15 Stuart herself observes in a letter written on 4 March 1603 to Sir Henry Brounker, “I am accountable even for idle wordes, which is much, and idle conceits which is more” (151). Such a context of suspicion makes clear that Stuart’s letters, though in some cases apparently private and personal, were in fact always at the boundary of public correspondence and thus necessarily written in what Barbara Lewalski has called “a rhetoric of concealment.”16 Early modern letters, therefore, can be deceptive, often seeming intimate when actually anticipating multiple readers and appearing to be “free and Easy” when in fact constrained by their own conventions of self-presentation.17 This is clear from a letter written by Stuart to Brounker on 9 March 1603, in which she seems to be confessing her reasons for writing, yet her consciousness of self-construction belies the ostensible honesty of tone. Writing from Hardwick Hall (where she was under house arrest for fear that she would elope and enter into a marriage that would endanger the succession to the throne), Stuart explains: being allowed no company to my likeing and finding this the best excuse to avoid the tedious conversation I am bound to, I thinck the time best spent in tiring you with the idle conceits of my travelling minde till it make you ashamed to see into what a scribling melancholy (which is a kinde of madnesse and theare are severall kindes of it) you have brought me and leave me, if you leave me till I be my owne woman and then your trouble and mine too will cease. or make you condempned of idlenesss and discourtesy if you requite my long letters with such short and Courtyerlike peremptory letters as all I have received from you have binne, whearby I perceive you content your selfe with the highe and by you right well deserved style of hir Majesties faithfull servant, and forgett you professe your self both by word and writing to be my frend. (168–9)

As the beginning of this extract reminds us, a letter is a supremely social mode of writing—it offers a better sort of “company” than was available in Stuart’s immediate surroundings and releases her from “tedious conversation” into a more interesting kind of dialogue. However, her dissatisfaction with their correspondence emphasizes once again the choices available to a letter-writer. Sir Henry has been responding in the manner of a courtier—brief and “peremptory”— whereas Lady Arbella writes at length and in a “scribling” style, an adjective linking rhetorical manner with both physical handwriting and state of mind. For Stuart claims to be suffering from “melancholy,” a recognized and much-analyzed condition in the Jacobean period, as Robert Burton’s encyclopedic Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) amply demonstrates.18 Stuart’s epistolary self-construction in fact draws on stereotypes and models in a way that is more familiar to us from poetic and dramatic literary texts of the period, as Barbara Lewalski has suggested.19 Stuart’s projected personality here is a rhetorical mode,

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just as the “right well deserved style of hir Majesties faithfull servant” is a “style” in the sense of Brounker’s title and nature, as well as his courtly manner of selfpresentation. What, then, do we learn about Arbella Stuart from her letter? We perceive that she is well aware of the gradations of politeness and “discourtesy,” and quite conscious of the roles and expectations of writer and recipient; indeed, she is not so much suffering from “a kinde of madnesse” as all too sanely sensitive to the difficulty of her situation. At the center of the extract is the resonant phrase “my own woman,” which might suggest the innermost identity of Arbella Stuart (if there were such a thing) behind the “mask” of rhetoric. However, the phrase is poised so ambiguously in a web of complex syntax that it is almost impossible to recognize what we are encountering as her own self. “My own woman” can mean either the mature individual who is able to determine her own future or the one who has been left alone to fade away and die, thereby most emphatically ending “your trouble and mine.” Stuart is intensely aware of her gendered self and the possibility of self-possession (“my own woman”) that yet remains tantalizingly unattainable (“if you leave me”). What the letter does contain, somewhere in this spectrum of her own anticipated identity between the extremes of selfdetermination and death, are “the idle conceits of my travelling minde.” This vivid expression suggests what a letter can convey: a mind at work (travailing) as well as on the move (travelling), transferred from one place and person to another via the social interaction of correspondence. As a mode of self-expression, therefore, the early modern letter can be richly expressive but also deceptive and ambiguous, offering and yet denying selfconstruction. It enacts immediacy and intimacy while depending upon the distancing effects of character types and paradoxes, and it functions on the borderline of private and public dialogue. How does this compare with the more conventionally restricted forms of lyric poetry, and the sonnet in particular, as a mode of self-expression? In the early modern sonnet there is much less emphasis on a rhetoric of spontaneity and much more formal craftwork in the restraint of length, meter, and rhyme patterns. The genre had also come to be associated with expected modes of behavior, such as the reactions and rhetorical excesses of a Petrarchan lover. When the speaker is a female lover, as in the unique case of Lady Mary Wroth, then the sense of generic restriction is even stronger.20 Writing behind the “mask” of Pamphilia in the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (c. 1613), Wroth gives expression to the desires and distresses of a woman betrayed in love, thought to be based on her own experience in the prolonged love affair with her cousin, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke.21 As her sonnets circulated, Wroth’s identities as poet and amorous persona became inseparable; Ben Jonson wrote that reading her work had made him both “A better lover, and much better poet.”22 The impact of her poems lies in the intensity with which the self-expression of Pamphilia is crammed within the “mold” of the sonnets, which the speaker calls “My owne fram’d words” (P45, 6; my italics).23


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The densely interlocking lyric form serves as a “frame” for the exploration of passion, within which the lines function metaphorically as a complex maze, like the winding ways of the “strang labourinth” of love itself (P77, 1). But at her moments of greatest emotion, as in the seventh sonnet of the fourth series, Pamphilia/Wroth becomes conscious of the fact that the poetic form is inadequate to express the pain and the power of love: No time, noe roome, noe thought, or writing can Give rest, or quiett to my loving hart, Or can my memory or phantsie scan The measure of my still renuing smart, Yett would I nott (deere love) thou shouldst depart Butt lett my passions as they first began Rule, wounde, and please, itt is thy choysest art To give disquiett which seemes ease to man; When all alone, I thinke upon thy paine How thou doest traveile owr best selves to gaine; Then howerly thy lessons I doe learne, Think on thy glory, which shall still assend Untill the world come to a finall end, And then shall wee thy lasting powre deserne. (P101)

The expression of a despairing lover’s feelings in sonnet form is shown here to be an overwhelming challenge: nothing—neither time, space, reason, nor poetry—can release the emotion and ensure “quiett” for the speaker’s “loving hart.” Even in negative ways, however, it is the language of poetic form which expresses her suffering: in the very act of saying that her imagination cannot “scan / The measure” of her misery, she is giving shape to that bitter sorrow in a perfectly scanned poetic “measure.” Although the mood of the sonnet tends towards silence and inarticulateness,24 Pamphilia/Wroth struggles on in an attempt to match the “choysest art” of love itself. Like most lyrics (and letters too), the sonnet is an implied dialogue, as the personal pronouns of the poem (I, thou, we) suggest. But who is the addressed “deere love”? In the wider context of the sonnet sequence it is likely to be Amphilanthus, modelled on William Herbert, but the detail of this poem suggests that it is Cupid. The speaker’s conflict is with the god of love who goes to such great lengths (“traveile” bearing the same double sense as in Stuart’s letter) in order to cause “disquiett” and win over “owr best selves.” The sonnet is filled with a sense of self under pressure—troubled, longing, combative, and ultimately submissive to love’s “lasting powre.” The speaker learns the “lessons” of love: pain and patience. There is no escape from this suffering, it seems, until the world ends, a thought which returns the poem to its starting point: “No time,

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noe roome, noe thought.” The more the poet travails in love and poetry, in the realms of “memory” and “phantsie,” the greater is her awareness of their equally labyrinthine natures. The sonnet sequence, with its artful intricacy, internal echoes, and cumulative narrative impact, is the perfect generic match for the stifling experience of impossible but inevitable love. From the examples of Stuart and Wroth, it is evident that early modern genres are, primarily, the literary embodiment of anticipated modes of social behaviour. While Stuart’s letter communicates ideas, mainly of self-defense or supplication, initially addressed to one named individual, Wroth’s sonnet is principally a selfcontained and intricately argued statement of a courtly lover. Both genres expect to be read and operate textually in the realm of dialogue, though this is explicit in the epistolary mode and implicitly assumed in the sonnet. The “plausible versions of themselves” 25 presented by these two authors are shaped and determined according to the recognized codes which we call genres—codes for writers and readers by which texts can be understood.26 Without the skills of recognizing and interpreting (for example) irony and metaphor in the letter and sonnet respectively, a reader of these texts would face major difficulties. There are differing levels of artifice at work in the genres and it is through these that the reader encounters the personality represented in the text. The letter-writer is engaged in a simpler process of selfpresentation (even though this may prove to be more rhetorically “painted” than is initially apparent), while the sonneteer draws attention to the conscious effort (and inherent impossibility) of self-expression. The “scribling melancholy” of Stuart’s letter and the “still renuing smart” of Wroth’s sonnet are closely related emotional states, yet molded into their distinctive “masks” by the conventional selfexpression of their chosen literary forms.

Selves “fitly willinglie” Composed: Moulsworth and Osborne When considering writers in relation to generic constraints, it is all too possible to envisage the letter-writer or poet as a kind of victim (willing or unaware) of the traditions and expectations associated with a particular genre. This would, of course, be a misrepresentation of the writing process, since kinds of literature evolve not only in response to the needs of readers and the larger processes of cultural change but also through the creativity of writers themselves. In The Resources of Kind, Rosalie Colie wisely suggests that genres, which are to a large extent defined by their form and subject matter, may also be usefully seen as “metaphors,” the literary equivalents of moods or states of mind.27 In the case of autobiographical modes, therefore, we might find it helpful to think of genres as metaphors of the self. This idea is certainly applicable to The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth, Widow, the remarkable autobiographical poem written in 1632 but only published for the first time in 1993.28 The poem takes its shape from the life it depicts:


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The tenth day of the winter month Nouember A day which I must duely still remember did open first theis eis, and shewed this light Now on thatt day vppon thatt daie I write This season fitly willinglie combines the birth day of my selfe, & of theis lynes The tyme the clocke, the yearly stroke is one thatt clocke by ffiftie fiue retourns hath gonn How ffew, how many warnings itt will giue he only knowes in whome we are, & lieu. (1–10)

Writing on her fifty-fifth birthday, Moulsworth presents herself in “lines” which are themselves born on the same day as their author. In both inscribed and lived time—“on thatt day” and “vppon thatt daie”—her own “selfe” is thus given identity. It is not only the date, 10 November, that “fitly willinglie combines” the poet’s life and work but also the very form of the poem itself which does so: the text consists of fifty-five rhyming couplets, one for every year of her life. As Moulsworth points out in a marginal note next to line 7, “my muse is a tell clocke, & echoeth euerie stroke [of the clock] wth a coupled ryme.” In her hands, the lyric genre thus functions as a metaphoric expression of her own experience. While Moulsworth’s Memorandum represents the author’s relative freedom to create a genre in her own image, it equally demonstrates the fundamental need for some sort of generic frame within which to express identity. The two elements— genre and self-representation—go hand in hand, mutually making possible the understanding of a life. In writing about her three husbands who have predeceased her, Moulsworth refers to the “holly dayes” (73) on which each died as a means of interpreting their lives. She uses the church calendar to provide a framework within which to characterize each of her husbands, while she uses the secular tally of “fiftie five retourns” to embody her own existence. Her decision to personalize the lyric mode in this way is a reflection of the social circumstances in which she wrote. Despite receiving some classical learning from her father, she comments ruefully that if she had merely had “Lattin” and “no other portion” for her “dower,” she might well have “stood a virgin to this houre” (39–40). In Moulsworth’s middle-class context,29 the courtly, humanist learning received and displayed by a poet such as Wroth would have been inappropriate. However, the wit of the Memorandum is particularly in evidence in the last lines, when Moulsworth asserts an outspoken preference for the widow’s “siluar” life above the “Virgins ... gold” (109–10). Similarly, the genre best suited to her self-expression is not the refined “gold” of a sonnet but her own wittily shaped, perhaps “siluar,” version of lyric form. If a literary genre is more of a metaphor than a “mold” or straitjacket, it is tempting to see the familiar letter as the genre functioning as a metaphor for the female self. As Mr. Tilney observes in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, “[e]very body allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female”—even

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though, Austen teasingly allows him to add, women letter-writers display “a general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.”30 One of the many women writers to whom these criticisms do not apply is Dorothy Osborne, whose correspondence with her future husband William Temple is one of the treasures of seventeenth-century autobiographical writing. As we have already noted, Osborne’s ideal of “All Letters” was that they should be “free and Easy as ones discourse,” a formulation that suggests the genre’s equivalence to the social environment in which the writer holds her spoken “discourse.” Once again it is fruitful to see a literary genre as a metaphor, and in this case, as in Moulsworth’s poem, a metaphor for the social self of its author. In the same letter, dated 24/5 September 1653, Osborne goes on to observe with considerable amusement “how some People will labour to finde out term’s that may Obscure a plaine sence, like a gentleman I knew, whoe would never say the weather grew cold, but that Winter began to salute us” (131). In addition to the delicious mockery of pretentious rhetoric, this comment reveals Osborne’s assumed ideal of correspondence: not labored, but using “plaine sence” to share rather than “Obscure” the thoughts of its author. Readers of Osborne’s correspondence will know that this notion of letters as the direct expression of their writers is only a relative truth about the genre. Even in the letter just cited, Osborne writes within a self-conscious rhetoric of plainness and uses an ironic tone which is itself a knowingly witty stance of worldly wisdom and detachment. Less than three months later, Osborne wrote to Temple that she had decided to abandon hope of their engagement, a conclusion which was “the result of a longe Strife with my selfe, before my Reason could overcome my passion, or bring mee to a perfect Resignation to whatsoever is alotted for mee” (151). The tone here is somber and resigned as Osborne describes her “selfe” as a meeting point of “Reason” and “passion,” a seat of strife as well as an object of fate with a specific future “alotted” to her. Even here, where the representation of her experience hardly seems a self-conscious pose, her self-image is based on the shared assumption that humans have rational and emotional selves, struggling for supremacy, and that “Reason” should be able to “overcome” the irrational aspects of the individual.31 Her conscious resignation is remarkably close to that of the suffering heroines of contemporary romance, a genre of which Osborne was very fond.32 This is not to cast doubt on her sincerity but to highlight the irrepressible intertextuality and rhetorical poise of the epistolary mode. Even the apparently boundless nature of letters, being generally as long or as short as the writer chooses, finds its limit at the foot of the allotted writing-paper. Osborne wrote at the end of her letter of 12/13 March 1653, “I find I am in the humour of talkeing wisely if my paper would give mee leave, tis great Pitty heer is roome for noe more but, your faithfull freind and Servant” (63). Was this splendid finishing gesture the result of practical necessity or an amusing ploy to end on a note of wisdom? Either way, the genre’s boundaries are flexible enough to accommodate her wit and express her colorful personality.


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Osborne’s letters are a record of a self presented in all its complexity—but still, undoubtedly, presented. As she writes in February 1654, Posibly it is a weaknesse in mee, to ayme at the worlds Esteem as if I could not bee happy without it; but there are certaine things that custom has made Almost of Absolute necessity, and reputation I take to bee one of those; if one could bee invisible I should choose that, but since all people are seen and knowne, ... whoe is it that do’s not desyre at least that nothing of ill may bee sayed of them (174)

Osborne knew to her cost that self-expression is very rarely innocent of a sense of necessity and the anticipation of judgment; it is designed to play its part in the social melee of good reputations and “ill” opinions. This was of particular significance to women in the early modern period, when a good name could make the difference not only between honor and shame but also, in practical terms, between successful marriage and impoverished spinsterhood. Despite an understandable longing to be “invisible,” Osborne knows how important it is to gain “the worlds Esteem,” as well as Temple’s love. By molding her letters to the level of discourse appropriate to each occasion and mood, Osborne shapes this pliant genre into a metaphor of the multifaceted self that, like Moulsworth’s lines, was “fitlie, willinglie” composed in the process. There is little sense here of the genre “freezing” an identity like the face beneath the mask of Kay’s “Model.” Indeed, both Moulsworth’s Memorandum and Osborne’s letters—in spite of their contrasting forms and techniques—make use of their genres as creative tools in the expressive fictionalizing of their individuality.

How Did This Lady Write “her own life”? Some Conclusions So far we have observed the ways in which two early modern genres, lyric and letter, worked like Jackie Kay’s “masks” as a means of both disguising and expressing the identity of four early modern Englishwomen. The first two cases, the work of Stuart and Wroth from the early seventeenth century, reminded us of the function of genres as “frames” or “molds” (that is, as sets of communal conventions—social and cultural as well as strictly literary) by which, paradoxically, an individual could be given shape. In the second pair of examples, the writings of the later and less courtly Moulsworth and Osborne, their chosen genres can be more appropriately seen as metaphors for the self, still functioning as parameters within which self-expression occurs but also pliable enough to be shaped by, and to, the individual writer. This development in the nature and function of a genre with respect to self-expression is particularly clear in the poetic examples, where the fixity of Wroth’s sonnet as a physical and ideological frame for her identity may be contrasted with Moulsworth’s lines as a deliberate and personal metaphor for her fifty-five years of life. By means of these four case

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studies, we have also begun to discern contrasts between the ways in which identities can be inscribed within the two genres on which we have focused. The formal constraints, symbolic mode, and intense self-consciousness of lyric poetry offer possibilities for self-construction which are different from the apparent freedoms yet strong social expectations and dialogic pressures of epistolary exchange. What happens, however, when the same author writes in both genres? To what extent are the emerging personalities formed by their genres? Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is an obvious test case, since she wrote in almost every available secular genre of mid-seventeenth-century literature, including lyric poetry, autobiographical memoir, letters, drama, orations, biography, and philosophical and utopian prose.33 In addition, it would seem that her underlying aim in all of these genres was autobiographical, and the question attributed to the imaginary reader of her memoir, “Why hath this lady writ her own life?,”34 could have been applied to any of her works. So it is especially relevant to inquire into the impact that the choice of genre had upon the expression of Cavendish’s colorful personality. The following two examples will suggest how this lady wrote “her own life” in lyric and letter. First, let us examine Cavendish’s self-presentation in part of “The Poetresses hasty Resolution.”35 Being fond of her own verses, the “Poetress” confesses to writing more poems out of “Selfe-love:” I writ so fast, I thought, if I liv’d long, A Pyramid of Fame to build thereon. Reason observing which way I was bent, Did stay my hand, and ask’t me what I meant; Will you, said shee, thus waste your time in vaine, On that which in the World small praise shall gaine? (5–10)

Despite this compelling argument, the headstrong writer ignores Reason’s subsequent advice—“For shame leave off”—and in anger does quite the opposite, hastily sending her book to be printed. As the poem’s closing lines contend, she lives to regret this: But now ’tis done, with greife repent doe I, Hang down my head with shame, blush, sigh and cry. Take pitty, and my drooping Spirits raise, Wipe off my teares with Handkerchiefes of Praise. (21–4)

One of the most notable features of this poem is its construction of the writer’s identity as a poet, through and through. There is no pretense that this is an ordinary individual musing on life or engaging in argument; this is undoubtedly the poet, reading, writing, publishing, regretting, and appealing for “pitty.” The “Poetress” is also gender conscious, both in her defiance of normally modest female behavior (she wants to build a “Pyramid of Fame” with her poems) and in her


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overwhelming adoption of the feminine stereotype at the end (“blush, sigh and cry”). The work is, indeed, a woman’s affair, since Reason is personified as female, and the long-suffering Printer, the only “Hee” in the whole dramatic poem, is never allowed to speak. The couplets of this energetic verse (whose movement is as exciting and “fast” as the writing described in the fifth line) underline the sense of debate, not only between the two women but also within the poet’s mind, where judgment is made to “rebell” (2), and anger is quickly followed by fear and “drooping Spirits.” The poetic structure of statement and counter-statement, often linked within paired rhymes, is fundamental to the strength of its self-presentation. The final flourish is an address to unknown readers, asking, by means of an ostentatious conceit, for “Handkerchiefes of Praise” to wipe away her “teares” of authorial shame. Let us place this poetic self alongside Cavendish’s epistolary identity as expressed in an extract from Sociable Letters (1664), a collection of vivacious letters addressed to an imaginary female correspondent: Madam, I Heard by your last, that the Lady S.P. was to visit you, where, amongst her other Discourses, she spoke of me, and was pleased to ... Condemn the Manner of my Life, saying, that I did either Retire out of a Fantastick Humour, or otherwise I was Constraind, in not having the Liberty, that usually other Wives have, to go Abroad, and receive what Visitors they please: But if she did but know the sweet Pleasures, and harmless Delights I have by this Retirement, she would not have said what she did; and to answer to what she said, This course of Life is by my own voluntary Choice, for I have liberty to do any Thing, or to go any Where, or to keep any Company that Discretion doth Allow, and Honour Approve of; ... and though I do not go Personally to Masks, Balls and Playes, yet my Thoughts entertain my Mind with such Pleasures, for some of my Thoughts make Playes, and others Act those Playes on the Stage of Imagination, where my Mind sits as a Spectator. (39–40) 36

The opening, “I Heard by your last [letter],” reminds us of the framework of regular correspondence which determines the context and tone of epistolary selfexpression; the imagined reader is a specific (in this case fictional) recipient, participating in an ongoing exchange of gossip, information, ideas, and feelings. Like Osborne, Cavendish is concerned with the question of female reputation and stresses that her “Retirement” (withdrawal to the country) is not a constraint but a “Liberty.” This contrast is highly relevant to the genre in which it is expressed. The letter as a mode of writing may appear to represent a kind of modest reclusiveness, a decision on the part of its author not to venture “Abroad” in bolder genres, but it can also be the result of a “voluntary Choice,” signifying freedom rather than constraint. The rest of the extract shows the liberating potential of the epistolary mode, permitting the experience of vivid theatricals in the mind of the writer (and reader). Cavendish’s self flourishes and multiplies in her epistolary text, where

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“sweet pleasures” are enacted and shared between her “Thoughts,” “Mind,” and “Imagination.” From the evidence of Cavendish’s case, what may be seen as the distinguishing characteristics of lyric and epistolary selves in early modern women’s writing? The poetic self is significantly dependent on the chosen lyric form while the letterwriter enjoys greater creative freedom and fewer constraints. The lyric persona uses more communal points of reference such as metaphor and tradition, addressing a wider and less predictable readership. The epistolary writer can refer to more specific, factual details determining the context and the formation of individuality and can have in mind, at least initially, an identifiable recipient. In the case of both lyric and letter, we may speak of the limitations and opportunities for self-expression represented by the genre. In order to build on these analyses of the texts by Stuart, Wroth, Moulsworth, Osborne, and Cavendish, and to test the differences between the selves embodied in the two literary modes, I set up an experiment with a recent class of graduate students working on early modern writing and identity. Each student was asked to convert part of an autobiographical work in one of the two genres into the other— for example, Wroth’s poem into a letter or part of Osborne’s correspondence into a sonnet. The aim of the exercise was to discover what remained constant and what was lost or gained in the process of “conversion.” The first problem that we encountered was the shortage of material for those who converted poems into letters, since the poems were on the whole neat and condensed while letters could ramble and elaborate their points, implying a fuller or more expansive self as a result. Similarly, that which was individual was found to be implied or assumed in poetic self-expression, whereas it was spelled out in detail in the epistolary mode. The formal structure and rhetorical complexity of lyric poetry was perceived as protective of individuality; when this linguistic “mask” was peeled off, so to speak, in transforming a poem into prose, the inscribed individual became more vulnerable, especially to the intrusion of a reply to the letter. The lyric can stand alone and aloof, even if intended as part of a sequence or for performance as a song, while the letter is more dependent upon its immediate context; as a result, the letter-writer has to use more direct techniques closer to the dynamics of conversation. We found that the speaker in a sonnet, with the privilege of rhetorical tradition, can safely say, “My love is a fever,” whereas the letter-writer is forced to say, “I am feverishly in love.” The poems, irrespective of whether they were circulated in manuscript or printed form, were also discerned to be more public in their self-presentation, while the letters, irrespective of interception or censorship, were on the whole more private in tone and attitude. The most important conclusion of our exercise was that a change of genre clearly implies a change of self. The metamorphosis of autobiographical writing from one genre to another necessarily results in an equivalent shift of identity, a new generic self. This is not to suggest that there are certain fixed types of identity inseparably linked to one particular genre, but that written selves are indeed


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formed by a choice of genre, which may function as a “mask” which “freezes” identities or as a flexible “mold” which metaphorically represents them. I would sum up our discoveries of these types of generic selves by means of visual similes: the identity presented by an early modern lyric poem may be compared to a selfportrait, while the persona in a letter is more like a reflection in a mirror. A poem, like a self-portrait, is composed, fixed and inevitably stylized, often with overt reference to traditions of public portraiture, identity, and self-presentation. A letter, like a reflection, is a more fluid and flexible image, yet still constructed with a conscious awareness of seeing one’s self—and of being seen. As Jackie Kay writes of the mysterious doubling of personality in a mirror, “One pair of eyes / stares through to the other” and “one face is lying / on top of the other” (“African Masks: Three, Rubber Girl,” 3–4, 1–2). To what extent is the self-image also “lying” in another sense—creating a fiction, misrepresenting the self? With this wordplay Kay manages to suggest the paradoxes of singularity and doubleness, expression and deception, inherent in the attempt at self-scrutiny. As we have seen, there are fictions and conventions vitally at work in written self-expression, whether in a lyric or a letter. However, I contend that a crucial determining factor in selfrepresentations is the writer’s choice of genre, even when—as in the case of Cavendish—the same author is projecting herself in more than one text. Continuity (if not consistency) of identity resides not only in the lived life of the individual writer but also in the rhetorical traditions and interpretative assumptions of her favored literary genres.

Coda: “my new face” This essay has suggested a number of issues concerning identity, genre, and female authorship in early modern England—subjects that will recur in a variety of forms and contexts throughout this volume. We have observed the constraining and creative possibilities of letters and lyric poetry, including the sonnet, for English women writers of the early and mid-seventeenth century. The impact of genres as framing devices for identity and their potential as metaphors for selfhood were revealed in the texts of Stuart, Wroth, Moulsworth, and Osborne. The test case of Cavendish and the exercise in “converting” autobiographical texts from one genre to another confirmed the vital influence of literary forms and modes as both masks and mediators in the representation of identity. We will end where we began, with another gloss on our subject taken from Kay’s Life Mask. The poem “Clay=Freedom” brings together the different paths of the exploration carried out in this essay. Kay addresses another person—perhaps her lover or a sculptor but just as possibly her own alter ego as writer or reader of her own being. The anticipated audience is certainly, either metaphorically or actually, an artist who works with an earthy substance (clay, or language) in order

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to express a self. And in the very act of doing this, a new identity, or mask, or “face,” is created: Just take a face, my face if you like And give it another name Just take the shape in your strong hands And make it another shape … Just take your hands and hold my new face To your face and call me the other name. (1–4, 9–10)

The work of art—sculpture, mask, poem, letter, the art of love itself—is shown to be a way of finding, expressing, forming, naming, and calling an individual identity. And with each “new face,” as with each literary genre in which the early modern woman writes herself, a new aspect of identity is given shape.

Notes With grateful thanks to the students in my 2003–04 M.A. course, “Writing and Identity in Early Modern England,” and to colleagues in the Later Renaissance Literature section of the conference of the International Association of University Professors of English (Vancouver, summer 2004). 1

2

3 4

See, for example, Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995); Meena Alexander, Fault Lines (New York: Feminist Press, 1993); and Michele Roberts, All the Selves I Was: New and Selected Poems (London: Virago, 1995). For important discussions on women and autobiography, see (among others) Shari Benstock, The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writing (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988); Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989); Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998). Jackie Kay, Life Mask (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), pp. 30, 37, 63, and 64. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. See Nussbaum on the “autobiographical subject,” as well as accounts of the “self” in (among others) Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) and Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997). For an earlier account of women and “masks,” see Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 35–44; see also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Genre and Self-Expression 5 6

7

8

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19

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Henry Vaughan, “The Retreat,” The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 173, line 19. For analyses of indirect early modern autobiography, see Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003); and Lynne McGrath, Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: “Why on the Ridge should She Desire to Go?” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Dorothy Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. Kenneth Parker (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 131. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. As the rest of this volume makes clear, the inquiry could easily be extended to include other early modern women writers, such as (among the poets) Isabella Whitney, An Collins, Katherine Philips, and Hester Pulter, and (among the letter-writers) Brilliana Harley, Lydia DuGard, and Philips. (Philips is a particularly interesting example of a writer who, like Margaret Cavendish, wrote in both genres). The research could also be widened to include more genres, such as a comparison of self-expression in secular memoirs as opposed to conversion narratives, and a parallel investigation could be undertaken to analyze the importance of genres as codes and metaphors for the sense of self in the work of comparable early modern male writers, too. For the purposes of this initial overview, however, the focus has remained on women writers and their expression of female identity in the genres of lyric verse and letters. See Sarah Gristwood, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen (London: Bantam, 2003). The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, ed. Sara Jayne Steen (New York: Oxford UP, 1994). All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. See Steen’s textual introduction to Stuart’s letters, pp. 107–13, esp. p. 107 and the images of Stuart’s informal italic hand and her formal presentation hand that Steen reproduces on pp. 112–13. Character: a graphic symbol or letter of the alphabet (OED 3); individual handwriting (OED 4c); individuality (OED 11). Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), ed. Peter Sabot (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), letter 1, p. 44. See the important account of gender, identity and literacy in Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). See Steen, textual introduction, pp. 107–8. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), p. 67. For further discussion of these paradoxes, see Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) and forthcoming research by Nadine Akkerman on the epistolary culture surrounding Elizabeth of Bohemia. See also Steen, “‘How Subject to Interpretation’: Lady Arbella Stuart and the Reading of Illness,” Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, pp. 109–26. Lewalski points out the parallels between Stuart’s condition and that of Shakespeare’s characters such as Hamlet and Poor Tom. See Writing Women, p. 75.

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20 See Josephine A. Roberts’s measured introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983), pp. 3–75. 21 See Roberts’s introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, pp. 24–6 and pp. 43–4. 22 Ben Jonson, “A Sonnet to the Noble Lady, the Lady Mary Wroth,” Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (London: Oxford UP, 1975), p. 175. 23 The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Roberts. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 24 See the perceptive discussions of Wroth in Christina Luckyj, ‘A Moving Rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002), pp. 129–46 and in Jeffrey Masten, “‘Shall I Turne Blabb?’: Circulation, Gender and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets,” Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991), pp. 67–87. 25 This is Elizabeth Heale’s phrase for autobiographical sketches in English Renaissance verse (9). 26 Among useful analyses of genre, see Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: GenreTheory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973); Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982); and David Duff, ed., Modern Genre Theory (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000). 27 Colie, p. 116. 28 The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth, Widdowe, “The Birthday of My Self”: Martha Moulsworth, Renaissance Poet, ed. Ann Depas-Orange and Robert C. Evans (Princeton: Critical Matrix, 1996), pp. 20–22. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 29 See Ann Depas-Orange, “Moulsworth’s Life and Times,” “The Birthday of My Self,” pp. 7–10. 30 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 49. 31 Among classic statements of this principle, see John Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII: 586– 594. 32 See Sheila Ottway, “Dorothy Osborne’s Love Letters: Glimmerings and the Ovidian Self,” Prose Studies 19.2 (1996): 149–59. 33 See Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic (London: Vintage, 2004). 34 Margaret Cavendish, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 87–100, esp. p. 98. 35 Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (London, 1653), A8r. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 36 Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (New York: Garland, 1997).

Chapter 3

Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing Margaret J.M. Ezell

“Life writing,” “self writing,” autobiography, personal history, memoirs—all are labels used for single-author narratives of personal experiences, but none of them draws much attention to the original medium in which the writer’s words were recorded and transmitted to readers. Life writing is a genre, however, whose texts are tied to the specific historical moments of their compositions and transmissions; they function as cultural as well as personal documents. This essay considers what issues might be revealed about the genre of early modern women’s life writings when one takes as the primary focus the mode of their textual creation and transmission. By doing so, it may invite further studies on what, if any, difference it might make to our understanding of the authorial practices of life writing to look at the texts which existed as part of a manuscript culture, rather than a print one. The first necessary step is to establish that there is indeed a body of manuscript evidence indicating that seventeenth-century Englishwomen were engaged in forms of life writing not intended for print publication and which may or may not conform to conventions associated with printed ones. As with all studies of manuscript texts as a category, not all the original materials have survived the centuries to serve as evidence, but “fossil” remains or records of them can be found in a variety of sources. 1 For example, there are numerous references in funeral sermons to documents in a woman’s “own hand,” signaling the existence and, at least for a time after their deaths, the preservation of early modern women’s manuscript texts for use by their contemporaries to create memorials to the women writing them. There are also still preserved entire manuscript volumes by early modern women which traditionally have not been classified as life writing, but which are generally referred to at large as “private papers” or “domestic papers” that also offer a chance to test one’s expectations of the genre. Finally, texts of both kinds also raise the general issue of what happens to women’s manuscript writings when subsequent generations publish them. Studying life writing as part of a larger classification—manuscript materials— shifts emphasis to aspects of the text other than the writer’s emotions or the events

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described. Rather than concentrating on the narrative aspects or the events within the contents as the principal fields of exploration, students of manuscript culture first investigate the situation of the creation of the text, then the formatting or physical presentation of its narrative, and finally how this information might affect its being read. As the editors of Her Own Life, an anthology of seventeenth-century women’s autobiographical writings, note in their introduction, in this genre, there is a “high level of awareness of the actual writing process,” and the manuscript texts used as examples will demonstrate a close connection between women reading, conversing, and writing about their lives.2 It is well to remember, too, as a starting premise, that a good portion of the texts published in the seventeenth century, by both men and women, were read initially as manuscript texts and subsequently published posthumously. Sometimes this was done by friends or relatives of the deceased, such as the 1720 memoir of Elizabeth Bury created by her husband; other times publication of manuscript material served as a testimonial from a generation or so later, such as the Rev. Julius Hutchinson’s 1806 publication of Lucy Hutchinson’s biography of her husband including the fragment of her life; finally, still other examples first saw print in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Ann Fanshawe’s memoirs, recovered by antiquarians and academics as valuable historical documents. Contemporary and familial editors generally have no apologies when they announce that they carefully selected portions of the manuscripts to conform to printed models, to best communicate the virtues of the authors. As the editors note, conversion narratives by women were sometimes published posthumously, ushered into the world by clergymen, “as an example of other sectaries of proper godly behavior.” “Only those that could be interpreted as proper models,” they conclude, “would find publication in this way.”3 Thus, reading texts by women which have been edited to highlight the author’s conformity to conventional social behaviors limits what one can know about the genre and about the author; on the other hand, exploring the fragments which are preserved in such editions and other print sources reveals indirectly information about the reading and writing practices performed by women in creating life writings, as part of their participation in a manuscript culture. In addition to these life writings published from manuscripts posthumously, such as Elizabeth Moore’s Evidences for Heaven (1657) and Elizabeth Bury’s Diary (1720)—both printed to provide a guide to the Christian reader—there are further traces of women’s manuscript life writing in other types of printed texts.4 In 1640, John Ley informed his hearers (and then his readers) that the source of part of his memorial to Jane Ratcliffe was the woman herself: “I have it under her owne hand writing among many other of her private papers (which with a little deske wherein they were contained she desired before shee went to LONDON, to bee delivered unto mee in case she should die, as she did from home).”5 Likewise, a “friend” of Elizabeth Wilkinson declared, “I will here set down a Narrative coppyed exactly out of her own hand writing, of Gods gracious dealings with her

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soule, as followeth Verbatim,” in her 1659 funeral sermon: “Such then as God would have honoured, should be transmitted with a character of honour to posterity, & their names should survive their funeral solemnities.”6 Seventeenthcentury funeral sermons and their printed versions are highly formalized in their conventions, and in general, one receives only traces of the deceased women’s own writings. The impressions of the woman writing preserved in these documents, nevertheless, are complex ones, which highlight the social, geographical, and religious circumstances that might affect the life writing practices arising from the recording of personal experiences and meditations. There are a number of similarities in the reading, writing, and self-writing practices of seventeenth-century pious women that override their generation. Life writing, one could argue, was among the most common genres produced by literate women of all social groups: as Felicity Nussbaum has observed about later eighteenth-century autobiographies, “autobiographical texts issue from the culture as much as the individual author.”7 The religious culture of the seventeenth century encouraged women and men from a wide range of social backgrounds to keep records of the events of their lives and to use this material for reflection and, in the case of some groups such as the Quakers whose followers included laboring and servant women as well as those in the gentry, for exhortation and public prophecy.8 Some of the women immortalized in the printed funeral sermons cited in this essay were the wives of clergymen, such as Elizabeth Wilkinson, Dorothy Shaw, and Elizabeth Baker, or a prominent citizen, as was Elizabeth Dunton, the wife of the bookseller John Dunton. These women were all variously called “gentlewomen” by their memorializers—Mary Gunter was raised in the house of the Countess of Leicester, while Margaret Ducke’s father was a London merchant, Elizabeth Wilkinson described her parents as being of the “gentry” of Devonshire, and Jane Ratcliffe is described as a “citizen of Chester.” They do not appear to have led unusual lives, nor to have had unusual life experiences—in short, unlike the intrepid Ann Fanshawe accompanying her husband through the war, or Anne Halkett engaged in espionage, in terms of the events of their lives and their opportunities one is tempted to describe them as “average,” with the possible exception of Mary Gunter’s connection with the Countess of Leicester. What did these women write about? These “average” Englishwomen shared the experiences of marriage and childbirth, disease and loss, celebration and despair. As displayed in the quotations from their papers, they also appear to have shared certain reading and life writing habits as part of their daily household practices. Many of the sermons relate a “typical” day in the life of their subject: in the section entitled “a Short Relation of her Life and Death,” written by “a Friend,” it is noted with approval that Margaret Ducke performed daily public prayers in her family, but also “in the morning and at other times, [she would betake herself to] private devotions in her closet, and then allotting some time … in the education of her children, and dispensing the affairs of her family, the rest of the day she spent in reading books of Piety and Devotion … by which means she made her heart

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Bibliothecam Christi, a Library of Christ.”9 Mary Bewley likewise was praised for her education of her son—“she hath been observed to dispute with her son syllogistically, and to enlarge her discourse with him by the help of Predicaments, and to reply upon him in witty extemporaneous verse”—and her assistance to her husband “both by pen and tongue.” Of her “closet duties,” it is noted that “she daily read [scripture], could not endure to read and not understand, and therefore often propounded the difficult passages she understood not, and craved others judgments to assist.”10 This practice led to “her own pondering and meditation, which she begun the last half year of her life to commit to writing, and which after much importunity she hath read to her husband and friend, to their great satisfaction.” One sees in these examples that reading, recording, and meditating on even minor daily events was part of the daily spiritual exercises performed by many early modern women which would feed the practice of life writing. 11 Richard Baxter comments on Elizabeth Baker’s diligences in “doing her part of family duties: teaching all the inferiours of her family, and laboring to season them with principles of holiness”: She was a very careful esteemer and redeemer of her time: At home in her family, the works of her general and particular calling took her up: When necessary business and great duties gave way, she was seldom without a Book in her hand, or some edifying discourse in her mouth …. She used good company practically and profitably, making use of what she heard for her own spirituall advantage. When I understood out of her Diary that she wrote down some of my familiar discourses, with serious application to herself, it struck exceeding deep to my heart, how much I have sinned all my days (since I undertook the person of a Minister of Christ) by the slightness and unprofitableness of my discourse.12

Baxter notes that whatever Baker read, whether it was scripture or works of devotion, “she was still laying in for use and practice” and she would “gather out passages and refer them to their several uses, as some that were fit subject for her Meditations.” Reading, whether it was the scripture or books of devotion, seemed for these women to have served as a platform from which to launch their self-examinations and shape their records of their lives. This is most easily seen in several of the funeral sermons that quote extensive blocks from the women’s manuscripts. Jane Ratcliffe, who, before her conversion was “rather civill then religious, and sometimes rather merry then civill … much delighted with dauncing, Stage plaies, and other publique vanities according to the fashion of young folks,” was urged by her minister John Ley to write down her observations on her readings, but it was not until after her death that he saw, “under her owne hand writing … divers discreet and profitable collections out of scriptures concerning speech and silence … for the greatest part of foure leaves in quarto, which I cannot well insert in this place, since for number they are too many” (32). In a footnote on another page, he

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notes that “since I delivered this I found in her private papers a note under her owne hand wherin recounting what had befallen her (especially) upon her first profession of religion she said some thought she was made, against which contumely she comforted herselfe with exemplary observations of the Prophet, 2 King 9.11 of our Saviour Mark 3.21, John 10:20 and of Paul Act 26.24, all said to be made by such as were both unwise and wicked” (footnote h, 42). As the excerpts he gives make clear, Ratcliffe had several crises in which she turned to scriptures to find a way of understanding her life. She wonders why she should fear death, “when I consider the misery that may come, both on my body and estate; and fearfull alterations may come, and warres may come, and all the desolation and terrours that accompany them, and I may be left in the hands of the violent. Besides,” she notes, “I daily suffer the losse of my friends who were the companions of my life, and meanes of much contentment to me” (88). Ley notes that she had “losses in her estate (as sometimes there did of losses so great as would put a worldly mammonist to an inward mutinie and commotion in his minde which would have haply raised a Tempest around him)” and that “she had of some of her children long and very painfull and perilous labour (above all that is ordinarie to breeding women)” (117, 119). She also experienced a disfiguring illness—perhaps a stroke—which Ley notes was even more difficult for her because “it was the shipwreck of much beauty and comelinesse which until then was seated in her countenance, and whereof she kept a remarkable impressions to her dying day” (119). At the first sight of herself in a mirror (“so weake she was that the jawe being fallen she could not bring it up toward the upper part of her mouth, her mouth was drawne awry towards her eare”), “she was somewhat troubled,” but he quotes her diary that she resolved that “if it pleased the Lord still to continue her a spectacle of deformed misery, she would not repine at his doing or her own suffering” (119). Ley also gives us some insight into her composition conventions to organize her life writing. “In the rehearsal of the particulars,” he notes, “I might have beene more large for the confession and application of her faith (with enterchange of writing and blanks wherein she ment to make additions) taketh up about forty leaves in octavo” (51). Commenting on the eight pages he prints on her thoughts on fearing death, he informs his reader that “to these particulars shee meant to make some additions. For there is a blanke of a side of a leafe and a halfe betwixt them and her next writing.” From this description, one can deduce that Ratcliffe’s practice was to take notes of her reading and their application to her daily life in loose sheets but also to attempt to organize them over time in bound volumes, leaving blank leaves for further examples or meditations (a practice whose significance will be discussed further in the context of women’s domestic manuscript volumes). Baxter likewise shows glimpses of the composition practices of Elizabeth Baker. “She had the great blessing of a tender conscious,” he notes, which clearly was the driving force shaping the record of her life.

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Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Europe She did not slightly pass over small sins without penitent observation. Her Diary records her trouble, when causelessly she neglected any Ordinance; or was hindered by rain or small occasion: or if she had overslept herself and lost a morning exercise in London. And if she mist of a Fast through misinformation & disappointments, and found not her heart duly sensible of the loss, that also she recorded. So did she her stirrings of anger, and her very angry looks. (236)

He does observe that, “though all ought not to spend so much time in writing down their failings, yet all should watch” and meditate on their daily and domestic actions with the care she did (236). He notes that she began in 1654 making a “daily account in writing” which included “the frame of her heart in every dayes duty, in Meditation, Prayer, Hearing, Reading” and a listing of her daily sins, of any resolutions or promises and whether they were kept, of “all special providences to her self, husband, Brothers, and others, and the improvement of them,” and of her response to the loss of her son. Her last entry was “two or three dayes before her delivery in Child-bearing” (241). Baxter concludes that “I only mention these hints, to shew the Method she used in her daily Accounts. To those Christians that have full leisure, this course is good,” but, he adds, “I urge it not all, upon those that have so great duties to take up their time, that they cannot spare so much to record their ordinary passages” (241). Busy people must read the writings of believers such as Elizabeth Baker and attempt to remember their application to their own domestic spiritual lives. An example of the difficulties in working with this genre when a manuscript is published posthumously rather than excerpted is the transformation of Agnes Beaumont’s first person narrative of her trial for “petty treason,” being accused of the murder of her father after she went against his commands and attended a sermon conveyed there on the back of John Bunyan’s horse. Her behavior so provoked her father he locked her out in the snow, her rejected suitor accused her of murder, and local people at the fair gossiped to such effect she was held for trial, but her manuscript account of these events reveals more than the printed versions of them do about her decision to write and also highlights different responses than one might expect from the model of patriarchal response to transgressive behavior implied in the print version’s title. There are two known surviving manuscripts of Beaumont’s narrative of the events leading up to the trial and its results, dating from 1674. Her narrative was not published until 1760, as part of Samuel James’ collection of texts written mostly, as its most recent editor Vera Camden notes, by clergyman’s daughters, The singular Experiences and great Sufferings of Mrs. Agnes Beaumont, who was born at Edworth, in the county of Bedford. As Written by Herself in a volume called An Abstract of the Gracious Dealings of God, with several Eminent Christians, in their Conversion and Sufferings, which went through ten editions by 1842. It was also published as a separate cheap tract in 1801 by Samuel Burder under the title “Real Religion: exemplified in the singular experience and great

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sufferings of Agnes Beaumont, of Edorthm, in the County of Bedford.” It was edited again from the first manuscript by G.B. Harrison in 1929 as The Narrative of the Persecution of Agnes Beaumont in 1674, and Camden’s 1992 title is The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont. The original manuscript sources, however, are interesting apart from their narrative of the events and the depiction of the small-town dynamics. British Library manuscript Egerton 2414 is untitled, while the fair copy Egerton 2128 has an ornamented title page announcing the contents to be “Divine Appearances, Or A Very Wonderfull Account of the Dealings of God with Mrs. Agnes Beaumount, Who was afterwards Married to Mr. Story, a Merchant at High-Gate. Taken from a Coppy Transcribed from a MSS in the hands of Mrs. Kenwrick at Bassant in Hampshire.” A header at the top of its first page, charmingly illustrated with a rural village landscape, repeats the information that this is “the Wonderfull Dealings of God with Mrs. Agnes Beaumont, written by her self.” The manuscripts highlight a different set of concerns in their presentation of the events and direct a different emphasis in the reading. In the manuscript versions, the emphasis is on Beaumont’s relationship with God and her own insights into what is happening around her. The title of the transcription version underlines not the personal suffering and social shame but the “wonderful” nature of the events and that Beaumont emerges triumphant (and even married to a man of substance). And in particular, the title draws our attention twice to the fact that this is her voice, her narrative, and her triumph. This aspect of reading the manuscript text is easily lost, I feel, under the more modern genre label of “persecution narrative.” As her manuscript versions make clear from the start, she speaks, argues, decides, acts, and in short is an active participant within the system used by her society to measure guilt and innocence, not a passive suffering illiterate woman whose story must be shaped and told by someone else. As a genre, life writing in print and manuscript engages with some of the most complicated critical issues for the period. “Autobiographical writing,” Helen Wilcox has asserted, may “breach the divide between private and public.” Speaking of early modern women’s texts, Wilcox draws our attention to how, like the women’s lives themselves, the texts are “poised at the borderline between hiddenness and expressiveness.” As she notes, “In their multiplicity of moods and modes—secretive, stubborn, witty, mournful, aware of both creativity and mortality—these texts resist categorization. Equally, they deny the validity of an easy classification of the public or the private in Renaissance women’s lives.”13 In the same way that Wilcox draws attention to the ways in which women’s texts problematize classification systems based on male models of political activity as a category, manuscript documents with their ambiguous status regarding public/private can call into question how it is that we define or understand what it means to “participate” in larger cultural spheres, whether Agnes Beaumont’s engagement with authority or with authorship. For the purposes of this essay, I will highlight two features which can be found repeatedly, if not always inevitably, in

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domestic papers by early modern women, both of which offer different avenues of approach in thinking about how we classify “private” writings and “domestic” ones as they intersect life writing. One of the interesting features of the accounts of contemporary and modern readers’ responses to working with early modern life writings in manuscript is women’s use of shorthand. Elizabeth Bury, for example, began composing her diary in 1664 in a private form of shorthand, which her husband laments that he is unable to decipher and which forced him to select from materials written after 1690 when she changed to writing in longhand. Timothy Rogers similarly refers to shorthand as a barrier to the use of the women’s own words in his account of Elizabeth Dunton’s domestic papers, which he said “would have made up a very considerable Folio.”14 He was limited in his use of these writings because “much of what she writ was in a Short-hand of her own Invention. That part of the Diary, out of which I have Extracted several Things that were written with her own Hand, was with great Difficulty obtain’d from her by her Husband in her last Sickness.” The author of the funeral sermon of Mary Bewley records that she read out loud from her writings to her husband and friends, which was important since on her death it was discovered that many of her papers “being in short-hand writing can hardly be read, some of the Characters being of her own invention” (9). Scholars have noted the practice by later seventeenth-century diarists to record certain types of events in a type of shorthand or code. Elizabeth Clarke references John Winthrop’s pattern of coding sins, biographers of the scientist Robert Hooke have decided that he substituted the symbol for Pisces for orgasm, while John Locke chastely used shorthand for marginalia. In a valuable early piece on Stuart women’s diaries by Sara Mendelson, which includes a list of twenty-four “diaries” by women between 1500 to 1800, the presence of “personal shorthand” is used as a means of distinguishing the “fundamental intentions between the autobiography and the diary”; Mendelson believes that women writing the first genre intended their words to be read by an audience, while women writing the second took “active steps to conceal their writing from all other eyes.”15 As she points out, the two “genres” as she identifies them are not distinct but occupy a “continuum from one genre to the other,”16 but it is interesting that the use of shorthand is assumed in all these examples to be the desire to conceal information from other readers, implicitly for the women writers, from male readers. Of course, one could also argue that if the writers had truly desired to conceal information from other readers, they would not have committed it to paper in the first place or would have destroyed it. In the cases of the men cited, Hooke and Winthrop, there appears no question but that particular incidents which these men felt the need to record but not name are covered by code, but one’s life would have had to be remarkably sinful for the entire diary to be done in that fashion. Shorthand, however, for both women and men, had other functions than concealment, including speed and space, which may have influenced women’s use of it in domestic papers. It should also be remembered that it could be used by

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women for decorative public display, as seen in the virtuoso performance of it in a presentation manuscript of poems done in shorthand by Jane Segar for Queen Elizabeth.17 As we have seen, the funeral sermons also record that women would read aloud to family and friends from their manuscripts. Shorthand, one could argue, might bridge the gap between public performance and domestic recording. Shorthand was touted by its inventors as a tool of efficiency and also a system of information organization. The “learned lady” Bathsua Makin, for example, probably learned it in her father’s school, where his system was taught to school boys to enable them to take better sermon notes. This shorthand system was described as being “a speedy and short writing, with great facility to be practized in any language … in far less tyme, than the leaning of the first Secretary letters do require.”18 We have a large amount of manuscript writing by women from the early modern period consisting of sermon notes, and one might speculate that training to take sermon notes could carry over into writing daily meditations. 19 Shorthand might thus be appealing to women keeping domestic papers involving minute accounts of their daily lives for reasons other than the public/private readership Mendelson suggests. Manuscript examples of women’s life writings, whether in shorthand or writ large, ask us to think about the presentation of the contents of an early modern woman’s life in terms of space available on a blank page. This brings up the consideration of the final point of this essay, the often multiple nature or function of women’s manuscript texts, which in turn highlights the difficulty of defining genre. Elspeth Graham’s 1996 study of early modern women’s “self writing” neatly summarizes the central issues which continue to perplex us: “the clear lack of any stable form of self-writing, which relates to a wider unifixity of genres in the period; women’s ambiguous status as subjects; and our own incomplete recovery of early modern women’s writings.”20 Manuscript documents especially illustrate the first and last issues. There are times when the printed description in a catalogue or even a printed edition of a text by an early modern woman does not reveal all that the manuscript taken in all its complexity does, either about the contents or the genre. For example, the manuscript text by Elizabeth Livingstone Delaval was described as being “prayers and meditations,” but a closer look at the entire contents of the volume reveals life writings shaped by the conventions of pastoral romance. 21 Another commonly found type of manuscript volumes composed by seventeenth-century women is frequently classified as “recipe” or “receipt books.”22 Although Harold Love may consider early modern women’s manuscript recipe volumes as not being a significant part of his model of scribal publication, nevertheless I would suggest that they are part of a much larger group of manuscript materials that I call “domestic papers.”23 In less formal terms, these “messy volumes,” which is to say manuscript spaces which served writers for more than one purpose, were not intended for publication (even after the author’s death, as I have argued parts of Anne Halkett’s papers were), nor were they intended to leave the domestic context

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of their production. On the other hand, there are frequently indications, when one examines the textual object itself, that the volume was intended to be read by others and was used by women for a much more complicated form of life record than its classification suggests. Some recipe compilation volumes, as Sara Pennell has argued, represent what she terms a “gendered knowledge form,” but as she also notes, the early modern “household compilation is certainly an amorphous creature, born of the many varieties of manuscript writing—verse miscellanies, table books, adversaria.” 24 Even the seemingly unambiguous term “recipe book” can mislead us about a manuscript’s contents, implying as it does a handwritten repository of directions for concocting combinations of meats, plants, herbs, and liquids, whether for the good of man or beast or both. Just as Agnes Beaumont’s manuscript texts are subtly different than the subsequent printed versions, these manuscript recipes are not, I will argue, the same as one finds in the 100 plus printed manuals of culinary texts published between 1650 and 1750 cited by Pennell. The examples of the manuscript volumes of Elizabeth Freke (published in part in 2001 as “Remembrances”) and the “recipe book” of Anne Glyde likewise have much to offer the social historian in terms of the specific details and lists of recipes, herbals, rents, and lists of household furnishings, but when the volumes as objects in and of themselves are viewed as being part of a manuscript culture (in both their methods of recording and their complete contents), it becomes clear that these “messy” volumes of domestic life may indeed also stretch the assumed conventions of life writing. The British Library manuscript Add 45718 is a large folio whose first page announces—“Elizabeth Frek her book, Given mee by my Cosin Sep 1684.” It is optimistically cataloged as a “diary”—Raymond A. Anselment calls his recent edition of it for the Camden series The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671– 1714. The BL MS Add 45196 is part of “The Brockman Papers,” a rebound folio volume; on its first page, centered with ornate capital letters, is “Anne Glyde/ Her Booke 1656.” 25 It is cataloged as “recipes,” and the British Library catalogue helpfully notes that, “Besides cookery, medical, and veterinary recipes, the volume includes (ff. 84–82, reversed) some genealogical notes concerning her husband and descendants.” Elizabeth Freke left behind two manuscript volumes. The editor of Freke does a masterful job of sorting through the intertwined contents and presenting their importance for modern readers of the two ill-matched volumes, both described by him as “commonplace books,” one a handsome white vellum-bound text of 245 folios and the other a much less imposing 53 folios wrapped in brown wallpaper. Taken as a whole, the contents of the volumes, he notes, highlight both the medical and financial well-being of Freke’s family, and although lists of rents and remedies from relatives and printed sources may seem superfluous to the narrative of her “remembrances”—and indeed were omitted or recast in the 1913 edition of her “diary,” done by Mary Carberry in 1913—Anselment justly insists that “medicine,

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money, and misery are inseparably woven into the life Elizabeth Freke constructs and reconstructs in the telling and the retelling that characterize her remembrances.”26 But what his very useful modern printed edition does is to remove any sense of the movement of the different types of material within the text, where the opening pages are of recipes followed by sections of “diary” mingled with accounts and other materials. At one point, after a copy of her reply to charges made against her by her son in a letter to her cousin date 24 May 1710, the next dated entry 22 June moves into column format as she presents several poems, including a poetic exchange between Eve and the serpent signed again by her at the end, which is followed by “some remembrances convenyentt for me to think on in which I were a deep sufferer with my deer husband Percy Frek, Esqu, to the loss of all we had by King Jams and excominycated by him and outlawed for an absentee in 1689” (139). 27 As good as the printed edition is in identifying people and events and making the text possible to read in a more or less chronological narrative sense, it cannot convey the effect of the handwritten volume’s manipulation of space, the ways in which dated entries which would seem to impose a formal conventional structure act more like pieces in a kaleidoscope, the nature of the pattern changing as the container is inverted and reversed, or the effect on the reader of the spacing on the page and the juxtaposition of materials read and transcribed with events experienced and remembered. This messy volume, in its very appropriation and distortion of the conventions of the printed page, offers us a complex example of “domestic” writing. It is bound up with household matters—cures, herbals, recipes, rents, reflections on births and deaths—but it is not “private” either in the sense that it was not intended to be read by others, which we know not as Anselment notes from any conventional address to her children but from occasional annotations and interpolations directed at the reader, or in the sense that it only concerns itself with family matters, commenting as it does on the wider world of public events and their impact. Anne Glyde, like the women celebrated in the funeral sermons, also represents the “middling sort,” the woman sitting at home, going about her domestic life. Her writings were preserved not for any striking insights offered by the contents into national life or even personal revelations, but as part of a larger collection of “family papers,” domestic documents. That she is neither a transgressive radical female preacher nor a maddened aristocratic lady shut up in her tower makes her interesting for my argument that manuscript documents by early modern women display conventions of life writing other than those derived from printed models. Her book, as she so carefully claims it in 1656, is also a “messy volume,” although in different ways than Freke’s. Like Freke’s, parts of it are a fair copy of recipes with attributions, which were clearly composed at different times over the years but which follow the same format. Following the initial page, on the recto side of the pages are recipes for human consumption—“to make a paste of Geneva the true way” given her by her cousin Berry—while on the facing folio side, in a different

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ink at a later point, she put in recipes for the benefit of animals—“a most approved & Souerragne Medicine for to Cure the K[H]ybe or Weepe in any Bullocke,” signed Anne Glyde. Like Freke’s (and so many other seventeenth-century manuscript volumes), the volume follows the manuscript convention of physical reversal of the volume, or a doubling of the matter in an inverted format, which is simply alien to print technology at this time. In effect, the messy, inverted manuscript functions as two books, beginning repeatedly, but never really ending. Reading in this second direction, one finds in addition to the recipes, not “genealogical notes” as promised by the catalogers but records of births and deaths, including her children’s and her husband’s, and her responses to them. Her husband Richard died in 1658, with two daughters predeceasing him in their infancy, but nevertheless, he left behind, as she meticulously notes apparently on the day after his death, “6 small children … the Eldest of them being But 8 years old and 9 weeks. The youngest of them but 6 weeks and 6 days old” (82b), causing her to doubt his faith in divine providence. In order to fit the next section in the remaining space of the page, she moves outside the ruled margins and addresses directly, “My Dear Children,” warning them at length of their father’s displeasure if they lived wrongly and threatening hellfire. “Let this thinge be remembred by you when my body shall be desolved into Dust,” Glyde requests. This “recipe” book continued to be used for multiple purposes until nearly the end of the century. There are happier events such as marriages and births interspersed in the “backward” volume. The entries describing the births of other grandchildren, Anne Drake in 1684 and Ralph Drake in 1688, have additional glosses in the margins, clarifying dates and names but also making reference to contemporary events: Ralph Drake was born as “the prince of orang began to Land his army,” and in her prayer for this child, she notes, “although he was born at a time that looked sad and darke and wee were under great confussion: yet of thy mercy, Be pleased to spare him that he may live to see good and gratious times thy church to flourish in peace and holiness” (83a). The final entries in the inverted volume relate to the deaths of her daughter in 1694 from smallpox and of her sonin-law in 29 July 1695, once again leaving six young children needing her care, against which she had to fight against the “unkind and I may say Evill carridge of their trusties to me” (82b). Crammed into the space at the bottom of this page, she prays in the final personal entry: “O Lord my God ever assiste in my Duty to thee my god and in all keep mee in my right reason and true understanding and spare my Life so far as I am able truly serve and please thee and be useful for the true good of the souls and Bodys of these orphans.” Although not following the example of printed spiritual journals or in any way a methodically organized journal or diary, this seventeenth-century woman is writing her life for future readers, weaving elements of the domestic with the political and spiritual in what is “her book.” The recipes speak not only to what has been dismissed as merely “domestic” writing, but also to the ways in which

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women circulated information and preserved knowledge, such as a solution for diarrhea in calves from a perhaps illiterate cowman, Goodman Giddick. It is also a narrative of the major events of her life, the births and deaths of those she loved and cared for through the generations, how relatives connect, and how values are transmitted. As Pennell also valuably points out, so-called recipe volumes were “a highlyvalued focus of inter-generational routes for female to female communication.”28 One of the most striking characteristics of the domestic papers of early modern women is how frequently the author or authors lays aggressive claim to the working space of the page—“Elizabeth Freke Her Book,” “Ann Glyde Her Book”—and also how in their signatures they lay claim to authorship as subsequent generations will of possession. The preservation of women’s “recipe” books and the use of women’s private, domestic papers by their friends to construct memorials to them in funeral sermons, designed to provide models for other living women, also highlight the ways in which domestic papers circulated within a family but also in a larger world. Elizabeth Clarke has warned that because of the haphazard ways in which early modern women’s manuscript texts have been preserved and discovered (and continue to be discovered), it is difficult to make any hard and fast claims about formal characteristics or indeed about the women who wrote them, read them, and preserved them.29 That noted, all of the various types of manuscript documents discussed here share some common points of interest to those thinking about definitions of genre. The “fossilized” manuscript evidence, taken from the printed funeral sermons about clergymen’s wives, from published spiritual lives, and from posthumous publication of memoirs suggests that daily life writing, unlike translation or even poetry, was not the property of a particular social group. Manuscript sources make it clear that life writing of a spiritual nature was not frowned upon by friends, family, or the culture at large. It has long been a commonplace that early modern women were “silent, chaste, and obedient,” a descriptive label which has sometimes been interpreted to mean that they were either illiterate or intimidated from the practice of authorship by cultural constraints. Looking at women’s life writing in manuscript form, however, suggests just the opposite. Sheila Ottway has suggested that for early modern women, “writing about oneself was a potentially trangressive activity … the ideal Christian woman was expected to be not only submissive but also self-effacing.”30 It is quickly evident, however, from the representation of life writing done by women in the funeral sermons offering patterns for Christian living that these women’s ability to express their thoughts and to record their feelings on paper was regarded as one of the many positive actions in their exemplary character. One could object, of course, that it was laudatory only because it stayed within the confines of the Christian practice of self-examination for the humiliation of one’s sinful nature, but I would argue that even within highly conventional expressions of self-denial these documents still foreground the importance of the

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individual intellect and conscious in shaping one’s life choices.31 Repeatedly, the contents of the manuscripts cited, whether in the excerpts from funeral sermons or the intergenerational domestic papers, show women reading independently and questioning what they read, seeking outside assistance on fixing their own interpretations and not simply repeating or recording the sermons of their ministers nor copying appropriate passages into their manuscript volumes from the printed texts of others. Finally, manuscript texts as a group of life writings share a characteristic impossible for contemporary printed ones. Because of the nature of the manuscript page and its culture, they were open-ended narratives, lacking a defined ending— blank pages permitted the rewriting of the past at any time and even when they were retrospective, the final words were determined by death itself stopping the writing process rather than by the author’s achieving a goal or fashioning a conclusion. Instead of a print narrative’s beginning, middle, and end, manuscript texts typically display a layering of time, continuous self-analysis and reworking. What manuscript life writings by early modern women can show us that printed ones sometimes obscure are the ongoing examples of daily authorial practice in the use of the blank page. In a “domestic” manuscript rather than in a print format, the writer’s life itself kept the narrative open for examination, reversal, and rewriting at any time. As these examples show, such multilayered manuscript texts were frequently passed to the next generation to serve as the starting points for other readers to chronicle their lives, recipes for authorship as well as accounts of the domestic events of early modern women’s lives.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

Margaret J.M. Ezell, “The Posthumous Publication of Women’s Manuscripts and the History of Authorship,” Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 121–36. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, introduction, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Graham et al (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 23. Ibid., p. 4. Elizabeth Clarke, “Diaries,” A Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), p. 611. See also Taylor Thomas, The Pilgrim’s Profession (1622) and Mistris Shawe’s Tomb-stone (1658) in addition to those cited. John Ley, A patterne of Pietie. Or The Religious life and death of that Grave and gracious Matron, Mrs. Jane Ratcliffe Widow and Citizen of Chester (London, 1640). All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. Edmund Staunton, A Sermon Preacht … At the Funeral of that Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ Mris. Elizabeth Wilkinson … Whereunto is Added a Narrative of Her Godly Life and death. (Oxford, 1654), p. 21, p. 26.

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Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), p. 28. See David George Mullan’s introduction to Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c. 1670–1730, ed. Mullan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 1–22. 8 See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), chapters 2 and 3. 9 A Funerall Sermon Preached by Dr Gouge ... At the Funeralls of Mrs Margaret Ducke ... With a short Relation of her Life and Death, written by a Friend (London, 1646), pp. 28–9. 10 Imitation and Caution for Christian Women: Or, The life and death of that Excellent Gentlewoman, Mrs. Mary Bewley (London, 1659), p. 3, p. 9. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 11 Ezell, “Anne Halkett's Morning Devotions: Posthumous Publication and the Culture of Writing in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain,” Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2000), pp. 215–31. 12 Richard Baxter, A Treatise of Death, …With some few passages of the life of the said Mrs. Baker, observed (London, 1660), p. 232, p. 235. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 13 Helen Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen,” Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992), pp. 47–62, esp. p. 60. 14 Timothy Rogers, preface, The Character of a Good Woman, … Occasion’d by the Decease of Mrs. Elizabeth Dunton, … With an Account of Her Life and Death; And part of the Diary writ with her own Hand (London, 1697). 15 Sara Heller Mendelson, “Stuart Women’s Diaries,” Women in English Society 1500– 1800, ed. Mary Prior (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 181–210, esp. p. 183. 16 Mendelson, p. 182. 17 William Carlton, Timothe Bright, Doctor of Phisicke (London: Elliot Stock, 1911), pp. 94–9. 18 Quoted in Frances Teague, Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1998), p. 36. 19 There has been little work published on women’s use of shorthand; I am indebted to conversations with Heather Wolfe and Michael Mendle for information and ideas. 20 Elspeth Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self,” Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 209–33, esp. 209–10. 21 Ezell, “Elizabeth Delaval's Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Modern Women Writers,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, vol. 3 (London: The British Library, 1992), pp. 216–37. 22 See Catherine Field’s essay in this collection for a fuller discussion of these receipt books. 23 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 54–8.

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24 Sara Pennell, “Perfecting Practice?: Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England,” Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237–58, esp. p. 240. 25 All further references to this manuscript will be cited parenthetically in the text. 26 Raymond A. Anselment, introduction, The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke 1671– 1714, ed. Anselment, Camden Fifth Series 18 (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 2001), pp. 1–36, esp. p. 1. 27 The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke 1671–1714, ed. Anselment. 28 Pennell, p. 240. 29 Clarke, p. 612. The Perdita Project, an electronic database, has produced an online guide to over 500 manuscript compilations by early modern women in collections around the world. 30 Sheila Ottway, “Autobiography,” A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 231–47, esp. p. 231. 31 On formulaic religious expression in life writing, see also Katharine Hodgkin, “Dionys Fitzherbert and the Anatomy of Madness,” Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998), pp. 69–92.

Chapter 4

“Many hands hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books Catherine Field

Recent historians and critics have argued that during the Renaissance, the concept of “self” was a distinctively negative one, informed by a spiritual and classical tradition that articulated the necessity for governing the desires of the physical, bodied “self,” endlessly in conflict with the immortal part of the person, the “soul.”1 Jonathan Sawday identifies the centrality of taming the self in Christian thought (whether Protestant or Catholic) in the period: “‘Self-hood’ in the midseventeenth century did not ... suggest ... the quality of having or possessing a ‘self.’ Rather it expressed the inability to govern the self. ‘Self-hood’ was the mark of Satan; it was a token of the spiritually unregenerate individual, in thrall to the flesh rather than the spirit.”2 Early modern bodied subjectivity, as Gail Paster argues, “would be characterized by a high degree of emotional liability ... [and] the call for emotional regulation by self and by external social disciplines ... assume[d] ... [particular] emphasis” since both the humoral body and the spirit residing within it were seen as particularly vulnerable to the malign influences of the outside world.3 Reflective thinking and writing about the self thus often involved wrestling with the unruly, passionate self—bringing it in line with God’s will and the higher needs of the soul. Such widespread beliefs about the flawed spiritual and physical makeup of the early modern person informed many autobiographical (or “pre-autobiographical”) writings, where self-expression was necessarily distilled through a filter of cultural injunctions that argued against excessive selfidentification or self-celebration.4 For women especially, who were considered legally, physically, and spiritually inferior to their fathers and husbands, writing about the self was an extraordinarily vexed process. As Shelia Ottway argues, The ideal Christian woman was expected not only to be submissive but also selfeffacing.... ‘Self’ was that part of the human psyche that had to be controlled and repressed before one could be a recipient of divine grace ... Consequently early modern women had to adopt certain strategies in order to be able to write about themselves at all.5

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As Ottway and others have found, women did develop many strategies for writing and speaking about the female self—through diaries, maternal legacies, prayers, prophecies, and poetry—often drawing on their authority as virtuous mothers and daughters to justify their writing and using the “domestic context” of the home to enable their literary production.6 However, a significant genre of self-writing that has been overlooked in recent scholarship on women’s autobiography and histories of the “self” is the manuscript recipe (or “receipt”) book, a collection of medicinal, culinary, and household recipes that provide us with an alternate window into the expression of the early modern self. In this essay, I consider the receipt book as a site and strategy of female self-writing, discussing first the major characteristics of the genre and second the implications for early modern women’s sense of self. The genre evolved out of the medieval books of secrets and the humanist commonplace book traditions but came to be associated with the popular, domestic literature of the house.7 The genre was a flexible one, drawing on multiple texts, technologies, and writers, and it allowed for the construction of a female self that was correspondingly fluid and in flux between individual practice and coterie. Through the receipt book’s close relationship to the house (where women were considered experts in medicine and cooking), its emphasis on collaboration as well as empirical practice, and its foregrounding of the female body, it became a textual space that enabled women’s positive expression of the self. Historically, manuscript recipe collections descend from medieval books of secrets (collections of treasured medical, alchemical, or trade recipes) written in Latin and circulated among an elite readership.8 The chief of feasts for Richard II who compiled a set of royal recipes in Forme of Cury (or Manner of Cookery) is credited with authoring the first receipt book in English in 1390.9 Culinary cookbooks later go into print with the anonymous publication of This is the Boke of Cokery in 1500, and the genre of printed cookbooks (often written by men and aimed at a female audience) and household manuals (sometimes containing medical and culinary recipes) became increasingly popular in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.10 Alongside this flourishing print culture in which male-authored recipe books and household “how-to” manuals were popular bestsellers, women circulated their recipes exclusively in manuscript until the middle of the seventeenth century. 11 Thus, in order to determine how women were writing the self through the writing and practice of recipes, we must look to manuscript receipt books. The historian Jennifer Stine has identified close to a hundred receipt books belonging to early modern Englishwomen, and she speculates that many anonymous receipt books remaining in the archives were written by women as well.12 Even as print became an increasingly attractive (and lucrative) option and popular post-Restoration writers like Hannah Woolley made a considerable living publishing recipes and cookbooks, women continued circulating their recipes in manuscript well into the eighteenth century (and of course, women continue to exchange recipes by hand to this day). The dynamic

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between print and manuscript was fluid with handwritten receipts finding their way into print and then circulating back into manuscript. The genre of the receipt book was thus an unstable one with “how-to” knowledge moving back and forth between print and manuscript, as well as between the owners of receipt books and their community of contributors. This generic instability has implications for the self that is constructed by such texts, as we shall see below. The general practice of keeping receipts—although originating in the medieval period—was profoundly influenced by the humanist reading and writing practices of the Renaissance, a “notebook society,” which emphasized the importance of collecting, organizing, and generating specialized knowledge in commonplace books structured thematically by topic.13 The collecting of commonplaces from a variety of sources popular with Renaissance readers—the Bible, sermons, poetry compilations, spiritual devotions, classical philosophy, natural history, and rhetoric—informed the practice of gathering receipts, which were themselves even occasionally included in commonplace books, a move which suggests, perhaps, that on one level, the recipe was thought of as just another type of commonplace fragment in the period.14 The reverse is also true; some receipt books also contain commonplaces, yet in their telescopic focus on culinary, medicinal, and household recipes, receipt books eventually emerge as a genre quite distinct from the commonplace book and other manuscript collections. The textual fragment of the recipe itself—either invented by the author/practitioner, or culled from written sources (in print or manuscript), or originating with friends, family members, or medical practitioners—recorded the “how to” work of the early modern house, particularly the work within the private rooms of the kitchen, distilling closet, and sickroom. This close association with the house and with women’s domestic practice further distances the genre of the receipt book from the commonplace book, and the receipt book thus falls within the larger category of what Helen Wilcox has identified as “domestic literature,” those texts both “associated with” and “produced within” the space of the home and often written by women, including “lyrics, letters, biography, memoirs, devotions, conduct books, meditations, commemorative sermons, prose polemics, diaries and poems of praise.”15 Their domestic context was crucial not just in abstract terms of genre, but also in terms of actual practice since the inventing, copying, and use of receipts often occurred within the space of the home where women wielded a considerable amount of authority in culinary and medical matters. Middle-class and elite women were educated by their mothers, female relatives, and governesses in the household arts, which included the study of cooking, confectionary, preserving, distilling, and medicine, and the collecting of receipts would likely have been included in this curriculum.16 Lady Grace Mildmay recalls in her autobiography that her governess encouraged her to read William Turner’s Herbal along with a surgical text by Bartholomew Vigoe when she was at loose ends as a child. As an adult, Mildmay compiled many hundreds of medicinal

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recipes (in 250 folios) in an extensive collection of personal papers, while regularly practicing “physic” (sometimes alone and sometimes with neighboring physicians) on family, friends, neighbors, and the poor in rural Northamptonshire.17 Stine observes that the early modern house functioned as “both the primary location for medical care and as the center for female authority in medical matters.” The historian of science and medicine, Margaret Pelling, agrees that the house was central in terms of a woman’s medical practice: “The first port of call in times of illness was ... the family or household ... [and] … it appears ... that the bulk of health care ... was left to the responsibility of women.”18 Such authority sometimes stretched beyond the four walls of the house into the neighboring community where an elite woman, such as Mildmay, might practice charitable medicine or where other women (sometimes of the middle and lower classes), worked cures, cooked medicinal broths, and offered medicinal recipes for a fee.19 Women performed extensive medical services in England since there were few university trained physicians and not nearly enough to go around. In Mildmay’s own town of Norwich, as Linda Pollock observes, “there was an estimated one practitioner for every 200–250 inhabitants in the late sixteenth century,” and “[w]ell populated rural areas would have a ratio of about 1 to 400,” and she concludes, “most of the medical services of this period would be furnished by unauthorized practitioners.”20 Along with lay practitioners, surgeons, apothecaries, charlatans, and midwives, women worked as caregivers in their homes and surrounding communities, and the compiling and testing of recipes for food and medicines was an important component of their practice.21 Culinary and medicinal recipes often occur together in receipt books with the author making no firm distinction between the preparation of remedies and foods because all ingestible substances—foodstuffs, herbs, and medicinal compounds— were thought to be endowed with humoral properties that could have a beneficial or negative effect on the body. 22 As Pelling explains, at this time, the definition of “physic, or internal medicine, included the vast grey area of overlap between medicines and food, in which women had an established role.” Purgative drinks and ales were food/medicine emblematic of this thinking: “Whether or not the offering of a purgative substance constituted the practice of physic could be very much in the eye of the beholder.”23 This early modern overlap between medicine as cooking and cooking as medicine worked in women’s favor because, through their socially sanctioned roles as cooks and healers in the house, they were authorized to practice, write, and exchange technical “how-to” knowledge in the areas of both food and medicine, an exchange that often occurred through the text of the recipe book. 24 As someone intimately associated with the care of the body through diet, cooking, and medicine, the writer’s identity and sense of self was fluid. In her receipt book (1576), Dorothy Lewkenore writes a culinary recipe “to boyle a capon another way” next to a receipt for medicinal broth using a rooster “to boyle a cocke for restorative” followed by a second culinary receipt “to seethe a legg of mutton” (f.2–f.3).25 Thus Lewkenore easily switches between cooking and medicine,


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demonstrating the confidence with which she assumed authority in both areas. In the seventeenth century, Katherine Packer, like Lewkenore, includes medicinal and culinary receipts in her collection (1639), but she divides her notebook into two discrete sections on medicine and cookery, reflecting her emerging sense of the topics as distinct from each other. She titles the medicinal section, “a boocke of very good medicines for seueral deseases wounds and sores both new and olde,” and she illustrates a remedy for the “bignes of the heart” (f.228r) with a fold-out drawing of a swollen heart. Similarly, she puts culinary and confectionary recipes under a separate heading, “Preserving and Coockery” (f.176r), and next to her recipe for a “quaking pudding,” she sketches a large pudding in a pot. Her organization and illustrations show her thinking about the two sections of receipts in parallel, each requiring illustration and explanation but located in separate parts of the volume.26 Distinctions between the culinary and medicinal recipe arose as the gradual influx of Paracelsian medicine (with its emphasis on chemical cures and treating a disease “retrospectively”) supplanted older Galenic theories about the nature of illness and its treatments (which emphasized “preventatively” balancing the body’s four humors).27 With the introduction of Paracelsian medicine and the wane in popularity of Galenic medicine, printed collections (as well as manuscript recipe collections) began showing a “distinct split between food as cookery and food as medicine, and between herbal preparations as medicine and chemical preparations as medicine.”28 Lynette Hunter argues that this shift happens early in the seventeenth century, and certainly, by the mid-1650s, printed recipe books, such as The Queens Closet Opened (1655) attributed to Queen Henrietta Maria, differentiated between the topics of medicine, food, and confectionary by sorting recipes into three separately titled sections. At about the same time as the printing of The Queens Closet, Mrs. Carlyon (who was possibly connected to the Arundel family) dedicates her receipt book exclusively to medicinal remedies, organizing her receipts according to the part of the body being treated, under headings such as, “eyes,” “heade,” “face,” “teeth,” and “throote,” and the absence of culinary receipts indicates that for Carlyon, the boundary or distinction between the two was a firm one.29 However, while Carlyon, Packer, and other women were separating their recipes topically, some continued to see cooking and medicine as intertwined since this paradigmatic shift in thinking was gradual and not instantaneous and absolute. For example, in 1681, Jane Dawson mixes both the culinary and medicinal in her table of contents. Under the letter “A,” she includes the recipes for cookery, “A good cake,” “Apricok Pye,” “Apple Cream,” as well as the medicinal, “A water for the scurvey.” She includes two medicinal receipts, one for “plague water” and another to make a “small tent” (for draining a wound), on the same page as a receipt for “a whit[e] pudding of rice” (f.63), and on the facing page, she includes other culinary receipts, such as “to stew a dish of pigeons” and another receipt to make “almond butter” (f.62v).30

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The continued elasticity of receipt books in terms of theme and organization allowed women to construct themselves as “expert” on anything having to do with the body under their care. The genre remained unstable for much of the early modern period because anything with specific “how-to” instructions could be a recipe enabling the author to construct a self as fluid and authoritative, drawing from multiple pools of specialized knowledge concerned with maintenance of the body. The picture of the self that emerges then is one closely involved in the quotidian activities of the house, an “art of dailyness,”31 demonstrating these women’s authority in such matters and how they managed bodies and health through their cooking and medicinal practice within the spaces of the early modern house. Along with the inherent hybridity of the subject matter, the collaborative nature of the receipt book also contributed to the flexibility of the genre and the writer’s sense of self. Like commonplace books, recipe collections muddy the line between authorship and ownership since owning the book and compiling it (with the help of friends, family, and other texts in manuscript and print) made the owner the “author” of the text as she generated her writing out of the texts and practices of others and as she derived authority from her established place in the house. Owners could individually compose receipts in their books, or as the book circulated among its coterie, they could invite a friend, family member, or other contributor to add to the collection, or they could ask a scribe to copy out a donated receipt (or even an entire collection). Recipes could be copied into bound notebooks (or even pinned in), or onto loose sheets of paper and bound together as a volume at a later date.32 Women often asserted their authorship/ownership of their collections on the title page or frontispiece of the notebook with signatures and epigraphs. Mary Baumfylde signs, titles, and dates her receipt collection, “Mary Baumfylde her booke June Anno 1626,” and she writes the phrase, “many hands hands,” and copies it several times down the middle of the page. This phrase with its repetition of the word “hands” signifies and enacts its meaning of multiplicity, and following Baumfylde’s signature and repeated epigraph, the book’s subsequent owners also sign their names: “Master Abraham: Sommers,” “Katherine Toster July 1707,” and “Katherine Thatcher 1712” (possibly Katherine Toster’s married name).33 Individual self-identity is at once written and represented on the page while at the same time it is absorbed within the other “hands hands” of later owners/authors. Lettice Pudsey, like Baumfylde, asserts herself as owner and author of her collection with her signature and epigraph, “Lettice Pudsey, her Booke of recipts, these following are written with my own hand” (f.7v), drawing attention to her ownership of the book and her own part in the material act of writing it. Attributions of ownership and of handwriting are important to Pudsey since under a receipt “to make bisketts,” copied in a different hand, she makes a note of the identity of the donor and writer of the receipt, “W[illiam] Oldfeld=His writing” (f.43v). This note along with Pudsey’s other marginalia indicating attribution and


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origin nods towards the collaborative nature of her collection (and indeed the collections of many of the women discussed here) and receipt practice.34 A receipt book’s primary “authorship” resided with its owner, the main person inventing, compiling, testing, and writing the recipes even as the receipt book circulated among its select coterie of readers (who were sometimes contributors), thus becoming a communal and social project. Though authorship was equivalent to ownership in the case of the receipt book, we can easily get lost in a Geertzian quest for origins (one that extends back indefinitely) if we attempt to determine which receipts were “original” inventions or writings by the author/owner.35 However, we can discern a partial picture of origins when an author/owner records “who” contributed the receipt and comments on the circumstances, as in the case of Pudsey (noted above) and in the case of Mary Granville, who often annotated her receipts. Under a “plaister for woundes,” she writes, “the receat I had from my sister Melborne in Essex by 12th of June 1683” (f.120r), and under the “voydinge of grauel and stone” (for a kidney or gall stone), she writes, “Captain Felpes lerned and procured” this receipt from the “Moirs when he was a slaue in Barbery” (f.122r).36 Yet this anecdote refuses to speak conclusively on origins since Captain Felpes learned this receipt from someone else, a nameless Moor in Africa, who himself or herself probably learned or heard of the receipt from another. So, an interpretation of any receipt book—like Geertz’s ethnographic analysis of a cultural system—is essentially incomplete, since the origins of a recipe (like the origins of a particular social tradition) remain distant and obscure. Even with this fundamental uncertainty shrouding the origins of individual recipes, we can still identify many primary owners/authors of receipt collections by name, since so many women signed and annotated their books (making them their “own”) and passed them as heirlooms from one generation of women to the next. A particular book might contain recipes spanning the course of a hundred years or more, as younger generations of women contributed to and edited their mothers’ collections. Mary Granville’s receipt book belonged to at least three generations of women: her mother, Mary herself, and her daughter, Anne D’Ewes. The receipts date from the early 1640s to the middle of the eighteenth century, and the variety of hands (and dates) indicate that each generation seems to have contributed and participated in familial receipt writing and practice.37 Lady Grace Mildmay left her extensive recipe collection to her daughter, Lady Mary Fane, Countess of Westmorland and after Mildmay’s death, Fane organized and annotated many of her mother’s loose papers and describes her mother’s receipt collection as an important part of her overall inheritance: “The treasure of this my worthy mother’s mind coming to my hands as well as all her worldly inheritances and goods, I was as desirous and careful to commend the first to her posterity’s view and imitation as I shall be careful to transfer unto them in time the latter; that the one by the other may be in them the more resplendent.”38 Dame Johanna St. John in her will (1704) ordered that her “great Receipt book”39 be left to her oldest daughter, Anne Cholmondeley, and that her “Book of receits of cookery and Preserves” be given to

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Joanna Soame, her granddaughter, while at the same time specifying that the other papers in her cabinet be burned, suggesting she valued her receipts more highly than other private writings.40 Nevertheless, the larger questions of authorship remain in these signed and often familial collections: How to access the extent of “self” that is revealed in these texts? How to determine the author’s sense of “self” when the authorship/ownership of the book was multiple and multiplying? While the genre reflects a self that defies easy boundaries or definitions of singleness, the receipt book still projects an insistent emphasis on the identity of the individual most especially through its concern with practice and personal experience of receipts (often expressed in the marginalia of “proved” and “probatum est,” or “it is proved,” “the best way”). In fact, the “proving” of a receipt allowed the individual to certify the receipts in her collection using her body (or the bodies of those under her care like family, servants, and neighbors) as a testing ground for efficacy, and it was a crucial part of receipt practice. Such testing was informed by an emerging empiricist model of knowledge and an emerging scientific method (advocated by Francis Bacon and his followers), which underscored the importance of personal observation and experiment to attain accurate information about natural phenomena.41 In their “proving” and experimenting with recipes, women were acting as scientists within their kitchens (which functioned as a type of early laboratory), distilling closets, and sickrooms.42 Lynette Hunter has pointed out connections between well-known women practitioners and men of science, such as Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, who kept two receipt books and had a laboratory built onto the back of her house in London while her brother Robert Boyle (a scientist and future member of the Royal Society) was living with her. Queen Henrietta Maria patronized many men of science, and as noted earlier, a book of recipes attributed to her was printed in 1655, and the title page of The Queens closet opened recognizes the social value accorded to the proving and testing of recipes through practice when it claims that the book’s recipes “were honoured with [the Queen’s] own practice, when she pleased to descend to these more private recreations.”43 Indeed, in their collections, women repeatedly emphasize individual practice and experience of receipts. At the beginning of her receipt book under her signature, Packer writes, “Reade gather and make careful practice,” and her marginalia indicate that she did try out the receipts in her cooking and medicinal practice. She records the word “prooued” in the margins next to many of the recipes, and she writes, “probatum est” under “A fine receipt for the falling sickness” (f.228).44 Carlyon titles her collection similarly to Packer’s emphasizing practice and proving of the receipts: “A Booke of Such medicines as haue been approved by the speciall practice” and follows it with her signature.45 Her use of the word “approued” (along with other annotations, marginalia, cross-outs, and notes next to the receipts) indicates her extensive self-testing of medicinal remedies. On the other hand, Mary Granville, the daughter of Sir Martin


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Wescombe, sheepishly refers to her lack of use of the book in her inscription to her daughter, Ann. Mary writes, “Mrs. Ann Granville Book which I hope she will make a better use of then her mother.” Underneath this is a later inscription in italic hand; perhaps, after Ann married, she resigned it, “now Anne Dewes Bradley” and then dated it “8 Sept 1746.” The many annotations, hash marks, and notes (“the best way” and “probatum est”) in an italic hand next to the older receipts written in Mary’s mixed hand indicate that Ann did indeed take her mother’s advice to use the receipt book well. Under a receipt, “To Make an Admirable Good Water Against Melancholy,” Mary writes, “It is very good for them that are heauy hearted and have a heauiness in their spirits; take two or three spoonesfull att a time and it will comfort you very much.” Ann follows this with a note on her own proving of the receipt, “Probatum est” (f.12r).46 Like Ann Granville, Lady Brilliana Harley records her self-testing of receipts. Under a cosmetic receipt for a lip balm, “An Exelent pumatum for ye lipps that be sore or ruff” (calling for the use of beeswax, unsalted butter, and raisins), she states, “I haue found this very exelent” (f.6).47 Women also recorded when a receipt did not work, canceling it out by drawing a line through it. Lettice Pudsey, under a failed receipt “to pickle cucumbers,” includes a comment, “this receipt is good for nothing” (f.56), and subsequently puts a line through the entire recipe, crossing it out of her collection.48 In these collections by Pudsey, Harley, Granville, Carlyon, and Packer, we see women foregrounding individual testing and personal experience of the receipt through their recording of whether a receipt is “proved” to be effective or not. Recipe writing and practice was thus a specialized type of self-certification, one encouraged by the “new ideas” of the Scientific Revolution, “a mechanical philosophy” that “validated the ‘maker’s knowledge’ (verum factum) model of scientific explanation, the maxim of reasoning according to which to know something means knowing how to make it.”49 Women generated “maker’s” knowledge about their bodies and their selves through experimentation and practice with recipes. Through the process of self-certification of receipts, they constructed and established themselves as authorities on matters relating to the body, capable of effecting positive change, healing or improving the body for the better. As Paster has observed in her study of the importance of bodily shame in the shaping of the early modern subject, the relationship of the early modern self to body was a fundamental one. She writes, “often what goes on within the body ‘goes without saying’ because it goes on daily, habitually, involuntarily, and universally, in this respect, bodiliness is the most rudimentary form of self presence.”50 Such self-presence is expressed in women’s many medicinal receipts for body and especially those for the female body. These receipts were particularly concerned with what might be termed “womanly” complaints—the pains of childbirth, breast fever, conception, and managing menstruation—that would have dominated much of a woman’s mature life. Carlyon includes eight receipts under the listing, “breste,” such as a remedy “to cure an olde Soore in the Breste and to

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Helpe the Rupture or Brokennesse” (f.49r) and another “To dry up a womans milke in childebedd” (f.50r), a receipt especially useful to elite and middle-class women who did not nurse their children, instead sending them to professional wetnurses.51 Baumfylde’s receipt, “To deliuer a woaman of a dead child,” calls for “Leeke blades” and instructs the reader to “skale them in hott water and binde them” to the pregnant woman’s “nauell and she shalbe deliuered.” Baumfylde cautions, “take them soone away, or they will cause her to cast all in her belly” (f.8), a warning which could be a coded reference to how the remedy might work in reverse and abort an unwanted pregnancy.52 Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, has a remedy to ease labor pains; under a section titled, “the medicinale parts of a woolff for tootheake, colick, speedy deliuerance,” she writes, “his flesh, a little given to a woman to eate that is in childbearing, how difficult soever it be, will make her suddenly to be delivered both of the child and afterbirth” (f.6).53 Such receipts posit the female body as healing (and heal-able), offering a possible corrective to Paster’s study of the humoral self as grounded in the experience of shame. The positive self that is expressed in these receipt books is capable of mending the fragile, humoral body, including the body of the practitioner (the “I” doing the proving, testing, and writing) and the bodies of those under her care. Such a benign view of the body and female self as constructed by the text (and practices) of the receipt book offers a contrast to Paster, Sawday, and other social historians and literary critics who have uncovered the many negative understandings of the self (physical, spiritual, and cultural) that existed in the early modern period. Such beliefs about the vulnerability of the self—beliefs which were theologically and medically codified—were certainly influencing the writers of receipt books and shaping their related culinary and medicinal practices. Yet the genre of the “how-to” recipe enabled women to counter such constructs of the body and self and instead imagine both as a healable whole and not just as a leaky vessel and fragmented subject in need of stringent regulation. This holistic philosophy is expressed by Mildmay who discusses her distaste for violent methods of humoral regulation, like “extreme purges” in the following: Whereby humours are stirred and made to fly up to the head, heart and spirits to the great molestation of all the said principal parts, by purging away the thin and leaving the thick behind.... So that the physic which bringeth the body and parts thereof into an union in itself, by little and little, worketh the most safe and effectual operation of the preservation thereof, without any danger and with the greatest hope to cure any disease in the end, except God determine the same to be incurable.54

Mildmay prefers a moderate course of physic for the body, and for her (and for many of the women who kept receipt books) the ultimate goal of medical practice (and receipt practice in general) was to bring the warring humors of the body together “into an union in itself.” Mildmay’s move towards wholeness is representative of many of the other medicinal remedies for female bodies that


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appear in receipt books and positively construct or even “prove” that the leaky, vulnerable, humoral body can exist as balanced, well, and intact. In this essay, I have pointed to the fluidity and flexibility of both the receipt book genre and the early modern selves it served and fashioned. The flexibility of the receipt book genre fostered a correspondingly fluid self constructed as positive, authoritative, and capable of healing (and being healed) through the writing, practice, proving, and exchange of medicinal and culinary receipts. The genre came to be closely associated with the work of the early modern house, where women were accepted as authorities in matters of household management including the related areas of cooking and medicine. Thus the receipt book as a genre was particularly accessible to early modern women in their search for modes for self-expression within a profoundly religious society that discouraged individual self-identification or self-celebration. The physical “form” of the receipt collection as a bound notebook may have further enabled introspection; Roger Smith writes, “the book itself, like the letter, significantly enhanced a person’s capacity to become self-absorbed and self-aware, that is to become individual.”55 In the pages of the receipt book, we see early modern women in the process of becoming “individual” within their communities of family and coterie and through the shared exchange and practice of the recipe.

Notes I am very much indebted to Jane Donawerth, Michelle Dowd, Julie Eckerle, and William Sherman for their advice, criticism, and help with this essay. 1

2 3 4

5 6

Roger Smith, “Self-Reflection and the Self,” Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 49–60, esp. p. 52. Jonathan Sawday, “Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century,” Rewriting the Self, pp. 29–48, esp. p. 30. Gail Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004), p. 19. On the use of the term “autobiography” (first coined in 1807) to describe self-writings in the early modern period, see the introduction by Henk Dragstra, Shelia Ottway, and Helen Wilcox to Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Dragstra et al (New York: St. Martins, 2000), pp. 1–13. Dragstra, Ottway, and Wilcox argue that many personal texts from the period can be seen as the “beginnings of autobiography” or as a type of “embryonic autobiography reflecting a nascent, incipient, or even ur-modernity of spirit” (9). Shelia Ottway, “Autobiography,” A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 231–47, esp. p. 231. For a general discussion of women’s authorial strategies, see Kristen Poole, “‘The fittest closet for all goodness’: Authorial Strategies of Jacobean Mothers’ Manuals,” SEL 35.1 (1995): 69–88; and Elizabeth Sauer, “Maternity, Prophecy, and the Cultivation of the

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Private Sphere in Seventeenth-Century England,” Exploration in Renaissance Culture 24 (1998): 119–48. For studies on women’s use of the private space of the home to authorize public writing or speaking, see Helen Wilcox, “Literature and the Household,” The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 737–63, esp. p. 759; Katharine Gillespie, “Anna Trapnel’s Window on the Word: The Domestic Sphere of Public Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Non-Conformity,” Bunyan Studies 7 (1997): 49–77; and Helen Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen,” Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992), pp. 47–62. 7 Wilcox, “Literature and the Household,” p. 737. 8 William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), p. 161. 9 Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (Including the Forme of Cury), ed. Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler (London: Oxford UP for the Early English Texts Society, 1985). For a modern cookbook derived from Forme of Cury, see Lorna S. Hass, To the King’s Taste: Richard II’s Book of Feasts Adapted for Modern Cooking (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975). 10 This is the Boke of Cokery: Here beginneth a noble boke of festes royalle and Cokery a boke for a pryncis householde or any other estates; and the makynge therof as ye shall fynde more playnly within this boke (London, 1500). For a discussion on the emerging genre of printed cookbooks, see Robert Appelbaum, “Rhetoric and Epistemology in Early Printed Recipe Collections,” JEMCS 3.2 (2003): 1–35; and for a discussion of cookbooks, gender, and the (related) politics of sugar, see Kim Hall, “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,” Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 168–90, esp. p. 171; and Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 18–58. 11 For more on the popularity of women’s printed cookbooks after 1660, see Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writings 1646–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 165–89. On the popularity of early modern printed “how-to” technical manuals on cookery, silkworm production, and husbandry, see Elizabeth Tebeaux, “Women and Technical Writing, 1475–1700: Technology, Literacy, and Development of a Genre,” Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1997), pp. 29–62. See also Lynette Hunter, “Books for Daily Life: Household, Husbandry, and Behaviour,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, ed. John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 514–32. 12 Jennifer Stine, Opening Closets: The Discovery of Household Medicine in Early Modern England (Diss., Stanford U, 1996), p. 110. Stine dated 97 collections and their owners with accuracy; 26 of the books were “written on or before 1650,” and 71 were written after 1650. For another archival study of the receipt book, see Sara Pennell, The Material Culture of Food in Early Modern England, Circa 1650–1750 (Diss., U of Oxford, 1997), esp. pp. 23–8. Elaine Leong is currently generating a handlist of over 250 early modern manuscript collections of recipes (belonging to both men and women)


13

14

15 16

17

18 19 20 21

22

23 24

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in her dissertation, Medical Remedy Collections in Seventeenth-Century England: Knowledge, Text, and Gender (Diss., U of Oxford, 2005). Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,” New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), pp. 131–47, esp. p. 131. Peter Beal writes, “The period has justly been described as embodying a ‘notebook culture,’ for the practice of keeping notebooks and commonplace books in general was one of the most widespread activities of the educated classes in England” (131). For more on the relationship of humanist reading practices to the receipt book, see Leong. Sir Edward Dering includes recipes in his commonplace book (1656–1662), HM 41536, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. For more about the general contents of commonplace books, see William Sherman, Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collections (Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew, 1994); Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven: UP of New England, 2001); and Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Wilcox, “Literature and the Household,” pp. 751–2. Bathsua Makin printed An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen in 1673, which stressed the importance of educating women in the study of classical learning and in the arts, and in her appended advertisement for her women’s school she writes: “Those that please, may learn Limning, Preserving, Pastry, and Cookery” (303). See Frances Teague, “Woman of Learning: Bathsua Makin,” Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Katharine M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989), pp. 285–304. Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–1620 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), esp. pp. 1–22, p. 26. William Turner’s New Herball was a popular guide to herbs which was printed in 1551. Margaret Pelling, “Thoroughly Resented? Older Women and the Medical Role in Early Modern London,” Women, Science, and Medicine, pp. 63–88, esp. p. 70. Stine, p. 108. Pollock, p. 93. Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), esp. pp. 189–224; and Pollock, pp. 92–109. Mary Anne Caton states: “The way to health was a balanced body; that balance was modified by the composition of one’s diet, for each food had a humor, or character, that defined its proper medicinal and culinary uses. Thus, recipes for medical treatments appear alongside those for table-top dishes in many ... [Renaissance] collections of recipes.” See “Introduction: ‘For Profit and Pleasure’: Changes in Food and Farming,” Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Caton and Joan Thirsk (Seattle: U of Washington P, 2000), pp. 9–12, esp. p. 9. Pelling, “Thoroughly Resented?,” p. 72. When women strayed outside of the house to practice medicine and charged a fee, they sometimes ran into problems with the authorities and the College of Royal Physicians. See Pelling, Medical Conflicts.

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25 Dorothy Lewkenore, Book of Medicinal and Culinary Receipts (1576), MS Ashmole 1477, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England. 26 Katherine Packer, Medicinal and Cookery Recipe Book (1639), Folger MS v.a. 387, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 27 For Galenic and Paracelsian theories of medicine in early modern England, see Andrew Wear, Knowledge & Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), esp. pp. 46–103. 28 Lynette Hunter, “Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570–1620,” Women, Science, and Medicine, pp. 89–107, esp. p. 96. 29 Stine speculates that this manuscript, which is identical to a presentation copy belonging to the Countess of Arundel, demonstrates a connection between the Arundels and the Carlyon family, “a gentry family from Cornwell, a region where the Howard family actively supported other Catholic families” (146). See Mrs. Carlyon, A Booke with such medicines as haue been approued by the speciall practice (c. 1660), Folger MS v.a. 398, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 30 Jane Dawson, Recipe Book (1681), Folger MS v.b. 14, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 31 The art historian Ann Vollmann Bible has used this phrase to describe the work of the artist Gabriele Münter in Cakewalking into Representation: Gabriele Münter’s America Travels (1898–1900) and Art of Dailiness (Diss., MIT, 2007). 32 For example, the receipt for a “wound drink” in Jane Dawson’s receipt book is pinned in sideways (f.81r). 33 Mary Baumfylde, Medical and Cookery Recipes (1626), Folger MS v.a. 456, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 34 Lettice Pudsey, Cookery and Medical Recipe Book (c. 1675), Folger MS v.a. 450, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 35 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973). See esp. pp. 3–32. 36 Mary Granville and Anne Granville D’Ewes, Recipe Book (1640–1750), Folger MS v.a. 430, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 37 Ibid. 38 Pollock, p. 110. 39 Johanna St. John, Johanna St. John Her Book (1680), MS 2990, Wellcome Historical Medical Library, London. I am grateful to Melissa Hull for this reference. 40 Frank T. Smallwood, “The Will of Dame Johanna St. John,” Notes and Queries 16.9 (1969): 344–47, esp. 346. Harold Love speculates that St. John’s instructions for the other papers to be burned indicates the high social (and most likely material) value put on the family receipt books, and his reading of this seems to be valid especially in light of the fact that many women (such as Mildmay and Granville, cited above) left their receipt books (which included not only recipes but sometimes family records) to their daughters and granddaughters, suggesting that such texts with their “how-to” knowledge of medicine and cooking were of particular value. However valuable she may have considered the other private papers in her cabinet, St. John did not choose for them to be preserved as textual and familial inheritance for her daughter and granddaughter as she did in the case of her receipt books. See Love, Scribal Publication in SeventeenthCentury England (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993), p. 58.


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41 On recipe practice as scientific experiment, see Lynette Hunter, “Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh,” Women, Science, and Medicine, pp. 178–97. 42 Hunter, “Sisters of the Royal Society,” p. 183. 43 W.M., The Queens Closet Opened (London, 1655). 44 Packer, Medicinal and Cookery Recipe Book. 45 Carlyon, A Booke with such medicines. 46 Granville and Granville D’Ewes, Recipe Book. 47 “Grandmother Harley” and Thomas Davies, Medical Recipes (1680), Egerton 2214, British Library, London. 48 Pudsey, Cookery and Medical Recipe Book. 49 Eamon, p. 10. 50 Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), p. 5. 51 Carlyon, A Booke with such medicines. 52 Baumfylde, Medical and Cookery Recipes. This receipt is numbered “8” and appears at the beginning of the collection. It appears to be in Baumfylde’s hand and probably dates from the first half of the seventeenth century. 53 Katherine Jones, Lady Rannelagh’s choise receipts, also some of Captain Willis; who valued them aboue gold (seventeenth century), MS Sloane 1367, British Library, London. 54 Pollock, p. 110. 55 Smith, p. 55.


Chapter 5

Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford Megan Matchinske

And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell therein. (Isaiah 58.12)1

In 1661, a by now 71-year-old Lady Anne Clifford acknowledges in her diary one in an endless line of temporal and spatial firsts: The same 14th day of this October about 9 a clock in the morning … did I remove out of Appleby Castle in Westmerland into Pendraggon Castle in the same Countie, where I now lay in the second Storie that looks East and South, for three nights together. … This being the first time I lay in the said Pendraggon Castle since it was lately repared and made habitable by mee … after it had layen desolate ever since the 15th yeare of Edward the third in 1341, which is 320 yeares agoe. (152–4)

Traversing place and position, Clifford’s recollection measures incremental and dynastic time by charting her detailed movement across her properties. From Appleby to Pendragon, she navigates, names, and prioritizes. On one hand time is everywhere hailed—“now,” “since,” “after,” “agoe.” On the other, Clifford’s progression largely refuses specific temporal terms. While we are informed that she begins her journey at “about 9 a clock in the morning” and that it marks a first (“this being the first time”), she simultaneously alludes to time in sweeping terms: this particular estate “had layen desolate” for 320 years prior to her arrival.2 The reason for the absence of local time-specifics resides in part in the attenuated nature of recording that was employed throughout the Kendall Diary. Not a series of diurnal entries per se, Clifford’s travelogue had probably been culled from a sporadic and largely informal daily register and collated at a moment when the nuances of individual events would have faded.3 Still, forgetfulness does not begin

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to explain Clifford’s serial obsession with such wanderings or the epic sweep of temporal registers she employs in detailing them. It does not account for her peculiar and repeated substitution of time with space or for the value she accords to material landmarks in her temporal landscape. Spatially rendered time looms large in the construction of Clifford’s autobiographical musings; it determines to a great extent the formal and generic characteristics of Clifford’s particular brand of diary writing. In the immediate present of Clifford’s narrative (her arrivals, departures, and sojourns), duration is marked by momentum and location—by the directed trajectory that Clifford’s diary traces through rooms, castles, parks, towns, and shires. The overall effect is an odd one. We wonder why Clifford feels compelled to reiterate each and every point en route and what purpose these way stations serve in the grand scheme of things. We wonder why each action requires historical positioning—this before that, there before here, the first before the rest. We wonder, in fact, what these temporal renderings finally are supposed to “mean” to their various audiences. For detail her progresses she did, repeatedly reviewing and updating her serial navigations in order to leave for posterity a “telling” record of her habitation and travel.4 Clifford’s serial musings draw attention to two points to which I shall return in this essay. First, Clifford’s diary writing actively creates for her an embodied, temporally responsible, and spatially attentive identity; it marks her experiences (as a woman located within a system of primogeniture) as both meaningful and productive and suggests the costs that such definition requires over the long haul. Second, Clifford’s autobiographical form in its peculiar iterative patterning delineates a new kind of personal history, one that is future-oriented, unfinished, and peculiarly suited to female needs. Cumulative, activist, and anticipatory, Clifford’s diary entries ask us to pay attention to the formal constituents of time, place, and personhood in the making and remaking of early modern female historical identity.

Lady Anne Clifford spent a considerable portion of her life embroiled in lawsuits attempting to recover her father’s extensive landholdings after they had been transferred out of her hands and into the possession of his younger brother Francis. With no living sons of his own, Clifford’s father had willed the family properties to his titular heir apparent, the next earl in the Clifford line. His decision was hardly unusual or impractical. In England, inherited title almost always followed male tail. Francis would become the fourth earl of Cumberland upon his brother’s death, and as earl, Francis would need the support of an undivided family legacy.5 Fortunately for Clifford, her father’s decision to bypass daughter for brother was not entirely his to make. Key properties within the estate had been fee granted by Edward II in 1311 as heir general inheritance and were still vested in the crown. Such grants could not be executed by special entails and could not bar entails

The Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford

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already in place by fine and recovery. 6 Put simply, at least some of the Clifford properties had already been spoken for in tail general and Clifford was, as the only surviving child of her father, the last in that heritable line. Despite the legal validity of her case, Clifford would not reacquire the majority of her family’s holdings for many years—37 to be exact. Still, Clifford’s father and uncle miscalculated badly when they neglected to do their historical homework and failed to look to the past to authorize the right of transfer from brother to brother. Because Clifford did not make the same mistake, her findings eventually proved difficult to ignore. In a legal sense, then, history gave her ammunition in court for a lengthy and protracted battle over the properties in question; it kept her from signing away her rights when the king’s decision over possession did not go her way; and it offered her moral ballast to counter the public outcry born of that stubborn refusal. For while Clifford most certainly had a legitimate case against her father’s will making, it was not one of which most of her contemporaries approved. Flying in the face of both public opinion and royal prerogative, Clifford’s legal wranglings openly defied conventional rules of primogeniture, female coverture, and social decorum, and they did so chronically and conspicuously. The correlation between Clifford’s appropriation of history, the generic shape of her diary writing, and her struggles to reclaim her lands cannot be overstated. A testimonial to the process of historical recovery and a means to explain herself during the most heated moments of her struggle, Clifford’s accounts serve an evidentiary role in the process of self-justification. Maintained on and off throughout much of her disenfranchisement, Clifford’s autobiographies no doubt provided solace to a woman at odds with the majority of her peers, validating the particulars of her life in light of that uncertain status. Her earliest account from this period, the Knole Dairy, best represents this authorizing principle. In it Clifford recounts her various confrontations with husband and king in her efforts to recuperate her inheritance. The substance of her daily entries involves her repeated attempts to avoid settlement of the case, her journeys to and from London on behalf of her claims, and her interactions with both friends and enemies during the tense proceedings against her.7 In these early entries we encounter firsthand some of the difficulties that Clifford had to face—moments where the injustice of her situation shines through—in the terse account of her husband’s refusal to come to her bed (54); in the submerged fury she voices describing her dealings with her husband’s favorite attendant, the sycophantic Matthew Caldicott (54); and in the undercurrent of anxiety we see in her response to the news that her daughter, Lady Margaret, will be taken from her (32). While it is fairly safe to assume that Clifford begins the Knole account to vindicate her own precarious position as litigant and obstructer and that issues of law inform every aspect of her writing, Clifford’s diaries continue long after she has recovered her father’s properties, ending only with her death in 1676. In point of fact, Clifford’s serial musings seem to gain in momentum as she settles into her

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new life; it is also during this later period when the temporal and spatial relationships that she navigates intensify, becoming longer and more material in the matter they describe. Inheritance secure and public opinion about her actions at least quiescent, Clifford nevertheless reiterates again and again and again her embodied connection to her lands. So what might this generic predisposition suggest? Why does the serial form continue to satisfy even after Clifford’s estate is securely in her hands?

Clifford’s sense of identity is imbricated in notions of deep history—in an ancestral connection to family origin.8 Her links to the past assure her of name and of legacy. At the same time, her discursive identification of place after place, this before that, offers material evidence—historically verifiable and legally valid evidence—of the justness of her claims. From the start, Clifford’s ability to make a legal case for her inheritance rights depends on historical precedent: during her initial legal battle, it depended on the documentary evidence of earlier land transfers (the paper trail that led from past to present). In the aftermath of that battle, however, the material fact of Clifford’s history matters more. Legal precedent becomes embodied potentiality; now proof rests on the written and repeated verification of Clifford’s lands as continuing in her possession. Where she “layen” last month has everything to do with where she will “lay” tonight and tomorrow, and both have to be meticulously documented. From the Great Books of Record, with their summary histories, genealogies, and memorializations, to the funerary monuments, plaques, and restored buildings that were her life’s work, Clifford actively uses the past.9 Hiring professional antiquaries like William Dugdale, Roger Dodsworth, and St. Loe Kniveton to help her gather information and organize it, she generates personal archives notable for their extensive scholarly apparatus, for their accumulated evidentiary proof.10 The Great Books draw on materials from fines, charters, pleas, inquisitions, patent rolls, close rolls, and exchequer documents, identifying the origin and location of almost every source in marginal reference.11 Accuracy is further authenticated through repetition. Clifford returns again and again to the histories she has already produced, adding, deleting, or reorganizing information each time she reengages with her writing. Hers is an ongoing process of archival collection and recollection.12 In a practical sense the diurnal form accommodates Clifford’s obsessive need for serial justification; it feeds into the citational impulse. For her, private history is an unfinished narrative particularly suited to castle counting and new beginnings. Written in successive installments at more or less regular intervals, Clifford’s serial rhapsodies spend little time processing information. Though narrative structure may very well be present within the countess’s perambulations, these moments offer readers little synthetic understanding. This is true of most diaries, whether written by men or by women. But diary-entry autobiography is far from ubiquitous


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at the time that Clifford is writing, especially for women. Indeed, female seriality may require a vigilance that does not sit all that easily with early modern women autobiographers. Of the over 100 autobiographical accounts written between 1550 and 1700 that I have looked at, only four of 31 female-authored accounts could be said to be serial in format.13 The other 27 tend to be memorial in structure, employing a defense/apology format to justify the detailing of private experience. Part of the reason that early modern women autobiographers avoid serial representation stems, I think, from the apparent amorality of the diurnal form. In serial writing iterative patterns tell us what sorts of subjects will be repeated across entries (in Clifford’s case, travel, property upkeep, visitors, and so on), but rarely do we find any attempt to extrapolate from lessons learned in one entry to the next or to render much in the way of absolute judgment. Unlike a more explicitly memorial form, then, serial navigations do not speak from a single vantage point as they look back over the whole of a life; they do not by and large reminisce.14 The same can be said to some extent in Clifford’s case, though here with an interesting twist. Clifford’s serial entries don’t evoke “an already over” or even “a soon to be completed” memorial truth (what we might find in a memoir where the life narrative is at its end looking back), but neither are they simply processual or unregarding in the matter that they address. Rather, Clifford’s diaries offer constant and repetitive pronouncements that operate directionally, spatially, and metaphorically in opposition to patrilineal networks that would regularly deny such connections. Despite Clifford’s predilection for serializing, she does not embrace time as sequence, as one thing after another. She does not imagine personal history as uninterrupted process. Instead, and this too is crucial, Clifford’s diary conceptually embraces firsts and forwards, employing origin and trajectory to reanimate serial history as ethical and dynastic momentum. In her diaries, she accumulates titles (Countess Dowager of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomerie; Baroness Clifford, Vesci, and Veteripont, High Sheriffess of Westmoreland), and she reckons in a series that amplifies rather than merely accumulates listings. Linking together several events in a temporal chain of spatial relationships, Clifford actively builds/rebuilds her properties, her heritage, and herself. She places monuments and plaques everywhere—to commemorate her tutor Samuel Daniel, her father, her mother, her renovations—and she replicates those founding impulses within the discursive constraints of the autobiographical form. Seven years after her last male cousin Henry, Lord Clifford, dies, leaving Clifford free to reclaim her inheritance, she makes her way back to her properties for the very first time: And ye 11th day of July 1649 … did I go out of London onwards on my journey towards Skipton … [arriving on] ye 18th day of ye month into my Castle there, it being ye first time of my coming into it after ye pulling down of most of ye old castle. … And I was never till now in any part of ye castle since I was 9 or 10 weeks old. (100)

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Despite or perhaps because of its red-letter status, Clifford’s “first” arrival at her estates is far from atypical; it begins an almost endless litany of founding moments—of conceptual “firsts,” all of them deeply temporal. Arriving at Skipton after a seven-day journey, Clifford interestingly announces origin in what is also an end (her entry begins only once her travels to her inheritance are over). At the same time, she posits the passage’s most immediate presence, “now,” as different than what has come before (“never … since I was 9 or 10 weeks old”). In the proliferation of firsts that mark Clifford’s diary, these doublings take on a multitude of forms. To illustrate this point, I’d like to return for a moment to the passage with which I began. In the 1661 entry, Clifford’s assertion about “this being the first time I lay in Pendraggon Castle since it was lately repared” is driven by two largely antithetical directives: initially by a backward-looking recollection of the castle’s unfortunate past (she tells us that it “had layen desolate” since 1341) and secondarily by an unspoken anticipation of what will follow “now” that she has begun its upkeep. Significantly, Clifford shifts in the latter case to an absolute construction—a construction that uses the nonfinite verb form, specifically unmarked for tense—to keep the action open and unfinished. Instead of telling us once and for all “this was the first time that I arrived,” she positions herself in the middle of an ongoing process, “this being the first time.” Clifford is right. In her diaries there will be other times, lots of them, of that we can rest assured. Indeed, while Clifford describes her initial stay in Skipton or Pendragon as noteworthy, almost any action will qualify as a first in this diary and most do: the first time in residence when an Assize is in session; the first time a Judge or other person “of Note and Quality” visits her (122); the first time the sacrament is received in a particular chapel (155); the first time Christmas is celebrated at a particular location (168); the first time a grandchild who is an Earl visits her (172); the first time a grandchild who sits in the House of Commons visits her (Spence, 230); even the first time any of her children have come “so far Northwards” to visit her (194). In calling attention to primacy, Clifford gestures both backwards and forwards, initially to the moment of instantiation that marks the occasion and ultimately to its denouement, evoked in the open-ended trajectory of the initial assertion. In the Diaries, origin promises futurity. After all, firsts only matter if they anticipate a series of seconds, thirds, and fourths. Firsts only signify in terms of what is yet to come. Clifford’s serial recitations follow the trajectory they do precisely because she wants to educate her readers at one and the same time that the places she describes become ends in and of themselves. Her diary moves toward emplotment despite the fact that its serial form would seem to prohibit such directive thinking.15 In each of her serial tellings, Clifford explodes the narrative past—the point at which events come together to make up a first—into a generic recitation that is at once historical, pedagogical, and anticipatory. She initiates a temporally full


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moment of beginnings and endings that alludes to and sometimes overtly proclaims the fact of her landed identity, promising in that assertion a continuation of its propertied effects. No matter how long Clifford’s lands remain in her possession, the moment of their acquisition never drops away. Inheritance—a transfer of property and identity that itself begins in death—continues metaphorically throughout the diary’s entries, shaping their generic matter in substantive and irrevocable ways. It is essential that Clifford see her property and her posterity as continuing into the future. Were either to stop, none of the work that she takes on as family historian would matter. The past, then, is not the be-all and end-all of this account despite its obvious centrality in Clifford’s serial narrative. That her eldest daughter is the mother of ten children offers proof positive that Clifford’s legacy will continue and further authorizes her role and responsibility as legacy keeper.16 At one point, ruminating on her three primary residences (Skipton, Appleby, and Brougham), Clifford takes an opportunity to think historically about her pleasures, seeing them as a legacy to be passed along, from days of “old” to “succeeding Providence”: which humour of mine I do [wish] with all my heart (if it bee the Will of Almightie God) may be conferred on my Posteritie that are to succeed mee in these places, for a Wife and lady oneself, to make their owne houses the place of Selfe fruition and bee comfortably parte of this Life. But this must be left to a Succeeding Providence, for none can know what shall come after them. Eccles. 3.22. But to invite them to itt that saying in the 16th Psalme, vv 5, 6, 7, and 8, may bee fittingly applied: “This Lott is fallen unto mee in a pleasant place. I have a fair Heritage.” And I may truly say that here: From many Noble Progenitors I hold / Transmitted Lands, Castle, and Honours, which they sway’d of old.

Blurring the lines between herself and succeeding generations of “Wi[ves] and lad[ies],” Clifford imagines the possibility of “Selfe fruition” in her “transmitted lands” as the uncertain domain of “a Succeeding Providence.” She creates a point of origin that gestures into the future yet depends on the past for its impetus: All which Benefitts have been bestowen upon mee for the heavenly goodness of my Deare Mother, whose fervent prayers were offered upp with greater zeale to Almighty God for mee and mine, and had such return of Blessings followed them, as that though I mett with some bitter and Wicked Enemies and many greate oppositions in this world, yet were my Deliverance so greate, as would not befall to any who were not visibly susteyned by a Divine favour from above. (112)

Clifford’s “Lott” has already been drawn; it and the account she writes of it are a historical testament to her continued godliness. She has been given this “fair Heritage,” this surfeit of “pleasant place[s],” through the “heavenly goodness” of her “Deare Mother.” To accommodate the “divine” trajectory of her inheritance,

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Clifford must throw the narrative forward, requiring her daughter’s continued fertility to justify her efforts in the future, and backward, to a mother who is imagined at the root of all God’s present and future goodness.17 Obviously Clifford cares deeply about the past and her relation to it as inheritor. But her diaries do not display the kind of dependence on the past that we have come to associate with history in its more traditional forms (citation, objectivity, critical distance), nor for that matter does the serial diary seem the best generic choice to document the past and put it to rest. Her use of the form despite these concerns suggests that ancestral history is only relevant in the continuation of the family line through and beyond Clifford. To some extent, she sees herself as both end point and origin in recovering and rectifying corruptions of the distant past as well as those of the current moment. What interests me about these formulations is the odd push-pull between cause and effect, between posterior and anterior, between ancestor and inheritor. In her diaries Clifford creates a temporally full “space” (and I use that term intentionally)—a space that relies on the past, authorizing itself in relation to what comes before, but more pertinently locates itself as the moment of origin, a “henceforth”—from this time onward. Indeed, Clifford repeatedly uses the Clifford family motto, Desormais (“henceforth”) to record her success. The insignia, marking the entryway to the Outer Gatehouse at Skipton Castle, Clifford’s premier property, suggests the centrality of that gesture forward in her sense of identity. Clifford’s place- and time-obsessed diaries start and stop, marking each destination in cumulative and amplifying order. It is not simply that Clifford wants us to see that her properties are her properties, rightfully inherited and legally secured. Were that enough her claims could be established once and for all; they could be memorialized and put to rest. But Clifford’s travels between and across estates are not memorial; they are chronic and continual, and her bodily presence at each juncture en route illustrates the significance of every new arrival, the singular importance of each potential way station. In one of her most involved traversals of time, place, and personhood, an 83-year-old Clifford explains: After I had layen in Brougham Castle in Westmerland in ye chamber wherein my Noble father was born and my Blessed Mother dyed … did I goe … into the middle room in the great Pagan Tower, there where my old servant Jane Bricknell dyed … from thence through the little passage room … down into the Court of that Castle, where I went into my Horslitter in which I rid … along by the Pillar I erected in memory of my last parting there with my Blessed Mother, and through Whinfield Park and by the Hartshorn Tree … and through the entry and so, out of the park crossing the Rivers of Lyvennett and Eden, I went through Kirbythure, Crackenthorp, Battleburgh and over Appleby Bridge … into Appleby Castle, whither I came … about 3 in the afternoon. (219)

From pagan tower to passage room, from Pillar to park, Clifford traverses her properties repeatedly and exhaustively. What seems to matter most is that she keeps moving.18 While her serial navigations between identifying markers appear


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non-continuous and non-narrative, almost staccato in their formulation, they are, nevertheless, history-obsessed, tracing a direct line between past and future. In the passage above, Clifford’s chamber recalls both her father’s birth and her mother’s death; the middle room, her servant Jane Bricknell’s last illness; the hartshorn tree, King Edward III’s hunting visit to one of Clifford’s estates (139). The Countess’s Pillar, mentioned in the middle of her daylong sojourn, is particularly evocative. While it reminds Clifford of her last parting with her mother, it also serves as a general landmark within the estates registering for passersby any number of arrivals and departures, of reunions and separations. For Clifford, the Countess’s Pillar literally embodies the passage of time. With a painted sundial on three of its four faces and a memento mori skull on its remaining side, the pillar stands in effect as community timekeeper—a reminder of what has passed and a marker of what is yet to come. The range of time stutters that occurs in each of Clifford’s serial pronouncements suggests to readers connections across time and place. Each halted embodiment (into the middle room, through the passage, along by the pillar, and so on) records movement as duration from a point somewhere in the past to a point that has not yet arrived. This lack of closure is reinforced by the seriality of the diurnal form itself in that it makes no effort to offer up any sort of completed thought process. Instead, Clifford uses ruptures of place and time to establish a historic truth that is as Kelly Oliver notes always “a future anterior”: it will have been in the past so that it might become down the road.19 Unstated throughout Clifford’s account is the effect toward which every cause is directed (presumably the maintenance and improvement of the family legacy through wise and continuing stewardship). Futurity is evidenced here in every breathless pause. Beyond the confines of Clifford’s diaries and regardless of her preeminence as titular Lady of her Lands, England’s legal system carried on much as it had. Laws of primogeniture continued to presume that property would descend from fathers to sons; the doctrine of attraction, that principal honors like the Cumberland earldom should by right encompass all other attached titles still held;20 and coverture, that inheriting wives need defer to their husbands in property decisions. In a culture so inherently antagonistic to land claims like Clifford’s, her discursive status as female property owner had to be vigilantly and recursively maintained. Seriality offered an effective albeit anxious solution to that problem. This was not the case with diurnal writing across the board. While Clifford’s autobiography depends on duration and destination to mark history, male diarists writing concurrently seem largely uninterested in landmark identification as [s]itational proof. Assuming an ultimate hubris (that the details of their lives are worthy of note in and of themselves), they focus instead on a quotidian intimacy. Take for instance the familiar case of Samuel Pepys. Writing near the end of his diary in 1669 of a day’s activities, Pepys organizes time and place as follows:

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Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England Up betimes, by coach to Sr. W. Coventry’s, and with him by coach to White Hall, and there walked in the garden talking of several things, and by my visit to keep fresh my interest in him. … He mighty kind to me, and so parted, and thence home, calling in two or three places—among other Dancre’s where I find him beginning of a piece for me, of Greenwich, which will please me well, and so home to dinner, and very busy all the afternoon, and so at night home to supper, and to bed.21

While Pepys’s diary entries, like Clifford’s, continually mention where he has been (home, Coventry’s, White Hall, Dancre’s), and sometimes note the approximate time and duration that he has been there (all the morning, at noon, after dinner), they rarely evoke a sense of those journeys as journey—as movement from or to, or as marking a significant trajectory in and of themselves. It is easy in fact to forget that Pepys is actually traveling at all. Instead his activities seem all of a piece: his days are marked by a processual plenitude, a temporal fullness that foregrounds middles to the exclusion of all else (why, perhaps, the Pepysian day feels so complete). Indeed, what is striking about Pepys’s diaries is how curiously ahistorical they are. His entries map a pattern of iteration that downplays singular events to concentrate instead on running sequences.22 The irony here is that Pepys is (as a man and a public servant) privy to a more recognizable, “standardized,” recent history than Clifford is (as a woman who rarely leaves her estates).23 While his diaries document the beheading of the regicides, the coronation of the new king, and the great London fire, these moments are momentous only as they carry us through the day as Pepys experiences it (what I saw, how I felt, when I encountered).24 For this male diarist, location and movement seem to matter little; instead his is a self-assured and unified identity born of gender privilege, a hubris that is perhaps all the more surprising given Pepys’s bourgeois middling rank background.25 Pepys’s diary professes a “serial self-sufficiency”—a laissez-faire mentality— that is, I think, symptomatic of the evolving masculine diurnal form in the early modern period regardless of the male writer’s status or rank, a form that is for women unsustainable and beside the point. Clifford certainly rejects this ephemeral mode of expression.26 From her earliest diurnal musings in the Knole Diary to the frank entries of the 1676 Day-Book, she refuses to embrace the kind of nonchalance that male writers employ in their diaries about the events of the day. The stakes are too high, and this distinction holds true for the handful of female diarists who employ the serial form in this period.27 Whether the issue is property transfer or religious obligation, child rearing or access to education, seventeenthcentury Englishwomen navigate serial form with an intensity of purpose that does not rest secure in the quotidian present or create for itself an insular and preemptively personal point of view. The fiction of an immediate and smoothly continuous present that Pepys employs to keep his readers “in the moment” will not work for embattled women like Clifford. Pepysian “contemporaneity,” dependent as it is on the coherence and validity of existing truths, only serves to


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underscore the tremendous distance that separates early modern women from the privileged momentum of male institutional right.

Clifford invests her diaries with meanings that transcend and even displace a chronological listing of events. Her account depends on the notion of time itself to express its humanness. Her temporal assertions do not “inform” at the sentence level of the account but nonetheless mark its formal trajectory and insist on its narrative continuation. When I put pressure on Clifford’s claims, revealing their futurity, I am not simply imposing a modernist narrative upon the bald facts of historical accounting. The temporality she crafts is inherent in both the form she has chosen and the historical matter that she feels impelled to recount within it. In its delineation of a past pregnant with possibility for the future, Clifford’s diary speaks to the moral dimension of historical consciousness.28 She is not just reminding herself and her readers that this is what she (in the singular) has accomplished—that now she is the “‘Lord’ of the Manor” and that all we need do is celebrate her fortitude and staying power. Instead Clifford’s fascination with time, as revealed in her obsession with firsts and her records of journeys, suggests at some level an understanding of history’s complex value as a means through which female legacy may be understood as intervention, as a project of social restitution. Clifford’s diary then carries symbolic weight that renders its serial treatment of history active and ongoing, meaningful and temporally dense.

Time and place constitute the way that we as human beings come to know our environment and ourselves. How we comprehend each, how we believe both to operate (as sequence through, as cycle in, as repetition across), also shapes the way that we choose to conduct our lives. Our perceptions of time and place enable us to anticipate and to remember, to make some choices and to forgo others. Most generic forms of writing produce these conceptual orders in a more or less consistent manner, though the forms themselves may vary from one writer to the next, or even from one passage to another in the same work. Temporality and movement are consonant with the shape of the story being told, with the format we have decided to use. Not surprisingly, different generic impressions of time and place encourage us to make use of different resources. Were we to believe “there is nothing new under the sun” and to appreciate that already familiar landscape, we might conduct our lives according to principles that take full advantage of custom and tradition, of memory and habit. In contrast, were we to see life as fleeting and impermanent and the environment as inherently unstable, we may be tempted to privilege rather different sets of values. Coherence might take precedence in the former, anticipation, in the latter. These ethical trajectories should not be taken lightly or dismissed as a matter of local significance, applying only to the text in question. That gender may ask us to alter forms or shift the very perspectives that

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underwrite their construction is a consequence worth pondering in a global sense, since it may conceivably have impact that is far-reaching and consequential. In autobiography the same principles apply. To a certain extent the diary privileges a recursive or cyclical formulation, at least in its serial format. Commonplace is at root an organizing principle of all diary writing, if only in the formulaic rehearsal of days, months, or years. The iteration of entry upon entry persuades diarists to record the same kinds of information over time, day in and day out, from one week to the next. But iteration as it is construed in early modern women’s diary writing also seems to be responding to something else—to a history that is in need of active and continual remediation. In seventeenth-century England, patrilineal privilege uniformly denied women an unbroken succession.29 Replaying with amplification precisely those elements of social coherence (property ownership, land management, feudal obligation) that seem most impregnable and personally damaging, Clifford’s seriality neutralizes the historical sting of primogeniture by actively siting both origin and property in the person of the “Lady of the House” as she makes her directed way across the lands of her inheritance. Indeed, Clifford’s iterations illustrate the complications that arise when writers detail historic truth from the edges of a given discourse—when time, place, and personhood require infinite and continual legitimation. Regardless of secure status or achieved success, hers then is a history of anxious possibility. It actively generates a truth that is both historical and forward focused: an anticipatory truth that stretches across time and space toward a serial future that is always potentially subject to change.

Notes 1

2

3

Inscribed on one of the plaques that adorn Clifford’s numerous castles and churches, this text is followed with the words Laus Deo. See The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D.J.H. Clifford (Wolfeboro Falls, NJ: Sutton, 1990), p. 101. All subsequent diary entries and inscriptions are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. Clifford is emphatic in identifying smaller increments of time (sometimes to the hour) only when they figure the span of a human life. Much like a parent who determines the age of her infant in days and months, Clifford notes ages to the day, even when they cover a considerable length of time. Of her youngest daughter’s demise in 1661 she writes, “and the 14th of October in this year, about 8 a clocke in the morning, dyed my youngest Daughter Isabella, Countesse of Northampton, in her Lords House in Lincolns Inne fields at London, when she was 39 yeares old and some 13 daies over” (152). George C. Williamson speculates that these “yearly summaries” are drawn from a “much fuller diary or Day-by-day Book, which … has now disappeared.” See Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, & Montgomery, 1590–1676: Her Life, Letters and Work (Yorkshire: S.R. Publishers, 1967), p. 361. Kathleen Osler Acheson concurs, further hypothesizing about the complexity of Clifford’s written records. See her introduction to The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–1619: A Critical Edition,


4

5

6 7

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ed. Acheson (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 1–37, esp. pp. 16–17. While the “Knole Diary” for 1616–17 and 1619 and Clifford’s “Day-Book” for January 1676 up to her death are the most explicitly diurnal of the various segments that make up the Clifford diaries, with entries broken down by days, even her writings covering the years 1650 to 1675 (the period I will principally focus on) read like compilation rather than formulation. Elizabeth Chew has also written on this phenomenon in her article “Si(gh)ting the Mistress of the House: Anne Clifford and Architectural Space,” Women as Sites of Culture: Women’s Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Shifrin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 167–82. Chew’s emphasis on the architectural legacy that Clifford creates asks readers to rethink assumed preconceptions of early modern domestic architecture in Britain as social chorography: “by occupying a house while exhaustively documenting her actions therein—Clifford asserted her place in the family’s dynastic tradition and reshaped it for her own benefit” (168). I would like to shift emphasis to consider instead the temporal and generic trajectory of such architectural journeys as they bear on both the formation of a new kind of history writing and a hybridization of the diurnal form to suit specifically female needs. Given the indebted state of the properties upon George’s death, the transfer of the lands to Clifford’s uncle may have been the only expedient that would keep the estates solvent and intact. Richard T. Spence points out that Francis, a propertied man in his own right, could better resolve his brother’s numerous financial obligations than could George’s young daughter. See Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery, 1590–1676 (Phoenix Mill, England: Sutton, 1997), p. 22. See also Williamson, p. 34. Spence, p. 45. Entries are both newsy and mundane: “upon the 14th, my Lord supp’d at the Globe … My Lady Gray brought my Lady Carr to play at Glecko with me, when I lost £15 to them” (29). They are also occasionally introspective: All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went abroad to cocking, to bowling Alleys, to Plays and Horse Races, & [was] commended by all the World. I stayed in the Countrey having many times a sorrowful & heavy heart & being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the Agreement, so I may truly say, I am like an Owl in the Desert. (33)

8

Extant in two original copies, this early diary is not part of Clifford’s Great Books. See Acheson, The Diary of Anne Clifford and The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. Vita Sackville-West (London: W. Heinemann, 1923). Spence dedicates a chapter of his biography to Clifford’s historical endeavors. More recently, Acheson and Mihoko Suzuki have explored Clifford’s historical disposition as it reflects on questions of gender. Both share with me an appreciation of Clifford’s historiographical efforts as in some sense gender-enabling and futurist. For Suzuki, Clifford is not simply compiling a “history written by agglomeration” in which “all sources were considered to be equal in value”; rather she is actively shaping a history that both “commemorates and constructs the identities of those she intended to celebrate” (italics mine). See “Anne Clifford and the Gendering of History,” Clio: A

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9

10 11 12

13

14

15

Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, 30.2 (2001): 195–229, esp. pp. 212–13. Acheson agrees, noting in Clifford’s desire “both [to] produc[e] and be produc[ed] by history,” that she “represent[s] the necessarily paradoxical nature of modernity.” See “The Modernity of the Early Modern: The Example of Anne Clifford,” Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998), pp. 27–51, esp. p. 32. See also Chew’s claim that Clifford “saw … connections among her own life; her land and houses … the history of her family … and the promise of its continuance in the hands of her progeny” (171). Clifford’s “Great Book” offers a compendium of legal proofs and historical evidence. Three copies of the Great Book survive, two of which are located in the Hothfield Papers at the Cumbria Records Office in Kendall, one in a private collection. See Acheson, introduction, The Diary of Anne Clifford, pp. 14–24. The possibility of a fourth copy exists but has not been traced. According to Thomas Tufton, sixth earl of Thanet, the copies were originally held at Skipton, Appleby, Hothfield, and London. See Spence, p. 160 and p. 271, n. 1. Spence, p. 89. Ibid. Jacques Derrida identifies the compulsion to retrieve, organize, and document the past as both ongoing and forward-focused—an intervention into the making of tomorrow. “The archivist produces more archive,” he explains, “and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.” See Archive Fever (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), p. 68. Of the accounts that I’ve read, only two, the autobiographies of Lady Margaret Hoby and Isabella Twysden, are strictly diurnal. See, for instance, Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605, ed. Dorothy M. Meads (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930) and The Diary of Isabella, Wife of Sir Roger Twysden, Baronet, of Royden Hall, East Peckham, 1645–1651, ed. F.W. Bennitt, Archaeologia Cantiana 51 (1939): 113–36. Stuart Sherman defines seriality as an emerging “practice in prose to writ[e], distribute ... and read, over steady, small increments of real time.” See Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), p. 9. I’m thinking here of Paul Ricoeur’s use of emplotment to evoke the work of memory as a configuration of both time and space in Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004). Richoeur writes: Between “narrated” time and “constructed” space there are many analogies and overlappings … whether it be … space for dwelling, or space to be traversed, constructed space consists in a system of sites for the major interactions of life. Narrative construction can bring about a similar kind of inscription, the one in the endurance of time, the other in the endurance of materials. Each new building is inscribed in urban space like a narrative within a setting of intertextuality. (150) See also Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964); Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993); and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).


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16 Clifford bore two daughters, Lady Margaret, Countess of Thanet, and Lady Isabella, Countess of Northampton, both of whom married and had children of their own. 17 While Clifford’s notions of history and identity have everything to do with the way that she locates maternal influence in the diaries, I will omit that discussion here as it is so ably addressed by other critics. See especially Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994), pp. 125–52; and Mary Ellen Lamb, “Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and Uses of Reading,” ELR 22.3 (1992): 347–68. Other pertinent areas of analysis include the role of privilege in determining Clifford’s sense of self (Lewalski, Writing Women; Lamb, “Agency of the Split Subject”; and Katharine Hodgkin, “The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford: A Study of Class and Gender in the Seventeenth Century,” History Workshop Journal 19.1 (1985): 148–61); readerly communities in the diaries (Lamb, “Agency of the Split Subject”); and connections between public and private (Helen Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen,” Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Mario Wynne-Davies [Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992], pp. 47–62). 18 Chew reminds us that Clifford’s chorographic traversals are far from arbitrary. They illustrate her ritualized mastery of her demesnes (172–6). 19 Kelly Oliver, “Witnessing Otherness in History,” What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. Howard Marchitello (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 41–66, esp. p. 47. 20 James I apparently relied on this doctrine in the awarding of the estates to Clifford’s uncle in 1617. See Acheson, “The Modernity of the Early Modern,” p. 39, n.7. 21 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1668–69, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), vol. 9, pp. 437–8. Another interesting and parallel case can be found in the diary of Sir Simonds d’Ewes. See The Diary of Sir Simonds d’Ewes (1622–24), ed. Elisabeth Bourcier (Paris: Didier, 1974). 22 Sherman, Telling Time, pp. 2–3. 23 By 1669, Pepys had achieved considerable status. While he is clearly from a lesser social order than Clifford is, and while many commentators attribute the generic peculiarities of his diary writing to that middling rank background, I am inclined instead to think of Pepys and Clifford in like terms. Both were aware of the precarious nature of their success, and both would have understood their vulnerability in material terms (as located in the security of their goods and properties). Given the parallels between the two, their differing modes of seriality are worthy of note. 24 Clifford refers in passing to some of these same events. In her case, however, allusions are generally static, bracketed off from the entry’s principal subject matter. 25 Scholarship on Pepys’s diaries runs the gamut from readings that see his diurnal recordkeeping as deeply troubled, born of his failure to reconcile his desires with the moral accountability required of members of his social rank and status, to interpretations that credit the author with a narrative nonchalance that revels in its own hedonism. See, for instance, Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); Harry Berger, “The Pepys Show: Ghost-Writing and Documentary Desire in the Diary,” ELH 65.3 (1998): 557–91; John H. O’Neill, “Samuel Pepys: The War of Will and Pleasure,” Restoration 19.2 (1995): 88–94; E. Pearlman, “Pepys and Lady Castlemaine,” Restoration 7.2 (1983): 43–53; and James Grantham Turner, “Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy,” Culture and Society in the Stuart

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26

27

28

29

Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), pp. 95–111. This argument is more fully developed in my upcoming book, Strategies for Survival: Gender, Ethics and History in Early Modern England. Using Clifford’s diaries as a case study to examine diary writing in general, I chart masculine and feminine formal characteristics across a wide range of early- to mid-century serial accounts. Hoby and Twysden both anticipate, though on a lesser scale, Clifford’s anxious seriality—Hoby in her repeated recitation of daily prayers and Twysden in the litany of family comings and goings that she documents. Hayden White locates moral accountability as the very domain of historical writing. See The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), p. 24. Even in cases in which women were identified as principal inheritors their bodies served principally as conduits to the next living male successor. Marriage law further complicated this trajectory by moving wealth laterally as well as through vertical descent. See Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 24–6.

Chapter 6

Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs Mary Ellen Lamb

Written in 1677–78 to record events from the civil war, Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs afford readerly pleasures more frequently encountered in fiction than in autobiography, and indeed numerous scholars have consistently compared Anne Halkett’s autobiography to novels.1 Born in 1623, she was in her mid-twenties when she participated in the daring conveyance of the Duke of York away from Parliamentary control. This act led to her romantic involvement with one Colonel Joseph Bampfield, whom she later discovered to be married. She further describes her courtship by Sir James Halkett, who married her in 1656, when the Memoirs draw to a close. Her relation of these two love affairs, and a third with a Thomas Howard, eldest son of Lord Howard of Escrick, contribute to the modern appeal of this work. These accounts have led recent critics to consider the effects of romance and of tragicomedy, genres of Halkett’s own time, in shaping her writing and perhaps even her experience of the events of her life. Citing its similarities to the general “plotting of Fletcherian tragicomedy with its chaste heroines and duplicitous lovers … its transformation of tragic action to comedy in intriguedriven plots,” Kim Walker convincingly argues for the influence of romantic drama as a framework for Halkett’s narrative, finding solid support in her record of youthful play-going in London and in her reference to Fletcher’s Humorous Lieutenant.2 Gabriele Rippl relates her “staging of secret love, the promises of fidelity, the vows, the convent, the separation of the lovers, the affectation of the heroine, the stock characters ... the series of adventures, as well as the digression technique” to the genre of chivalric romance.3 However, it is not necessary to choose between the genres of tragicomedy and romance. Similarities to both genres appear, for example, in her highly dramatized description of her encounter with Thomas Howard, or Mr. H., who meets her in a gallery, as “pale as death” as with a trembling hand, he sighs, “If I loved you lese I could say more.”4 Just as sensational is her final interview with Colonel Bampfield, or C.B., in which she responds to his question “if I was maried to Sir J.H.” with the equivocation, “‘I am’ (outt aloud, and secrettly said, ‘nott’)” (82). As she finally rides off in a coach

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as the wife of Halkett, who has proven his love for her through his extraordinary perseverance, the Memoirs seem readily conformable to a romance or a comedy ending in marriage. Against the backdrop of the civil war, these romantic elements also take on a political aspect, and N.H. Keeble and Susan Wiseman stress her political role as an active agent in the events of the civil war.5 This thread of Halkett’s narrative, in particular her part in the rescue of the young Duke of York, later to become James II, creates high suspense. As the boat carrying C.B. and the young Duke does not arrive on schedule to the appointed place, she and her maidservant Miriam wonder if the plan has been discovered. When Halkett (or Anne Murray as she was then) hears a “great noise of many as I thought coming up the staires,” she fears that they “bee soldiers to take mee.” But, it was C.B. and the Duke, after all. She dresses the boy quickly in the woman’s gown she had provided—“a mixt mohaire of a light haire couler and blacke” with an “under petticoate” that was “scarlett” (24)—to assert, with unexpected humor, that he “was very pretty in itt” (25). This is the stuff of which Oscar-worthy films are made, and Halkett’s rendering shows her a master of suspense, of narrative detail, and of dialogue. These romantic and political elements have understandably led recent scholars to take issue with representations of Anne Halkett’s Memoirs as an exemplum of Christian piety.6 In this critical climate, John Loftis’s claims come in for particular critique: writing her autobiography with “intense piety and with a troubled conscience,” Halkett “apparently wrote for herself alone, as she wrote many of her religious meditations, employing her literary talent in an effort to sort out the pattern of her life, above all in its spiritual dimensions.”7 In addition to Halkett’s references to God, Loftis finds support for this interpretation in the religious content of what remains of the beginning of her Memoirs. The first two leaves of her text are mutilated, leaving only a brief devotional passage on the second leaf. This passage expresses repentance: “There is noe sin that ever I have been guilty of in my whole life butt I repent with as much sincearity as I seeke pardon” (9). For Walker, this “brief devotional introduction” is at odds with an autobiography in which “the importance of religion to the writing subject does not loom large.”8 For Wiseman, Halkett’s opening line has misled readers to “understand the text as a confessional account of personal relationships” that distracts from her activity as a political agent.9 In this essay, I argue that just as it is not necessary to choose between the genres of tragicomedy and romance when reading Halkett’s Memoirs, so it is also not necessary to choose between the sacred and the secular. Rather than privileging or “reading out” either devotional or secular genres underlying Halkett’s Memoirs, I reconsider both of them in terms of their relationship to each other, to their historical context, and to the version of selfhood that Halkett is performing in her text. Recent theorists of autobiography have ably allowed for the simultaneous presence of competing discourses.10 But these critical writings do not usually set out the specific relationships between the terms of this dialogic selfhood. Do

The Secular and the Spiritual in Halkett’s Memoirs

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subject positions merely coexist without interaction? Do they cause inner conflicts that create tensions within a subject? Within specific situations, do they require negotiation as to which one becomes predominant? With its coexisting secular and devotional versions of selfhood, Halkett’s Memoirs provide ideal material for a study of the entanglements possible between subject positions. Particularly productive for this study is a central preoccupation of the Memoirs: is it a sin on her part to become affianced to a Colonel who deceives her with the claim his wife is dead? If so deceived, does her commitment to him constitute an impediment to a marriage with another? These conundrums emerge from an earlier dilemma, arising in the turmoil of civil war times: is it permissible to visit a man, such as C.B., alone in his chamber for the sake of Royalist cause? In this finally scandalous action which she comes to regret, but never precisely repents, her motives draw simultaneously from romantic desires and from spiritual self-examination; and both of these are integrally related to her political identity as a Royalist. In this and in other incidents described in the Memoirs, Halkett constructs for her earlier self, Anne Murray, a form of selfhood that conflates the apparently opposing demands of religious and secular genres. Murray’s religious scruples heighten her innocence, to create her as an ideal protagonist of the secular genres of romance and tragicomedy. Conversely, her scruples reformulate these genres, enfolding them within a religious sensibility, as her moments of penitence—and of lack of penitence—provide revealing insights into the forms of religious selfhood available to Royalist women during and after the Interregnum. To understand the devotional aspects of Halkett’s Memoirs, it is necessary to explore the role of autobiography in religious practice. What remains of the two leaves of the prefatory material provides a specifically sacramental context for her autobiography as a mode of self-examination undertaken in preparation for receiving the eucharist. This is the first extant sentence of the Memoirs: “And since wee have an advocate with the Father of Christ the righteous, hee will plead for mee wherin I am inocentt and pardon wherin I have beene guiltty” (9). This sentence quotes and then moves to a near-paraphrase of a statement taken from the “comfortable words” of the communion service from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer of 1663. After the confession of sins and absolutions, the minister comforts the congregation with this scriptural quotation: “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the Propitiation for our sins. 1 St. John ii. 1,2.”11 The version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer published five years before Halkett wrote her Memoirs stresses the need for self-examination: “Saint Paul exhorteth all persons diligently to try and examine themselves, before they presume to eat of that Bread, and drink of that Cup. For as the benefit is great ... so is the danger great, if we receive the same unworthily.”12 Like most prefatory material, this framing of Halkett’s Memoirs provides directions as to the mode of reading desired by its author. It is consistent with the prolific devotional writing produced after her husband’s death. At the time she was composing her Memoirs, she was also engaged in writing what would become over

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6,000 manuscript pages, primarily of religious meditations, which passed after her death in 1699 to one Samuel Couper, probably the S.C. who used portions of her manuscript Memoirs to write her biography, The Life of Anne, Lady Halkett, published in 1701 and then again in 1778. S.C.’s Life specifically relates her “review of her life” undertaken in preparation for receiving the eucharist four times a year. According to S.C., she often engaged in autobiography as a devotional aid: “But this great and useful duty of self-examination was not reserved only for these solemn occasions; she very wisely kept short accounts, by frequent calling them up; and it was of great advantage to her, in this performance, that from her younger years she had kept a register of the most remarkable occurrence of her life, especially her failings, mercies, and resolutions.”13 In this self-examination, Halkett employed a form of spiritual analysis that shapes her Memoirs in terms of a contemporary devotional genre, as a series of cases of conscience, through which she sifted through her actions and, more importantly, her motives, to discover the sins for which she required absolution. A long-standing form of casuistry rendered especially popular from the late sixteenth century by Puritan writers and extending into and beyond the civil war years, cases of conscience had in themselves become a form of genre before and during the civil war. The posing of various cases by the Puritan cleric William Perkins, compiled by Thomas Pickering into The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606), raised them to special prominence throughout the seventeenth century, when Perkins himself was regarded, according to James Mullinger, “as an authority but little inferior to Hooker or Calvin.”14 Much of Perkins’s collection is composed of spiritual directions that address specific moral quandaries, such as “whether a man may defend himself by force, when he is wronged?” (499), “How farr a man may, with good conscience, proceed in the desiring and seeking of Riches?” (521), and “Whether Recreation be lawfull for a Christian man?” (583). This meticulous weighing and resolving of scruples continued during the civil war, as the erosions of earlier forms of civil and ecclesiastical authority created a market not only for Perkins’s writings, but also for small pamphlets designed to resolve specific points of great local importance.15 The popularity of these cases was a symptom of a need for some fragile certainty in a sea of moral confusion. While perhaps overly precise or tediously legalistic to modern readers, cases of conscience remained formative to many subjectivities in the seventeenth century. In its intricate logic, Halkett’s own meditation “Of Communicating upon a short Advertisement,” reads very like a case of conscience.16 After tears and self-debate in prayer, she finally resolved that “it was not length of time, so much as sincerity, that made a due preparation” (47). She would present herself to communion as she would present herself to the moment of death on similarly short notice, with repentance for her sins and a state of charity with all persons. In this sense, Halkett’s practice of self-examination prepared her not only for the eucharist, but ultimately for the moment of her death.


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This devotional practice of self-examination appears explicitly in Halkett’s account of her early life in the Memoirs: “What my childish actions were I thinke I need nott give account of here, for I hope none will thinke they could bee either vicious or scandalous” (11). In this context, an additional awareness of the influence of cases of conscience, composed of an elaborate balancing of scruples, provides a justification for equivocations that might otherwise seem insincere or even hypocritical. When Mr. H. swears not to leave for France without seeing her one more time, Murray confronts a case of conscience, expressed in her words: “‘Was ever creature so unfortunate and putt to such a sad difficulty, either to make Mr. H. forsworne if hee see mee nott, or if I doe see him, my mother will bee forsworne if shee doth nott expose mee to the uttmost rigour her anger can inventt’” (18). Remarkably, the wording of this conflict at this point expresses less concern for her mother’s anger than for her mother’s violation of her oath to punish her. Anne finds much joy in her resolution to this case: she wears a blindfold so that she might talk to him but yet not actually see him with her eyes. Keeble denigrates Halkett’s use of a blindfold to resolve her dilemma as her “casuistically deft contrivance of disobedience under the guise of scrupulous obedience which the narrative here celebrates.”17 But Keeble’s judgment underestimates the importance of an oath to Anne and the validity, in a case of conscience, of a painstaking analysis of its wording for loopholes. Halkett’s selection of actions for which she does, and more strikingly, for which she does not require absolution is sometimes startling, and it demands a reconsideration of her model of religious piety precisely in terms of the genres of romance and tragicomedy. As Lois Potter has noted, the blindfold ploy was also employed in Cowley’s The Guardian (1641), in which the female protagonist Lucia wears a veil to prevent her beloved Truman from breaking his oath, forced by his father, not to see her again.18 If Murray is imitating a stratagem she has seen in a play, then she is casting herself as a protagonist of a drama. Rather than referring to a play, however, Murray describes how the solution occurred to her: “In the midst of this dispute with my selfe what I should doe, my hand beeing still upon my eyes, itt presently came in my mind that if I blindfolded my eyes that would secure mee from seeing him, and so I did not transgrese against my mother” (18). Perhaps placing her hands over her eyes reminded her of the Cowley play. Or if she did not know of Lucia’s similar use of her veil, then her solution becomes all the more revealing of a system of values shared with the play, rather than the influence of the specific play itself, that informs her actions. As Potter notes, one can see the mysterious and equivocal strategies of romance plots become adapted to the “real-life plots” of royalists.19 In the play, as in Murray’s life, the ruse of the blindfold enables an observance of an oath, and this observance gained significance from the importance with which royalists regarded oaths. It was their continued observation of their oath of loyalty to King Charles, performed in the name of God, that elevated their cause beyond the political to the spiritual sphere. For Murray, as for Lucia in Cowley’s play, the necessity of adhering to the letter of

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an oath, whatever the infraction of its spirit, outweighed the necessity to obey a parent. Mr. H.’s courtship provides another dilemma that similarly unites the secular genres of romance and tragicomedy with a case of conscience. In this incident, also, these very different genres agree together in the necessity of disobedience to Murray’s mother. A mutual friend informs Anne that Mr. H. is so desperate for her love that he intends to “turne Capucin” (12). Tricking her into a private meeting in a garden, Mr. H. confirms his intention of becoming a Catholic monk if he has no hopes of marriage to her. Attesting to the intensity of his devotion, this suitor’s despair is the material both of high romance and tragicomedy. Or if we suspect his sincerity, then perhaps his threat represents callous manipulation of a trusting young woman. If so, then this deception is also the material of the more sinister side of romance and tragicomedy. Yet Murray also provides a religious perspective on this romantic dilemma as she observes that “relligion was a tye upon mee to indeaver the prevention of the hazard of his soule” (13). Her concern for his soul, like her previous concern for his oath, similarly outweighs obedience to her mother’s demand that she in no way entertain company with Mr. H. In this case, also, she relies on equivocation to resolve another case of conscience by encouraging Mr. H. without actually promising to marry him. She attempts to allay his passion by “seeming complaisance” in the promise that “I would nott marry till I saw him first maried.” This promise was more easily given “since I had noe inclination to marry any” (13). Far from dissuaded, Mr. H. provided a minister and a ring for the marriage. At this point she openly refused, for without their parents’ permission “I could nott expect God’s blesing neither upon him nor mee” (14). Her oath produced perhaps an unexpected side-benefit. When her mother attempted to force her to marry one of her own choice, Murray’s oath to Mr. H. provided an ideal evasion, for as she begged her mother’s pardon, “for till Mr. H. was first maried I was fully determined to marry noe person living” (19). Her integrity preserved by equivocation, Murray becomes the witty heroine of Fletcherian tragicomedy and simultaneously a soul cleared of sin. The combined perspectives of secular romance and of spiritual self-examination only enhance her status as a heroine. It is through such conflations of the spiritual and the secular that Murray evades conflicts between potential or even actual sexual relationships and her religious version of selfhood. In the autobiography as a whole, romantic episodes do not generally elicit confessions of sin. Let us consider another example. Walker associates the genre of romantic drama with the relationship of Murray to Mr. H. with “its standard parental blocking figure, its extended pieces of dialogue between lover and mistress ... its intriguing servants who are clearly on the side of the lovers.”20 As Mr. H.’s collapse in a chair from emotional exhaustion induces Murray to allow him to kiss her, Walker presents the reasonable claim that in this moment the “desiring subject strains against obedient daughter and virtuous woman.”21 Interestingly enough, however, nowhere in this text does Halkett,


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writing from the perspective of her pious widowhood, register regret or the least contrition for these kisses. While she begins this narrative of Mr. H.’s courtship with an admission of guilt—“In the yeare 1644 I confese I was guilty of an act of disobedience, for I gave way to the adrese of a person whom my mother ... had absolutely discharged mee never to allow of”—(11), her account of her actions, so consistent with romance and tragicomedy, in fact provide explanations for the felt necessity of her disobedience. In this entire episode, she repents of only one sin. When Mr. H. finally marries the unattractive daughter of an earl, she declaims: “‘I pray God hee may never dye in peace till hee confese his fault and aske me forgivenese’” (22). For this outburst, she acknowledges her fault and has “a hundred times beged the Lord’s pardon for itt,” not for the prayer for his repentance, but for her desire to witness it. She would not wish his repentance to be delayed or neglected because circumstances might prevent her hearing of it, for, as she adds, “God forbid that any should wantt peace for my passion” (22). It is Halkett’s construction of a Royalist selfhood that provides the grounds for an unexpected consistency between devotional and secular genres. As Potter has ably demonstrated, romance and tragicomedy were literary forms that associated specifically with the Royalists.22 Imitating the action of a play was itself an antiCromwellian statement, since performances of plays had been rendered illegal since 1642, two years before the events of Halkett’s Memoirs. From the time Halkett lived through these events through the time she wrote them, romance continued to be seen as a Royalist genre, centered initially on the idealization of the loving and generative relationship of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. According to Potter, “The two Charles acted out virtually every role available to a ruler in romance or drama: the disguised lover, the husband parted from his wife/kingdom, the loving father of his country, the sacrificial victim, the wandering prince.”23 On a more sinister side, the deception that was “common practice” among romance heroes also became part of Royalist selfhood, and “secrecy, mystification, and equivocation—qualities of the romance plot—were frequent accusations against the real-life plots of royalists.”24 In both their idealizing and deceptive aspects, actions consonant with romance and tragicomedy remain oddly compatible with Halkett’s system of religious values. What might, according to conventional devotional discourses, be considered sins—secrecy, equivocation, and even comforting an overwrought suitor with a kiss—do not, in Halkett’s Memoirs, merit repentance. Halkett’s construction of a Royalist selfhood thoroughly permeates her spiritual sensibility. Her autobiography demonstrates the extent to which her political interests, and especially her loyalty to the king, became inseparable from her religious duty. As Cromwell unexpectedly defeats Royalist troops at Dunbar, Halkett expresses her perception of history as the working out of a divine plan: “Butt the sad effects made us see how litle confidence should be placed in anything butt God, who in his justice thought fitt to punish his kingdome and bring itt under subjection to an usurper because they paid nott that subjection that was due to there

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lawfull King” (54). Paradoxically, this subjection to God’s will in these chaotic times empowers Halkett to debate with a Parliamentarian military leader, Colonel Overton, on equal terms. When Overton exemplifies a providential view of history through the military success of Parliamentarian forces, Murray argues that success is “noe good rule to justify ill actions,” and since there is no warrant in Holy Scripture for “murdering your lawfull King,” then she “must condemne that horrid act and what ever is done in prosecution of itts vindication” (61). As Keeble extrapolates: “Like the apostatizing children of Israel, Royalists are to learn true obedience through suffering. The Interregnum is configured as an Old Testament wilderness through which the loyal remnant toil regardless of hardship” towards a promised land achieved only in the restoration of Charles II in 1660.25 But the arguably libertine court of Charles II may not have looked like a promised land to Halkett as she wrote her Memoirs and meditations. The crime of the execution of Charles I may not be entirely expiated. In her “Meditations upon the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit,” she foretells that both her generation and “future ages [will] have reason to weep and mourn, and to cry mightily to GOD with Fasting and Prayer, to divert the wrath which that Horrid Crime, as yet, lowdly calls for, and that it be not visited upon us, not upon our Children.”26 God pours out his mercy as well as his wrath not only on sinning nations, but on sinning individuals. But what represented sin to a young woman of Royalist sympathies during the civil war? For those who remained loyal to their monarch even in defeat, their oath to Charles outweighed their obligations to remain open and honest with the various authorities of the Interregnum. From this foundation, oaths took on a special moral urgency that helps to account for Murray’s privileging of the sanctity of an oath even over disobedience to her mother. In her involvement with C.B., as with Mr. H., larger issues justify disobedience to the prevailing morals of a secular authority, whether mothers or Parliamentarians. As with other wartime romances, the danger and suspense of contemporary events lend a sensational backdrop to her love relationship with a man who was, unbeknownst to her, already married to another. However, as Wiseman points out, these events formed more than a backdrop; for through her activities with C.B., Anne Murray became a political agent.27 After their shared role in the successful rescue of the Duke of York from St. James Palace, C.B. became a wanted man; and on his return to London, he depended on her to find him a secure lodging and then to act as his courier for letters to and from the King, then in the hands of the Parliamentarians. As described in her Memoirs, Murray was operating from pure and idealistic motives: The earnest desire I had to serve the King made mee omitt noe opertunity wherin I could bee usefull, and the zeale I had for His Majesty made mee not see what inconveniencys I exposed my selfe to; for my intentions beeing just and inocentt made mee nott reflect what conclusions might bee made for the private visitts which I could nott butt nesesarily make to CB in order to the King’s service. (27)


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Surrounded by danger, with their liberty and even their lives at stake, the developing love between C.B. and Murray is the material of high romance. While Wisemen describes the widow Halkett, writing long after the visits, as using “her political loyalty to recuperate her tarnished reputation,”28 this recuperation appears to be more than a strategy. As Wiseman notes, the concept of “virtue” in those tumultuous days expanded beyond the “solely sexual” to “open doors into the sphere of political action.”29 I would push this point somewhat further. To Murray during the civil wars, as well as to the writer Halkett in the 1670s, this political action was more than merely virtuous; it was religious in its very essence. United to C.B. in a cause much greater than themselves, how could Murray concern herself with the risk to her reputation incurred in the service of God’s own anointed king? This risk took a sharp upward turn when one evening C.B. informed Murray that his wife had died and that his solicitor had named the “day and place where shee was buried” (27). C.B. urged some secrecy for this information, however, “lest the fortune hee had by his wife and shee injoyed while shee lived should bee sequestered” (27). C.B. proposed marriage, and she accepted, delaying the ceremony until “wee saw how itt pleased God to determine of the King’s afaires” (28). Shortly afterwards, however, C.B. discovered that, in fact, his wife was living; but then his servant Ned “brought word that his wife died” as had been previously thought (29). Despite warnings from her brother and sister, Murray continued to believe in C.B.’s integrity, supposing that his wife’s relations had falsely rumored her death only to retain “a considerable part of her portion beeing still in there hands” (33). Offering to swear by the sacrament, C.B. appeared unswerving in his confidence in his wife’s death (57). Finally, however, James Halkett informs Murray that C.B.’s wife was indubitably alive and living in London “where shee came cheefely to undeceave those who beleeved her dead” (72). At this point in the text, one leaf with two pages is torn out, and the Memoirs continue with the sentence “none living could condemne mee more then I did my selfe.” But Halkett then represents extenuating circumstances that render her action as not, precisely, unpardonable. Most particularly, the dangerous circumstances in which their service to the king had placed them required the concealment of their intended marriage. As a wanted man, C.B. “durst not withoutt hazard of his life avowedly apeare,” and for this reason, as well, publishing the banns would have brought “ruine to us both” (72). While the continued survival of C.B.’s wife represented a shock to Murray, it is no surprise to many readers. Writing years after the event, the writer Halkett leaves us, the readers, in the same ignorance as Murray until this definitive proof delivers the final blow to Murray’s faith in C.B. Yet as more persons come forward to warn Murray, most readers have already caught on to C.B. Perhaps especially telling is the duel in which her brother-in-law Newton undertakes to defend her honor against C.B. Why would Newton perceive her honor as sufficiently endangered by C.B. as to risk his life for her? Why did Murray not catch on more quickly? There

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are, in fact, several reasons. In his biographical supplement to Colonel Joseph Bampfield’s Apology, Loftis revises his earlier low opinion of Bampfield’s motives that he expresses in his introduction to Halkett’s Memoirs. It seems possible, according to Loftis, that Bampfield himself had been deceived by his servant Ned B., bribed by his wife’s family to prevent sequestration of her estate as punishment for his role in the recent abduction of the Duke of York.30 It is additionally possible that Halkett’s Memoirs, and perhaps her earlier trust in C.B. as well, may have been formed by the genre of tragicomedy. The highly dramatized situations of Jacobean and Caroline drama thrived on restoring the reputations of virtuous protagonists sullied by sexual slander. In Cowley’s The Guardian, a possible source for Murray’s blindfold trick, the lower class Aurelia assumes an identical veil to Lucia’s to become sexually forward to the beloved Truman, who then assumes Lucia to be unchaste. Similarly, in Fletcher’s Humorous Lieutenant, a play Halkett specifically mentions (54), the prince Demetrius suspects the chaste Celia when he sees her dressed in expensive clothing and jewels bought by his father, as “the ulcer of thy Sexe” (Act IV, scene 8, line 104).31 Philaster, one of Fletcher’s most famous plays, features not only a denounced heroine, but a secret marriage. Such misunderstandings are also commonplace in romance, from the Red Crosse Knight’s abandonment of Una in Spenser’s Faerie Queene to the erroneous reports of affairs and even marriages in Wroth’s Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. The narrative point of these many episodes from tragicomedy and romance is to teach trust in beloveds, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Murray’s example provides a gender switch from the convention, for it was her male beloved whose reputation was maligned. From this generic perspective, the narrative of C.B. was not supposed to have turned out this way. In this respect, as in others, the lives of royalists conformed in striking ways to the genres of romance and tragicomedy. Rumors and dangerous accusations swarmed, together with multi-level intrigues, in what was left of Charles’s court. It was truly difficult to know whom to trust. False rumors abounded within Halkett’s own Memoirs. Slander that her brother Will supported the Duke of York as king was sufficient to banish him from Charles’s court; his subsequent melancholy caused his death from pneumonia (29). A malicious chaplain ruined Murray’s residence among the Howards at Naworth Castle by circulating a rumor that she imagined the master of the house to be in love with her (42). Even the upright and steady James Halkett became the subject of some “reflection” regarding his actions on a battlefield. In his vindication, the King deplored the omnipresence of slander: “‘Lord, keepe mee from there malice, for I see they will spare none they have a prejudice against’” (71). Like episodes from romance and tragicomedy, these incidents convey the necessity to trust one’s loyal followers more than the malicious rumors. The reliable information that C.B.’s wife was in fact alive was, then, from this perspective, unexpected. It appears to have caused Murray an especially painful


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case of conscience. At precisely the moment in the text when Murray finally accepts this news, she sighs sadly, somewhat in the persona of a dramatic heroine: “Is my misfortune so soone devulged?” (73). The precise implications of this misfortune are occluded by two missing pages ripped out of the text. In his edition of the Memoirs, Loftis notes that “The contexts in which the later missing leaves would have appeared suggest that they were purposely removed by Lady Halkett or some member of her family, for purposes of privacy.”32 From a reference to a trip to Holland in S.C.’s Life, based in part on Halkett’s autobiography, Loftis supposes that the missing pages may have described a marriage to C.B. there, to avoid the risks awaiting them in England.33 Other forms of marriage were also possible, such as private marriages, without the calling of the banns, by ministers according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer. If confirmed by witnesses or records, these marriages remained “legally binding” although, as Lawrence Stone notes, the minister could be suspended for three years.34 Even more secret was the de praesenti marriage, in which a couple exchanges vows using the present tense, preferably before two witnesses. Because of complex legal suits that caused the church courts to disallow many of these contracts, de praesenti marriages had become rare by 1640. But, according to Stone, with the “collapse of church discipline ... between 1640 and 1660,” there was a “revival of contract marriages of this kind.”35 It would be irresponsible to assert without qualification that the missing pages described a form of marriage by Murray to C.B. But it seems that whatever occurred, Murray felt that she could not marry Halkett as long as C.B. remained alive. She explained her scruples to Halkett in this way: “I had that tye upon mee to another that I could nott dispose of my selfe to any other if I expected a blesing” (76). Given the weight Murray invested in an oath, perhaps a promise to marry C.B. was sufficient to prevent, in her mind, her freedom to pledge her love to another. Or, in her mind, a de praesenti vow was sufficient to render her as married in God’s eyes. While she would not have read Wroth’s manuscript continuation of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the de praesenti marriage contracted between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus before five witnesses provides a nearcontemporary view of the status of these vows: “This was performed butt nott as an absolute mariage, though as perfect as that, beeing onely an outward serimony of the church; this as absolute beefore God and as fast a tiing, for such a contract can nott bee broken by any lawe whatsoever.”36 While this tying was “absolute beefore God,” it did not prevent either of Wroth’s protagonists, on receiving erroneous news of the other’s remarriage, from entering into another marriage. Whether she in fact entered into a de praesenti marriage or simply made a vow, Murray’s scruples were more exacting than those of Wroth’s characters. Ever the sensible man, James Halkett suggested that she consult a respected clergyman, David Dickson, who subsequently visited her every week to resolve this matter. Murray explained to Dickson that she wished to marry Halkett, “butt I had beene so farre ingaged to another that I could nott thinke itt lawfull for mee to marry

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another.” After her tearful account of her history with C.B., including “my beeing unhapily deceaved and what length I had gone, and rather more then lese,” Mr. Dickson responded in this way: “Since what I did was suposing C.B. a free person, hee nott proving so, though I had beene puplickely maried to him and avowedly lived with him as his wife, yett the ground of itt failing, I was as free as if I had never seene him.” In short, she might “withoutt offence either to the laws of God or man marry any other person when ever I found itt convenientt, and that hee thought I might bee guilty of a fault if I did nott when I had so good an offer” (76– 7). Not yet “fully convinced butt that itt might bee a sin in mee to marry,” Murray underwent a long series of “debates with my selfe” (83). Scruples complicating such an easy resolution emerge, for example, from William Perkins’s case, “Whether doth an oath binde conscience, whereunto a man is drawne, by fraud and subtiltie.” Drawing on the example of Joshua, who respected an oath even though the Gibeonites used “craft” in its content, Perkins asserts that an oath “bindeth and is to be kept, though we were induced to it by deceit.”37 Finally, however, after fasting and prayer, Murray finds that her scruples advocate romance, as she comes to look upon a marriage with Halkett as “ordered by the wise and good providence of the Allmighty” (83–4). Through this entire episode, from the proposal by C.B. to her marriage to Halkett, Murray underwent significant public scrutiny. Repeatedly, she accepts responsibility for the actions that placed her in slander’s way, but she never precisely repents them as sins. After she initially accepts C.B.’s proposal of marriage, she deflects the blame that she will experience by maintaining her innocence of motive, while also accepting scandal as a just consequence for her disregard for appearances: From the prejudice which that opinion brought upon mee I shall advise all never to thinke a good intention can justify what may bee scandalous, for though one’s actions bee never so inocentt, yett they cannott blame them who suspect them guilty when there is apearance of there deserved reproach. And I confese I did justly suffer the scourge of the toung for exposing my selfe upon any consideration to what might make me liable to itt, for which I condemne my selfe as much as my sevearest enemey. (28)

A “scourge of the toung” is a punishment inflicted by society for a societal transgression, not a definite sign of displeasure from a God who sees into human hearts. Similarly, when Murray dismisses information regarding C.B.’s wife as a false rumor, she hopes for “charity” from “any pious vertuous person” who would believe that she, no more than themselves, would never have purposefully “designed to marry a man that had a wife” (35). When it was finally ascertained that, in fact, C.B.’s wife remained alive, Murray “aprehended every one that saw mee censured mee.” While she accepted the “too just grounds” of their opinion, she interpreted their censure as a trial sent by God: “Butt that I was with patience to suffer, and what ever els my Lord God thought fitt to inflict, to whom I did


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intirely submitt and could make nothing unwellcome from His hand who had so wonderfully suported mee in so unparaleld a triall” (73). This trial does not represent a punishment. Through such trials or adversities, God tests and develops a soul as a token of His loving concern. The sign of His approval appears in how He “wonderfully suported” Murray in her tribulations. This proof of one’s merit through a calm acceptance of worldly affliction conformed to a model especially useful to disheartened Royalists during the difficult days of the Interregnum. While Halkett may have regretted her interactions with Mr. H. and her involvement with C.B., she did not explicitly repent them as sins against God’s law. If anything, her cases of conscience tend to vindicate rather than to impugn her actions. The sins she actually repents are nearly insignificant. As mentioned earlier, she begs the Lord’s pardon “a hundred times” for her outburst that Mr. H. might confess and ask her forgiveness before he dies (22). In addition, she repents her sly response to Lord Howard and her sister when they foretell her marriage to C.B.: “Sure, you would nott have mee marry another woman’s husband.” As she explains, Murray believed that C.B.’s wife was dead, and so this comment represented the sin of dissimulation, “for God requireth truth in the inward parts, and I have a thousand times beged his pardon for that failing” (34). Halkett’s professed concern is not with social judgments but with God’s judgments in the “last accounts” after death. For example, when her servant Miriam’s prayer that Mr. H.’s new wife might miscarry in fact comes to pass, Halkett uses this example “to teach people to governe there wishes and there toung that neither may act to the prejudice of any, lest it bee placed on there accounts att the day of reckoning” (22). As she attends her brother Will in his final illness, she describes his expectation, after taking the eucharist, of rendering his final accounts to God at death, in these words: “I am now going to pertake of that most holy sacramentt and shortely affter to give an accountt to God Allmighty for all my actions in this life.” Halkett blesses God that she “had the satisfaction to see him dye as a good Christian” (30). If Halkett’s Memoirs primarily represented a private examination of her conscience, then why did she also follow the secular genres of tragicomedy and romance? And why are they written to elicit suspense and other readerly pleasures? Margaret Ezell has recently argued that Halkett’s Memoirs were not a “single fragmentary text,” but part of an extensive output of manuscripts, including her many volumes of meditations, carefully prepared for posthumous publication.38 Her imagined audience was not, apparently, God alone, but also readers who would remember her after her death. The simultaneity of these two audiences perhaps best accounts for her conflations of genre. In examining her conscience in preparation for the eucharist and ultimately for the moment of her own death, she holds up her soul for God’s inspection, and she repents extravagantly for those few and minor sins she discovers. As she imagines later readers, perhaps readers who remember her alleged affair with a married man, she becomes a familiar protagonist of her own tragicomic romance: the chaste heroine whose reputation is sullied by slander. Experienced consumers of plays and romances will know

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enough to trust in her innocence and to celebrate her marriage to Sir James Halkett, who never doubted her for a moment. Halkett’s Memoirs make explicit an essential difference in religious sensibility between the seventeenth century and modern times. In this secular age, perceptions of what constitutes religion have narrowed, often to the observance of codified morals such as “family values” or to a generalized liberal tolerance for fellow humans. In the seventeenth century, however, religion constituted an expansive and more flexible discourse. For Halkett, writing for God and for secular readers did not represent a split in consciousness or even, evidently, a substantial conflict. In the seventeenth century, religion encompassed much of what today would be considered to be secular. Halkett’s politics, her sexuality, and her oaths all participated in a profoundly unifying religious perspective that accommodated, with little apparent strain, perceptions about love and human nature also structuring tragicomedy and romance. Halkett’s was not the only perspective on religion operating in the seventeenth century. There were undoubtedly hundreds if not thousands of other ways to negotiate the spiritual and the secular domains in those troubled times. To approach a work such as Halkett’s Memoirs, it is important to consider religion as a productive rather than repressive force.39 Instead of a locus of arid doctrines, religion constituted a form of desire, fully compatible with sexuality, capable of generating an extraordinary diversity of variously nuanced subjectivities.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

Donald Stauffer, English Biography Before 1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1930), pp. 227–8; James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), p. 263; Estelle Jelinek, Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne, 1986), p. 30. See also John Loftis, introduction, The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), pp. ix–xviii, esp. p. x. Kim Walker, “The Lives of Anne Halkett,” Women Writing 1550–1750, ed. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (Bundoora, Australia: Meridian, 2001), pp. 133–50. Gabriele Rippl, “‘The Conflict Betwixt Love and Honor’: The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett,” Feminist Contributions to the Literary Canon: Setting Standards of Taste, ed. Susanne Fendler (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1997), pp. 7–29, esp. p. 22. Rippl also describes two models for Halkett’s form of selfhood, the first as “an inwardly directed guilt culture” according to a “puritan model with ‘self-scrutinizing’” and the second as an “other-directed shame culture” of a courtly model of the self (9). Loftis, Memoirs, pp. 9–87, esp. p. 12; this and all quotations cited parenthetically in the text will be taken from the Loftis edition. This scene is ably discussed by Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1958), pp. 152–3. N.H. Keeble, “Obedient Subjects? The Loyal Self in Some Later Seventeenth-Century Royalist Women’s Memoirs,” Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature,


6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18

19 20 21

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Drama, History, ed. Gerald Maclean (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), pp. 201–20, esp. pp. 201–13 and Susan Wiseman, “Anne Halkett and the Writing of Civil War Conspiracy,” Women Writing 1550–1750, pp. 25–46. Wiseman dates this pious version as beginning with the publication in 1701 of Halkett’s biography by S.C., who “isolated the struggle for personal virtue as the theme of his Life,” and extending through modern editors, who continue to stress her “moral virtue” as the “key to her texts” (“Civil War Conspiracy” 29). Like Wiseman, Walker contends that “the focus of the autobiography is firmly on the secular world ... despite the pious conclusions” (134). Sheila Ottway represents Halkett’s autobiography as motivated “partly to celebrate her public involvement in the Royalist struggle for power, and partly to vindicate herself from any possible slander concerning her private love affair with Bampfield.” See “They Only Lived Twice: Public and Private Selfhood in the Autobiographies of Anne, Lady Halkett and Colonel Joseph Bampfield,” Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 136–47, esp. p. 140. Loftis, introduction, Memoirs, p. ix. For criticism, see, for example, Wiseman, “Civil War Conspiracy,” p. 43. Walker, p. 134. Wiseman, “Civil War Conspiracy,” p. 29. See, for example, Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), esp. pp. 24–6; Felicity Nussbaum, “The Politics of Subjectivity,” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998), 160–65; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001). “The Holy Communion,” The Book of Common Prayer (Cambridge, 1663), M8. “The Holy Communion,” M6. S.C., Life of Anne, Lady Halkett (Edinburgh, 1701), pp. 8–9. James Bass Mullinger, “William Perkins,” DNB, vol. 15, p. 893; William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, comp. Thomas Pickering (Cambridge, 1606). All further quotations cited parenthetically in the text from this work will be taken from this edition. John Ley’s A Case of Conscience, Concerning the Sacrament of the Lords Supper (London, 1641); Samuel Torshell’s A Case of Conscience, Concerning Flying in Times of Trouble (London, 1643); George Pressick’s A Case of Conscience propounded to a great Bishop in Ireland (London, 1661). Halkett, “Sacramental Meditations on the Lord’s Supper,” Meditations upon the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit … Together with Sacramental Meditations on the Lord’s Supper (Edinburgh, 1702), pp. 44–67, esp. pp. 47–8. All further quotations cited parenthetically in the text from this work will be taken from this edition. Keeble, p. 212. This episode occurs in Abraham Cowley, The Guardian, Complete Works in Verse and Prose, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Grosart (New York: AMS, 1967), pp. 205–33, esp. p. 212. See Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 108. Potter, p. 108. Walker, p. 137. Ibid.

96 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

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Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England Potter, p. 74. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 108. Keeble, p. 202. Halkett, “Meditations upon the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit,” Meditations upon the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit … Together with Sacramental Meditations on the Lord’s Supper (Edinburgh, 1702), pp. 3–22, esp. p. 15. Wiseman, “Civil War Conspiracy,” p. 30. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 32. John Loftis, Bampfield’s Later Career: A Biographical Supplement, Colonel Joseph Bampfield’s Apology “Written by Himself and Printed at His Desire” 1685, ed. Loftis and Paul Hardacre (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1993), p. 246. Halkett’s use of this play is ably discussed by Walker, pp. 141–3. Loftis, introduction, Memoirs, p. xxii. Loftis, “Bampfield’s Later Career,” p. 145. Lawrence Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England 1660–1857 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), p. 17. Stone, p. 17. Mary Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, Suzanne Gossett, and Janel Mueller (Tempe, AZ: RETS & ACMRS, 1999), p. 44. Perkins, p. 393. Margaret Ezell, “Anne Halkett’s Morning Devotions: Posthumous Publication and the Culture of Writing in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain,” Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2000), pp. 215–31, esp. p. 216. An analogy appears in Michel Foucault’s reconceiving of Victorian sexuality from a repressive model to “a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions.” See The History of Sexuality, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 33.

Chapter 7

Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space Julie A. Eckerle

The preface is a unique textual space, one that demands a very particular kind of rhetoric because of its generic constraints and yet allows ample room for an author’s manipulation and creativity. 1 Perhaps the best articulation of the preface’s paradoxical nature appears in Barbara Johnson’s playful response to Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. In her translation of Derrida’s text, Johnson extends the first essay’s brief title—“Hors livre, préfaces” (literally, “outside the book”)—by adding a list of potential synonyms: “OUTWORK,” “HORS D’OEUVRE,” “EXTRATEXT,” “FOREPLAY,” “BOOKEND,” “FACING,” and finally, “PREFACING.”2 This textual proliferation, which Johnson explains as an effort “to conjugate out some of the ramifications of this ‘title’ and to open Dissemination with a kind of miniaturized version of its strange textual logic,”3 also usefully highlights the preface’s existence at the margins of texts and meaning and identifies the preface of a published text as an odd, perhaps undefinable, space. Indeed, as something “extra” or “outside,” a preface suggests its own disposability and lack of direct impact on the primary text. As something “pre” text, the preface suggests a space or time that has already been superseded by the text it once foreshadowed. As “foreplay,” it is potentially tantalizing and provocative but quickly outdone by the force of the primary text. And yet, significantly, this odd space on the margins of the printed word has a culturally sanctioned position within the textual world, containing within its history a range of foundational examples from Cicero to Dante and an extensive amount of theoretical discussion, especially in classical treatises on rhetoric. The preface, after all, does the important work of presentation: introducing a text, praising a patron, requesting financial support, and generally “negotiat[ing] a place for the work, and its author, in the public realm.”4 But even these traditional functions are tangential to the work of the primary text and thus quickly forgotten in the transition from preface to primary text and in the shift from a self-concerned voice

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to one that is generally much less personal. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that this strange and contradictory space should provide a place for textual experimentation and a forum for writers who are otherwise denied the right to public speech. Indeed, precisely because it is marginalized, the space of the preface becomes an acceptable place for those typically denied a voice to say those things that have no place in the privileged text. The preface allows for that which is typically not allowed, including the published voices of unsanctioned writers and, in turn, more possibilities for innovation and even personal commentary than such writers would be allowed in a primary text. This is especially the case for women of the English early modern period who chose to write—and occasionally even publish—despite strong social pressure against such acts. These women wrote from the social margins and appropriately found a marginal space from which to enter the text. And yet, even though early modern Englishwomen’s prefaces are frequently anthologized and increasingly considered as useful source material in studies of individual women writers, no published study to date has examined in any collective, comprehensive way how these women used this valuable textual space.5 In her work on French Renaissance women writers, Anne R. Larsen reveals the value of this kind of study: Early women writers exploited the preface’s “marginality” and epistolarity. To legitimize their uncommon venture, they adroitly adapted its apologetic topoi; and they heightened its sense of relational “intimacy” by framing it as a letter addressed by one woman to generally another woman friend, mentor, or patron. The preface thus occupies a strategic function in their venue into the world of the printed book in which relatively few had entered.6

This characterization of women’s early use of the preface suggests the rhetorical savvy with which these writers approached a space intended primarily for apology and self-effacing explanation; it further highlights the preface’s usefulness for the fledgling female author. In this essay, I explore a few of the prefatory strategies early modern Englishwomen used—and often manipulated—in order to authorize themselves and their texts.7 In the process, I argue that the very strangeness of the prefatory space is what both attracts and enables marginalized writers like early modern women, and I note in particular how this space enables original composition, not only by introducing and making way for such work in the primary text but also, more significantly, by allowing for original argument within the preface itself. Finally, I consider how—in the process of authorizing themselves as authoring women and as women capable of authoring—early modern Englishwomen further manipulate the textual space of the preface into something intensely personal. Because women had to defend not only their authorial choices but their very identities as respectable women as well, their prefaces must be somewhat autobiographical. Here women created new identities for themselves as authors, as

The Preface as Autobiographical Space

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women, and as women with authority enough to enter the public arena. Thus personal details mingle with authorial justifications and even, on occasion, polemic defenses of the female sex.

Early modern prefaces not only introduce texts in a range of genres, but they also take a number of different forms themselves, including general prefaces to the reader, dedicatory epistles and verses addressed to individual personages, and prefatory poems like Rachel Speght’s A Dreame, which precedes her Mortalities Memorandum (1621). But the prefatory strategies used by early modern women are remarkably consistent across age, generic, and—as Larsen’s work suggests— national boundaries even as they wrote with different purposes and different styles. In particular, these women emphasized their humility and adherence to traditional female virtues, worked to create an ideal (that is, sympathetic) reader for their works, attempted to forge bonds with these readers that would prohibit rejection of their major claims, and provided the necessary personal information to accomplish all of these goals. Because the burden on their prefaces was intense, requiring them to accomplish traditional prefatory tasks as well as those specific to a female author, such as establishing an authorial voice and creating a space for women writers in general, early modern women relied on sophisticated rhetorical maneuvering to structure their prefatory remarks. This suggests that most early modern women writers recognized the value of the preface and exploited it for their own benefit, often to make arguments in defense of women that have no place in the primary texts but that, paradoxically, create the space in which those texts can be written. Many of the techniques traditionally associated with the preface actually assisted the woman venturing into print. For example, the preface as a genre was designed to put its readership in the right frame of mind for persuasion and thus demanded justification for a variety of authorial choices. As Wendy Wall notes in The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance, extensive prefatory disclaimers were especially necessary in the new print world of early modern England, since “writers both male and female risked estrangement from the social sources of power when they chose to publish. Because print publication was rhetorically scripted as a lower-class activity, writers of both genders had to counter the force of this stigma.”8 But for women the stakes were even higher, in part because of the gendered rhetoric of authorship that Wall traces so effectively in her work.9 “If women were tropes necessary to the process of writing,” Wall asks, “if they were constructed within genres as figures for male desire, with what authority could they publish? How could a woman become an author if she was the ‘other’ against whom ‘authors’ differentiated themselves?”10 In other words, the obstacles facing women who wished to publish, combined with both traditional and then-contemporary needs for authorial disclaimers, meant that women writers simply had to explain themselves in order to create an audience

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receptive to their (that is, women’s) work. That apology was already written into— and thus expected of—the genre of the preface proved especially useful for these women. Among other things, women writers often had to defend their choice of genre and almost always explained their decision to be “authorial” in the first place. Thus Margaret Tyler uses the prefatory space of her 1578 translation of the first part of Diego Ortunez de Calahorra’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (a Spanish romance) in part to explain why she chose to translate and publish such questionable material. After all, even though translation was an acceptable venue for women’s texts at this time, secular topics were generally not, and it is telling that, as Mary Ellen Lamb notes, “no other woman published a translation of a romance in [the sixteenth] century!”11 Tyler’s choice of genre violated injunctions against women reading romances, much less translating them. Therefore, in both her traditional dedication to Lord Thomas Howard and the more polemic “M.T. to the Reader” that follows it, Tyler defends her choice of this particular romance on the basis of its instructional value and delightful style: “it is done into English,” she says in true Horatian fashion, “for thy profit and delight” (Aiiir).12 The instruction comes through the characters’ exemplary demonstration of “magnanimitie and courage,” especially on the battlefield, while the delight comes from “the varietie and continual shift of fresh matter” (Aiiir).13 Tyler is not at all bothered by the fact that her material is “more manlike than becometh my sex”; on the contrary, she rather sarcastically notes “that it is not necessary for every trumpeter or drumster in the warre to be a good fighter: they take wage onely to incite others” (Aiiir). Further, she cites a benefit for both male and female readers: “be it that the attempt were bold to intermeddle in armes, ... yet to report of armes is not so odious but that it may be borne withal, not onely in you men which your selves are fighters, but in us women, to whom the benefit in equal part apperteineth of your victories” (Aiiiv). And yet, despite such bold argumentation on the part of a woman who has dared to translate and publish a romance, Tyler simultaneously explains away her actions and seeming “choices” via a commonplace prefatory disclaimer: others encouraged her to both translate and publish, and even the choice of material was not her own. As she explains to Howard in the epistle dedicatory, “the matter was offered not made choice of, as ther appeared lykewise little lybertie in my first yielding” (Aiir). Tyler’s example is useful because it demonstrates how a female writer could use prefatory explanations to her benefit, justifying even the publication of romance material through concern for her readers (what will both benefit and delight them) and through laudable female obedience. In other words, Tyler walks the fine line between the authorial assertion necessary to see a work through to its publication and the female humility that was seen as the hallmark of a respectable woman. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that female writers’ prefatorial defenses of authorship often extended beyond individualized explanations to general defenses of women writers. This is where Tyler’s preface to her readers becomes especially


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bold and straightforward. Her oft-quoted argument is based on the fact that women are common dedicatees (and thus, she assumes, readers) of men’s work. Therefore, she says, there is nothing wrong with women writing as well: “it is all one,” she explains, “for a woman to pen a story, as for a man to addresse his story to a woman” (Aiiiiv). In Aemilia Lanyer’s “To the Vertuous Reader,” which prefaces her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), Lanyer claims that her primary purpose in the work is “to make knowne to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed” (48) even though both men and other women have slandered the female sex.14 In the course of her preface, and later in the title poem, Lanyer summons numerous female biblical figures as evidence for her claims in women’s defense. Other women are more humble, though equally invested in the need to defend women and their textual ventures. Anne Wheathill, for example, makes a case for writing as a wise use of a woman’s time, since it helps her avoid idleness; Wheathill explains that the prayers she has collected “to the advancement of Gods glorie” (A3r) in her 1584 collection of private prayers, A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs, will also act as “a testimoniall to the world, how I have and doo (I praise God) bestowe the pretious treasure of time, even now in the state of my virginitie or maidenhood (A2r).” 15 A very personal statement like Wheathill’s works in two ways: it first serves to explain her own authorial choices, and it secondarily suggests that, rather than being incompatible, writing and female virtue might actually support and enable one another. In other words, it is through and in her writing that Wheathill is able to make the most productive use of her time as a virtuous Christian woman.16 Both suggestions help to assuage readers’ likely concerns and thus, in true prefatorial fashion, put them in the right frame of mind for further reading. Such elaborate justifications would not work, however, if early modern women writers did not also make use of the most basic and perhaps most important of all traditional prefatory gestures: the humility topos. This technique tended to manifest itself in a series of disingenuous disclaimers, such as the commonplace “reluctance to appear in print,”17 but was absolutely crucial for women who wished to speak (and be heard) without being held unchaste. Indications of humility are thus pervasive in women’s prefaces, ranging from the consistently humble tone used by Tyler in her dedicatory epistle to Wheathill’s seemingly casual reference to “the weakenes of my knowledge and capacitie” (A2v). Many writers, like Anna Weamys in the prefatory apparatus to A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651), sign their dedicatory messages with phrases like “Your Honours devoted Servant” (109),18 and others, like Speght in her prose preface to A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), reference their “unworthi[ness]” (3). 19 None of these examples are surprising, but they enabled the project of the authoring woman by allowing her to code her authorial acts, however unorthodox and capable, as the products of humble and inferior femininity. True or not, this is what readers would want to hear, and the genre of the preface just happened to require it.

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Early modern women writers were similarly able to capitalize on the preface’s traditional epistolarity, for prefatory texts are always addressed to a reader— whether known or unknown, general or specific, singular or plural—and sometimes actually take the form of an epistolary dedication. This prefatory feature created a kind of intimacy that female writers were quick to manipulate in order to maintain the appearance of traditional female virtue and behavior and to further influence the reader’s response to the text. The distinct difference in tone between Tyler’s self-effacing and fawning dedicatory epistle to Howard and her bolder preface to the reader is a case in point, since the epistle presents a traditional version of femininity that the preface could not, on its own, so successfully project. More often, however, women writers addressed other women as women, evoking the seemingly private space of a letter or personal dedication in what was actually a much more public realm. Lanyer’s extensive, sophisticated, and self-serving prefatory apparatus for Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum offers a familiar example here. In addition to “To the Vertuous Reader,” Lanyer prefaces her poetic meditation on Christ’s passion with a poem dedicated “To all virtuous Ladies in generall” and several other verse and prose dedications to the most important women of her day. Whether a blatant bid for patronage, an expression of genuine respect and/or gratitude, or—most likely—a combination of the two, Lanyer’s prefatory apparatus summons “a community of good women” 20 to attend to and support her poetic project via personal, individualized invitations. The benefits of this gesture are significant. As Susanne Woods explains in her introduction to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, Lanyer’s extensive use of dedications allows her to simultaneously acknowledge and overcome her doubly unauthorized position as a lower-born, female poet: “By collapsing her unworthiness as a woman into the general unworthiness all poets must acknowledge in their dedications to the high born, she renders the happenstance of gender as visible as, and as ultimately inconsequential as, the male poet’s happenstance of birth.”21 The dedications also enhance Lanyer’s defense of women in her subsequent poems, since—through her gender—she “claim[s] a special identity with her dedicatees, and ... allow[s] their dignity and high birth to assert the dignity and merit of all women.”22 And finally, the dedications call into being tailor-made, personal bonds with her readers that not only work to create a sense of goodwill but also make more likely a generous, supportive, and positive response to her work. The prose dedication with which Speght begins her Mortalities Memorandum offers an example of how a writer could use even a personal, seemingly more intimate dedication to meet multiple prefatory goals or needs. Speght dedicates her text, a meditation on death, to her godmother, Marie Moundford; this forum allows Speght to praise and flatter her addressee, as all such dedications do, as she expresses gratitude for Moundford’s love and affection “ever since my beeing” (46).23 However, through the pretense of explaining her work to her godmother, Speght is also able to introduce justifications for her decision to publish and other motives beyond the selfless desire to provide “a testimonie of my true


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thankefulnesse for [Moundford’s] fruitfull love” (46). Thus we learn that Speght also acts out of a “desire of common benefit” (45) and out of a much more selfconcerned desire to prove herself to her critics: “I am now, as by a strong motive induced (for my rights sake) to produce and divulge this off-spring of my indevour, to prove them further futurely who have formerly deprived me of my due” (45).24 As with many prefaces, explanations proliferate and often seem to contradict one another as the writer fulfills the required humble persona and simultaneously offers an authorial self, one that is by its very nature the opposite of humble. But the form of a personal letter is particularly conducive for this paradoxical gesture, especially when the writer is a woman and women were generally encouraged to live private, rather than public, lives. Of course, many women violated this cultural ideal, though perhaps not so blatantly as Speght, who became the first self-identified female participant in the Jacobean pamphlet debate about women with her first publication, A Mouzell for Melastomus. But all published women writers “went public” to a certain extent, and using a traditionally personal form like a letter to introduce a text maintained the pretense, however momentarily, that the authoring act was not as bold as it might appear. As we have seen, the appearance of intimacy and the permission to directly address one’s reader that are afforded by epistolarity helped to make the preface a metaphorical bridge between private life and published text, thus easing the woman writer’s transition from one world to the next. Indeed, as I have argued throughout this essay, the reader-oriented approach demanded by the preface—and exemplified by such techniques as offering selfeffacing apologies, creating personal dedications, and consistently flattering one’s readers—actually enabled early modern women’s entrance into the world of print. The particular ability to create common ground with their readers was essential, for this strategy meant establishing a female community that would encompass themselves as well as their readers. As Larsen notes, this community of women essentially offered a support group. 25 But I would argue that the rhetorical motivation behind the language of inclusivity is at least as important as the support group it creates, since inclusion in a group makes disagreement with the author more difficult. Readers who choose to disagree must first disassociate themselves psychologically from the group with which they have been defined. And to disassociate, they must also reject the primary ideas of the group, ideas that are portrayed in the prefaces as positive, moral, and in defense of their own sex. This technique is closely linked to epistolary addresses but also manifests itself within the text, most obviously in the form of direct address. Tyler’s audience technically includes both men and women, but she refers to her female readers with the welcoming language of “us” and her male readers with a more distant “you” (Aiiiv). 26 Lanyer, too, addresses her main preface to the non-gendered “Virtuous Reader” but quickly makes it clear that her collection is intended primarily for women, noting that she intends it “for the generall use of all virtuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of this kingdome” (48). Finally, although Wheathill’s

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extended title notes her book’s benefit for “all such as are devoutlie disposed” (A1r), her preface speaks explicitly to “all Ladies, Gentlewomen, and others, which love true religion and vertue, and be devoutlie disposed” (A2r). Significantly, she here relegates men to the “other” category. More importantly, however, all three of these women use inclusive language to create personal links between reader and writer and between the reader and the issues at hand. Tyler and Lanyer speak of “us,” women who deserve to write texts just as men do and who (in Lanyer’s mind) should not heed men’s unsubstantiated accusations against them, and Wheathill speaks of her supportive readers as a community of “brethren and sisters in the Lord” (A3r). Such inclusivity operates as an offer, an extended hand if you will, into a unique and valuable community. Tyler’s inclusive “us” invites women into a community of female dedicatees, readers, and—according to her logic—writers, and Lanyer invites the reader to become one of many women, including biblical heroines, who have resisted arrogant and misguided men. Similarly, one who accepts Wheathill’s offer of brotherhood or sisterhood practices the very faith on which her text is based. In each case, the writers try to gain supporters by creating a bond between themselves and their readers that will be psychologically difficult to break and by offering sisterhood and fellowship to those who will read with an open mind.27 Accordingly, they explicitly place their literary success in their readers’ hands, a goodwill gesture that is also rhetorically powerful. Lanyer offers her readers “all increase of virtue” in return for “their favourable and best interpretations” (50). She also distinguishes between these ideal readers and those women who “speake unadvisedly against the rest of their sexe” (48); this gesture forces her readers to align themselves with the approving crowd. Tyler similarly manipulates her readers’ responses to her major claims by prefacing them with phrases like “thou knowest” (Aiiir)28 and by making her opponents’ stances absurdly polarized. For example, when defending her choice of genre, she says she hopes her “ill willers ... would enforce me necessarily either not to write or to write of divinitie” (Aiiiiv). Thus she subtly keeps her readers from aligning themselves with either antagonistic position. She also suggests a reader-author pact similar to Lanyer’s when she says, “and if I may deserve thy good favour by lyke labour, when the choice is mine owne I will have a speciall regard of thy liking” (Aiiiiv). According to this pattern, Wheathill also places the success of her readerly community on the nature of the readers’ response. Speaking of her desire for acceptance, she says: Which if I may obtaine, with the good judgement and liking of all my brethren and sisters in the Lord, I shall thinke my time most happilie bestowed: for that thereby I did avoid idlenes, to the pleasing of almightie God; and have gained those ... to be my freends, that shall taste these grose hearbs with me. (A3r–A3v)

In other words, only if her prayer collection is well received will she have gained a spiritual community of fellow believers and spent her time wisely. Fortunately, she


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has stacked the deck in her favor by claiming God’s support of her work throughout the preface, trusting that He will find it “no lesse acceptable” (A3r) than that of more learned individuals. Assuming that God does indeed accept her work, Wheathill makes it difficult for her Christian readers to do otherwise. In these skillful appeals to their readers, early modern women blend many traditional prefatory techniques in a way that is ideally suited to their needs as female authors. In the rest of this essay, I will turn to a more surprising but equally important element of early modern Englishwomen’s prefaces: the extraordinary amount of personal information that these writers offer in the attempt to both appear duly humble and effectively justify their violation of social codes. Certainly, the preface of a published text is the natural place for personal information, if it is to be included at all. However, as in so many cases, this gesture is particularly tricky for women. Given the early modern ideological formulations that equated women’s sexual and verbal excesses—thus suggesting that the female speaker orally exposed herself when she spoke publicly—sharing personal details in a public forum was especially problematic. According to this logic, the female writer who participates in autobiography makes her very person into a text, symbolically offering her body for public perusal. Not surprisingly, therefore, none of the personal tidbits provided by early modern Englishwomen in their prefaces has the “exposé” quality expected by readers of twenty-first century autobiography.29 On the contrary, the details are mundane and superficial, rarely moving beyond references to age, family, or the particular moment that lead to the writing act. Nonetheless, such personal references are noteworthy, for they demonstrate how an acknowledgement of self—and especially of gender—was commensurate with an early modern woman’s foray into public authorship even as she tried to be as self-effacing as possible. Yes, there are instances of a woman’s attempt to explicitly hide her gender and/or identity, including the publication of A Continuation by “A.W.” rather than “Anna Weamys” 30 and the likely use of pseudonyms by female participants in the early seventeenth-century pamphlet debates. But even the denial of gender is an acknowledgment of its importance, and—in the case of Weamys’s Continuation—the commendatory poems prefixed to the romance acknowledge the author’s female identity even if she is not named directly. In addition to the fact that they are women, we learn from their prefatory material that Tyler is of a “staied age” (Aiiiiv)31 and in need of money to pay her debts; 32 that Wheathill is an unmarried virgin who claims to lack formal education; that Speght is a young but educated woman (and an experienced author by the time she writes Mortalities Memorandum); and that Margaret Ascham, who dedicates her husband’s The Schoolmaster to Sir William Cecil in 1570, is a widow with many orphans. 33 Beyond such details—which also make clear that the early modern female writer fit no single profile—we learn about the writers’ intellectual identities. Tyler, for instance, finds great delight in reading Calahorra’s romance and seems to value its style—“the reporters device”—more than its content or

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verity—“the truth of this report” (Aiiir). 34 Such revelations contribute to her insistence on the text’s value for readers, but they also work, quite usefully, to deflect any concern that she immerses herself in romance for the morally suspect material, as was so often thought to be the reason for—and the primary danger of—a woman reading romance. At the other end of the spectrum, Wheathill’s selfpresentation as an uneducated but zealous Christian woman both justifies her decision to write and underscores her work’s status as the inspired—and thus acceptable—product of a woman’s spiritual devotion rather than the intellectual product of an unacceptable program of female education. Similarly, Weamys’s acknowledgment of her admiration for Philip Sidney’s work serves to counter suspicions that she is so ambitious as to think she can match him. On the contrary, as is so often the case in prefaces by both men and women (as already seen with Tyler), “someone else” made her do it. As she says to her dedicatees, “my ambition was not raised to so high a pitch, as the Title now manifests it to be, until I received Commands from those that cannot be disobeyed” (109). Her disclaimers put her intellectual work safely in the realm of obedience and overshadow the fact that she has not only read and admired but thoroughly absorbed Sidney’s romance. Perhaps the most complicated of the examples I offer here is Speght, for her written work—especially the thinly veiled A Dreame—reveals rhetorical finesse, a sharp wit, and even a bit of the heroic in the tone and manner with which she presents herself. In this prefatory poem, Speght traces her female speaker’s quest for knowledge, a quest that takes place in the safe—because otherworldly—realm of a dream. Yet the text is clearly autobiographical, referencing Speght’s general intellectual leanings, her participation in the pamphlet debate initiated by Joseph Swetnam’s misogynist diatribe, and her mother’s death. The narration poignantly describes how empty and sad the speaker feels as a result of Ignorance, how she eventually comes to believe that her desire for Knowledge is “a lawfull avarice” (231), and how—despite the fact that “some occurrence” (234) ends her pursuit of knowledge, she nonetheless takes up the pen when duty calls. Thus she heroically attempts to save women by using her Mouzell “to binde [Swetnam’s] chaps” (246) and writes Mortalities Memorandum to expose the cruel nature of the ultimate villain, Death. Like so many other preface writers, she claims that her text will benefit her readers: I’le blaze the nature of this mortall foe, And shew how it to tyranize begun. The sequell then with judgement view aright, The profit may and will the paines requite. (297–300)

Through this heroic characterization of her textual efforts, Speght both explains herself and defends all women, gestures we have come to expect. And though she works hard in her prefatory materials to present a self that is not learned, a self who is generally “defective in knowledge” (“Reader,” 31) 35 with a particular


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“insufficiency in literature” (“Virtuous Ladies,” 5),36 her texts clearly convey the opposite. The autobiographical details summarized here paradoxically depict Speght as the heroic defender of all people (but especially women) and, simultaneously, a woman who clearly knows her place. In A Dreame, she describes her return to the non-intellectual life, though this happens, ironically, before her written attack on Swetnam: ... some occurrence called me away. And made me rest content with that I had, Which was but little, as effect doth show; And quenched hope for gaining any more, For I my time must other-wayes bestow. I therefore to that place return’d againe, From whence I came, and where I must remaine. (234–40)

In Certain Quaeres to the Bayter of Women—a tract attached to A Mouzell for Melastomus—she says that education is, quite practically, limited to her spare time: “that little smattering in Learning which I have obtained, being only the fruit of such vacant houres, as I could spare from affaires befitting my Sex” (31).37 And in her dedicatory epistle to Mortalities Memorandum, Speght even claims to have matured from the “forward” self who printed previous works (45) to the very grateful and humble self who dedicates her work to Moundford.38 Speght’s example is so unusual because, unlike most of the writers I have considered here, the autobiographical details she provides are central to her text, thus claiming a certain amount of significance. The somewhat tortured intellectual self conveyed through Speght’s prefatory dream-vision poem is not built on scattered details or fragments of self-narrative that seem to exist only in order to excuse or explain an author’s actions. Rather, this figure of a knowledge-hungry woman is the poem, and it stands in defiance of the more traditional apologetic self Speght also tries to project. The amount of time Speght devotes to her female dreamer, the heroic achievements of this character, and the text’s bold defense of female education suggest, more than other texts can do, just how rhetorically motivated women’s prefatory gestures are. Thus, like Speght, most female writers use their prefaces to humbly deny both ambition and intellectual capacity even as they reveal these very same attributes. Furthermore, though not as boldly as Speght and in spite of their general adherence to the humility topos, early modern women writers demonstrate through their prefaces that they are quite confident and more than willing to take risks. One is, of course, the act of writing and/or publishing. Another, in many cases, is incorporating polemical defenses of women alongside more private and personal, often apologetic, disclosures. And yet another is their willingness to claim authority for what they are doing. For example, in Tyler’s humble epistle to

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Howard, she nonetheless claims the right and the ability to make the best decisions about her work. After explaining how others forced her to take on the translation project, she notes that she made the decisions about the dedication: “reserving to my selfe the order for the dedication, so as I should thinke best either for the defence of my worke, or for some perticuler merite towards me. And heerein I tooke no long leysure to finde out a sufficient personage” (Aiir). Clearly this is flattery, but it is also an assertion of will. Anne Dowriche, in her dedicatory epistle to The French Historie (1589), is even more explicit: “Consider not therefore the worthinesse of the worke, but rather the will of the worker: for though the one maie justlie be condemned, yet the other deserves to be accepted” (A2r). 39 Dowriche’s assertion of what she deserves stands in stark contrast to the proffering of a text that its writer hopes will be accepted. And yet, Dowriche’s assertion is implicit in the other prefaces I have examined here. In fact, despite women’s complete mastery of the preface’s self-effacing topoi—or perhaps because of it—they reveal not only an unexpectedly powerful and confident version of themselves but also a new version of early modern women more generally. As noted above, all of the traditional prefatory elements enable self-authorization, the desired intention of any prefatory text. However, achieving this goal was especially challenging for women, who entered the text with little or no authority, especially in textual and intellectual matters. As already noted, unlike their male counterparts, women had to perform all of the traditional prefatory gestures and defend their basic right to write. Therefore, it was essential that they master the right tone (simultaneously authoritative and humble), use persuasive techniques as adroitly as possible, and never lose sight of the power of their readers. The examples offered here demonstrate that early modern Englishwomen could indeed meet all of these challenges, thus taking advantage of the prefatory space to gain the right to authorship rather than simply to describe one’s authorial choices. Ironically, it is through the space of the preface and the denial of self and ability that must occur there that early modern women were able to authorize themselves—and other women—as individuals capable of authoring. Consequently, in addition to all of its other functions, the preface can also be seen as an autobiographical, image-forging space. This is, in many ways, an obvious claim. If writers use the space to justify and otherwise explain their writerly acts, then of course they participate in a certain amount of self-fashioning, representing themselves, as needs demand, as inexperienced, reluctant, ineffective, or all of the above. The image that emerges does not have to match reality, for this is part of the prefatorial agreement between reader and writer. But for female writers, the self-fashioning was much more extensive and much less superficial and disingenuous. For the woman’s greatest task—beyond explaining a variety of decisions, putting her readers in the right frame of mind, and introducing her text— was to present herself, in a convincing and socially acceptable way, as an author. Since there was no culturally designated role for an early modern woman as a writer, much less a published author, successfully representing herself as one


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would inevitably contribute to a new version of the early modern woman. When all of the humble dressing and commonplace apologies are put aside, this revised version of the female self emerges. Some characteristics of this woman—such as her devotion to God and/or family—are expected. But she is also simultaneously determined, confident, and bold; a serious thinker; and one who has mastered logic, rhetoric, and at least a few aspects of the textual landscape. She is, as Wheathill would have us believe, even more devout because of the time devoted to writing. And she is, as Speght would have us believe, no less than heroic as a result of her days in the garden of Knowledge. In other words, the type of personal information that is provided in early modern Englishwomen’s prefaces helps to forge a new conception of the woman writer at a critical moment in the development of attitudes about and towards women. Female preface writers were not only presenting new versions of themselves, though that was necessary on an individual basis in order to get written work accepted without doing too much damage to one’s reputation. But they were also, collectively, presenting a new version of female subjectivity: a version that suggested humble womanhood and intellectual production were not necessarily mutually exclusive and that, over time, would pave the way for a writing woman who may still have to justify genre or subject matter but not that she was entitled to write. As I have been arguing in this essay, the preface is the safest and most ideal space for women to perform such radical work, as their willingness to compose polemical arguments in their prefaces most dramatically suggests. Even though a few women composed original polemical tracts during this period, Speght being the most notable, women who chose not to voice their controversial opinions in such a direct way had a much more subtle route available to them in the preface. Tyler stuck to the more permissible act of translation, for example, but still managed to build arguments in defense of women writers into her preface. And Lanyer, who defends women throughout Salve Deus, is, arguably, most polemic and aggressive in its preface. Admittedly, the difference between Speght’s “direct” method and the other writers’ “indirect” method is one of degree, but this is precisely the value of the prefatory space. As Moira Ferguson notes, “in prefaces, writers could air their views and not be perceived as aggressive controversialists.”40 These brief examples provide a sense of the kind of polemical work a rather innocent-looking document could achieve, in part because the mechanisms for such work already existed within the framework of the preface as it was used in early modern England. Indeed, the space of the preface enabled early modern women’s original composition in a number of ways. First, through its literal, physical location at the beginning of a text, a preface introduces and thus brings into being the text that follows. In many cases, as has been duly demonstrated by years of scholarship on the work of early modern women writers, this work is often more radical, subversive, or polemic than it may at first appear. Second, the preface itself allows

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for original thought within its marginal and thus more easily disregarded (read “less important”) space. And third, the prefaces written by early modern Englishwomen contributed in a number of ways to the development and authorization of the female writer as a cultural figure. Through the defenses of women that so often found their way into prefatory material and the example offered by each woman who used this space to her advantage, additional work by women became possible. Of course, the advent of the female writer in English literary history is complicated, based on numerous interconnected factors. But it is both likely and reasonable that the arguments made within early modern prefaces, the comfort level clearly afforded by the prefatory space, and the personae created by women in this space contributed to changes in the perception of women and what they could do that occurred around this time. For these reasons, the marginal space of the preface can be seen as a useful, though little-marked, tool in the transition from silent women to published women.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

On the preface as a malleable generic space, see Anne R. Larsen, “‘Un honneste passetems’: Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women’s Prefaces,” L’Esprit Créateur 30.4 (1990): 11–22; Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994); Elizabeth W. Harries, “‘Out in Left Field’: Charlotte Smith’s Prefaces, Bourdieu’s Categories, and the Public Sphere,” Modern Language Quarterly 58.4 (1997): 457–73; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993); and Catherine Gallagher, “A History of the Precedent: Rhetorics of Legitimation in Women’s Writing,” Critical Inquiry 26.2 (2000): 309–27. Joseph Conrad’s comment to R.B. Cunninghame Graham in an 1899 letter most succinctly states the idea of the preface as its own, quite unique genre: “I am vexed about the preface. Your prefaces are so good! It is quite an art by itself.” See Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. C.T. Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), p. 128. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), p. 1. Barbara Johnson, translator’s introduction, Dissemination, pp. vii–xxiii, esp. p. xix. Larsen’s reference to Johnson in “‘Un honneste passetems’” directed me to this provocative piece. Indeed, my essay is indebted to Larsen’s in a number of ways. Larsen, p. 12. Significantly, however, a number of recent dissertations indicate the increasing interest in this subject. These include, for example, Anamaria Harriette Kothe, Displaying the Muse: Print, Prologue, Poetics, and Early Modern Women Writers Published in England and Spain (Diss., U of Maryland, 1996); Amy Scott-Douglass, Prefacing the Poetess: Gender and Textual Presentation in Seventeenth-Century England (Diss., U of


6 7

8 9

10 11

12

13

14

15

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Oklahoma, 2000); and Patricia Pender, Authorial Alibis: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Limits of Literature (Diss., Stanford U, 2004.) Larsen, p. 12. Although there are, of course, numerous writers to whom I could refer in this essay, I have chosen only a few. My intention has been to represent as wide a range as possible of writers whose work was published in their lifetime. The writers I discuss, therefore, come from different class and religious backgrounds, have a wide range of educational experiences, write with different purposes and in different genres, and write from many different points in time within the early modern period. I have not, it should be noted, addressed Margaret Cavendish, whose prefatory writings often comment directly on both genre and the nature of her identity as a woman and a writer. In part because Cavendish is unique among early modern women writers (thus deserving more space than I could give her here) and in part because her work is amply addressed in this collection, I have decided not to include her in this essay. For an exclusive discussion of Cavendish’s prefaces, see Amy Scott-Douglass, “Self-Crowned Laureatess: Towards a Critical Revaluation of Margaret Cavendish’s Prefaces,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 9.1 (2000): 27–49. Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 281. The crux of Wall’s argument is that the concept of literary authority that developed during the transition from manuscript to print culture in Renaissance England was intensely masculine and reliant on the idea of a feminine text, thereby shifting attention from the social crisis created by publication to issues of gender. Since this conception of literary authority posed even more challenges for female writers, Wall considers women’s approaches to self-authorization in chapter 5. Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 282. Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance,” Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1985), pp. 107–25, esp. p. 115. Margaret Tyler, “M.T. to the Reader,” The Mirrour of Princely deedes and Knighthood, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, part 1, vol. 8, comp. Kathryn Coad (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), Aiiir–Aiiiiv. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text to Tyler’s preface and her dedicatory epistle, “To the right honourable the Lord Thomas Howard,” are to this edition. I have modernized the spelling slightly for greater clarity. Tyler, “M.T. to the Reader.” Similarly, in the dedicatory epistle, she writes that the romance is “not in deede the most profitablest, as entreting of arms, nor yet altogether fruitlesse, if example may serve, as being historicall, but the while, either to be born withal for the delight, or not to be refused for the strangeness” (Aiir). Aemilia Lanyer, “To the Vertuous Reader,” The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), pp. 48–50. All subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text to this edition. All subsequent references to Wheathill’s text cited parenthetically in the text are to the electronic edition, Anne Wheathill, “To all Ladies, Gentlewomen, and others,” A Handful of Wholesome (Though Homely) Herbs, London, 1584, Renaissance Women Online, Women Writers Project, Brown University, 29 June 2005 <www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/wroentry.html>. Although little is known of Wheathill, she

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16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27


was clearly of the Protestant faith, and her collection of prayers “is completely within the tradition of Reformed books for private devotion.” See Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), p. 53. I am grateful to Michelle M. Dowd for helping me to clarify this and other critical points. Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 1. All subsequent references to Weamys cited parenthetically in the text are to “To the two unparalleld Sisters” in the reprint edition in Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia,” ed. Patrick Colborn Cullen (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), p. 109. Cullen (introduction, pp. xvii–xi, esp. pp. xvii–xviii) convincingly explains why the “A.W.” who signs the dedication and whose initials appear on the title page is thought to be Weamys. Rachel Speght, “To all virtuous Ladies Honourable or Worshipfull,” The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (New York: Oxford UP, 1996). Additional preliminary materials for A Mouzell include a poem and a second prose preface, both addressed to Joseph Swetnam. All subsequent references to Speght cited parenthetically in the text are to this edition. Susanne Woods, introduction, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Woods, pp. xv–xlii, esp. p. xxi. Woods also refers to this group as “a community of intellectual women” (xxi), an important characterization given the rewriting of female identity that occurs in the preface space, and notes, “there is no comparable work of sustained and exclusive dedication to women patrons” (xxxii). For a useful counterargument to Woods and others who emphasize community over patronage in their reading of Lanyer’s prefaces, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000), pp. 38–57. Woods, introduction, p. xxxiii. Ibid. Speght, “To the Worshipfull and Vertuous Gentlewoman,” pp. 45–6. Speght here refers to her 1617 publication of A Mouzell, which was apparently attributed to her father by some who could not or did not accept a woman’s authorship. Larsen, pp. 17–18. Tyler, “M.T. to the Reader.” Direct addresses to men could, of course, be equally manipulative, as Tyler once again demonstrates. In her dedication to Howard, she explains that she has chosen him as her dedicatee because of the “manifolde benefits” (Aiir) she received from his parents and her gratitude for their kindnesses. However, in addition to being “a simple testimony of [her] good will” (Aiiv) toward Howard and his family, Tyler’s translation is also in need of a protector. Her description of her expectations in this regard exude a not-so-subtle pressure for Howard to live up to his family’s reputation: Under your honours protection I shal lesse fear the assalt of the envious, and of your honours good acceptacion I have some hope in the mildenes of your Lordships nature, not doubting but that as your Lordshippe hath given no small signification in this your noble youth of wisedome and courage to so many as knowe you, it being the only support of your auncestours lyne: so the same lykewise will maynteine your


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auncestours glorye and the hope of your owne vertues with affability and gentlenesse, which was the proper commendation of your parents. (Aiiv) 28 Tyler, “M.T. to the Reader.” 29 The complexity of early modern women writing autobiographical texts for publication likely also helps to explain why most of the writers addressed in this collection produced either manuscript texts (thus avoiding publication of their “selves” altogether) or works within “safe” genres like the mother’s manual. 30 See note 18 above. 31 Tyler, “M.T. to the Reader.” 32 Tyler, “To the right honourable the Lord Thomas Howard.” 33 Margaret Ascham wrote a dedicatory epistle to Sir William Cecil to accompany her late husband’s The Schoolmaster (1570). 34 Tyler, “M.T. to the Reader.” 35 Speght, “To the Reader,” Certain Quaeres, pp. 31–32. 36 Speght, “To all virtuous Ladies Honourable or Worshipfull.” 37 Speght, “To the Reader.” 38 Speght, “To the Worshipfull and Vertuous Gentlewoman.” 39 Anne Dowriche, “To the right worshipfull her loving Bro. Master Pearse Edgecombe,” The French Historie, London, 1589, Renaissance Women Online, Women Writers Project, Brown University, 29 June 2005 <www.wwp.brown.edu/text/wroentry.html>. 40 Moira Ferguson, ed., First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578–1799 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), p. 51, emphasis added.


Chapter 8

Structures of Piety in Elizabeth Richardson’s Legacie Michelle M. Dowd

In 1645, Elizabeth Richardson published A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters, a book of prayers intended as both an advice book and a devotional aid for her children. As a book of practical and spiritual guidance, the Legacie has a place within a subgenre of women’s life writings in early modern England that has come to be known as mothers’ legacies. These books were ostensibly directed at a very small audience: they were usually dedicated to the writer’s children and designed to offer maternal advice that could outlive the author herself. However, though texts in this tradition had been written and circulated in England from the 800s, the seventeenth century witnessed a striking surge in the publication and dissemination of these books, particularly by Protestant women. As Valerie Wayne has demonstrated, the influence of humanist positions about motherhood, advocated most forcefully by Erasmus, combined with widespread sympathy for the plight of Elizabeth Stuart, exiled daughter to James I and a popular symbol for both Protestantism and maternal nurturance, may have provided both the “ideological justification” and the “politico-religious occasion” for these mothers’ advice books.1 These texts thus performed a dual function: they served as personal collections of practical and spiritual guidance intended for individual family members, and they also participated more broadly in the process of advocating Protestant ethics and spirituality during a tumultuous period of political and religious upheaval. The dual function of these books might help to account for the widespread popularity that they enjoyed throughout the early modern period. The most wellknown text in this genre, Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing (1616), was dedicated to Elizabeth Stuart, and it was a seventeenth-century bestseller, running to 23 editions between 1616 and 1674. Similarly, Elizabeth Jocelin’s The Mothers Legacie, To her unborne Childe (1624) went through seven editions between 1624 and 1640.2 And yet, the popularity of these texts does not imply that their authors triumphed unproblematically over the stigmas associated with women’s writing during the period. Authors of mothers’ legacies often claimed their own impending

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death as the impetus for their writing, thus offering an urgent justification for the publication of their texts. As much of the criticism on legacy books has demonstrated, the genre of the mother’s legacy gave women like Leigh and Jocelin authorial strategies that enabled them to publish but demanded in turn their rhetorical (and sometimes literal) self-effacement. For these women, the publication of the self often implied its erasure, either through the rhetorical transference of agency from mother to child or through the physical loss of agency at death.3 What is less often discussed, however, are the ways in which the formal structure of mothers’ legacy books affected the type of written guidance these women could leave for the benefit of their surviving children and the particular role these texts could play in Protestant print culture. Since mothers’ legacies were not well defined in terms of generic categorization or structural design, these texts often make creative use of a wide range of literary forms and models. This generic fluidity and potential for innovation within the legacy genre, I argue, produced unique opportunities for religious expression and self-authorization that helped to articulate the significance of maternal authority to both individual families and to Protestant communities more generally. Generic hybridity in this context becomes a politically useful and spiritually efficacious literary tool. Given my interest in the creativity and generic flexibility of the mothers’ legacy books, my focus on Elizabeth Richardson might seem counterintuitive. Born to a large and well-connected gentry family in Leicestershire, Richardson was a devout Protestant who adhered to Anglican orthodoxies.4 Her legacy book reflects her doctrinal allegiances in its contents. The 1645 edition, which is my primary focus here, begins with an epistle and preface dedicated to her four daughters, Elizabeth, Frances, Anne, and Katherine. The rest of the text is divided into three books: the first consists of scriptural meditations and prayers; Book II is almost exclusively comprised of prayers, including ones to be read on each day of the week; and the third and final book presents additional prayers, many of which are more personal in nature, “written out of crises of sorrow or sickness in her widowhood and old age.”5 What immediately strikes a modern reader of the Legacie—particularly if it is compared to other legacy books from the period, such as those by Leigh and Jocelin—is its proclivity for set prayers. With the exception of the epistle and preface, the Legacie consists not of narrative advice or conduct-book style aphorisms, but entirely of specific prayers to be read, recited, and memorized for individual occasions. As such, Richardson’s book seems to represent the antithesis of creativity or formal flexibility; it is perhaps for this reason that the Legacie has been discussed far less in the critical literature than have other mothers’ advice books. But I suggest that Richardson’s book is more complex than it might first appear to be and that examining it more carefully can help us to think in new ways about the subgenre of mothers’ legacy books as a whole. Richardson is undoubtedly unique within this tradition, and the structure of her set prayers can tell us a great

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deal about the kind of intervention she hoped to make in her family’s spiritual life and in the lives of other devout Protestants. But the Legacie, despite its apparent lack of extensive personal narrative, is also in many ways an ideal case study for considering the formal flexibility of the mothers’ legacies and the link between generic hybridity, self-expression, and religio-political discourse. This essay, then, has two goals: 1) to explore the historical and textual idiosyncrasies of Richardson’s book that facilitate its participation in mid-seventeenth-century Protestant print culture and that enable the construction of a maternal self, and 2) to suggest that attending to formal hybridity—one of the key structural features of the Legacie—can offer a new critical method for studying the mothers’ advice manuals as a genre.

Though the Legacie was clearly an important document for Richardson, her family, and their spiritual lives, it lacked the commercial popularity of many mothers’ legacy books: the 1645 edition was printed in two issues, but no subsequent editions were ever produced. However, a rich textual history lies behind the 1645 edition, linking it to other early modern literary traditions and patterns of circulation. Though the Legacie was not published until 1645, Richardson began writing advice, prayers, and meditations much earlier in the century. Extant manuscripts of Richardson’s work dated 1606 and 1626 demonstrate her “revising sensibility” as well as her active participation in seventeenth-century English manuscript culture.6 Indeed, Book I of the Legacie consists largely of the same material found in the 1626 manuscript (MS ASH 3501) dedicated to her daughter Elizabeth.7 Manuscript book production and circulation, as Margaret Ezell and others have demonstrated, enabled women like Richardson to establish personal networks through textual exchange and to develop intellectual and spiritual interests that could be passed on as legacies to their children.8 The 1645 edition of the Legacie in many ways continues to build upon the personal and religious networks first developed in the earlier manuscripts, providing another venue for Richardson to leave a “motherly remembrance” to her daughters consisting of “prayers faithfully offered up unto his Majesty,” that is, to God (A3r, A1v).9 The textual history of Richardson’s Legacie thus locates it within at least two literary traditions associated with women’s writing in early modern England: women’s manuscript publication of prayers and meditations and the mothers’ advice writing tradition that set a precedent for the 1645 publication of the Legacie. But the printed edition of the Legacie borrows from other early modern textual traditions that are somewhat less obvious—and less frequently discussed—than either patterns of manuscript exchange or the developing genre of the legacy book. The Legacie’s explicit focus on pious devotion, for instance, closely aligns it with early modern prayer books. Yet even within the generic subset of the prayer book, Richardson had access to an assortment of textual models that represented a range of religious orthodoxies. Both Richardson’s father-in-law, John Ashburnham, and

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her primary patron, the Duchess of Buckingham, for example, were Roman Catholics. In 1625, Richardson and her children took refuge at the Duke of Buckingham’s Chelsea house to escape the plague, and it was there that Richardson began composing the prayers that would eventually be printed in the Legacie.10 Early in her text, Richardson credits the Duchess of Buckingham with providing a space for the Legacie to originate: “This Booke was written at Chelsey in the yeare 1625 by E.A. at the Duke of Buckinghams house, a part whereof was lent me by the good Dutches, my most honoured Lady, when the great sicknesse was in London” (A2r). Both through her husband’s family and through her close association with “the good Dutches”—a personal connection directly linked to the writing and publication of the Legacie—Richardson may have become familiar with the modes of prayer associated with Catholic piety. Though Richardson herself was not a Catholic, aspects of the Legacie demonstrate an “attraction to the set rituals and rhythms of devotion” that typified Roman Catholic Books of Hours.11 Like the Legacie, Books of Hours were structured as a sequence of prayers to be recited at specific hours throughout the day. And these devotional texts were enormously popular in medieval and early modern England: “[f]rom the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, more Books of Hours were commissioned and produced, bought and sold, bequeathed and inherited, printed and reprinted than any other text, including the Bible.”12 Their primary audience was the female laity; women played an essential role in the patronage of these books, brides frequently received them as wedding gifts, and women exchanged them among family members and friends.13 It is quite possible that Richardson may have read or glanced at Books of Hours owned by either the Ashburnhams or the Buckinghams, becoming familiar with their overall structure and design and revisiting that form when she composed her Legacie. During the sixteenth century, as Kathleen Ashley has recently demonstrated, Books of Hours began to be used for family record keeping in both France and England. This use of Books of Hours as “tangible symbols of the family lineage” might have made this genre particularly appealing to Richardson as she set out to leave a “motherly remembrance” of advice and prayer to her children.14 Richardson herself, however, was very much a Protestant. As an Anglican with leanings toward Laudianism, Richardson would have looked directly to the Bible and to the Book of Common Prayer for models of daily piety and routine devotion. Though she may use the language and structure of Catholic Books of Hours to organize the content and form of her Legacie, Richardson turns most consistently to the specific refrains of the Bible and the Protestant Prayer Book to shape her personal narrative of self, family, and piety. The text of the Legacie thus borrows most evidently and most profoundly from the generic and spiritual templates offered by these two cornerstones of Protestant spiritual ideology. Given that the “matter” of her text is “but devotions or prayers,” Richardson’s frequent citation of biblical passages is hardly surprising (A2r). The printed margins of the Legacie are taken up by scriptural references that link her text


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directly to corresponding passages in the Geneva Bible, the Bible most commonly used for personal meditation and devotional study. Richardson seems to have been particularly attracted to several biblical passages (such as Matthew 7:7, John 14:13, and Psalm 8:4–5), which she returns to frequently throughout the Legacie to structure her personal prayers. In Book III of her text, her “Prayer to God, the Lord of all grace and mercie” that begins “O most bountifull Lord God, which giveth to all men liberally, and reproacheth none, if we aske in faith and waver not” borrows from all three of these passages. Richardson’s use of the Bible is often citational, but it is also at times creative and even commercially savvy. This becomes particularly clear near the end of the Legacie, where Richardson includes a hymn under the heading, “My owne Prayer in Meeter, or to be sung as a Hymne” (M1r). As Sylvia Brown has noted, this hymn is metrically structured by alternating “tetrameter and trimester lines in a four-line stanza: the dominant metrical pattern … of the immensely popular versification of the Psalms by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins.”15 For this prayer, Richardson borrows indirectly from the Bible, combining her own devotional text with the metrics popularized by Sternhold and Hopkins; the Psalms provide the biblical context for her “Prayer in Meeter,” but Richardson adapts that text for her own readers. Her choice of meter is particularly interesting, given that the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter was the most popular volume of metrical psalms in England between 1549 and 1700 and that the tradition of sung metrical psalms was a well-established method of spreading Protestant doctrine and building religious alliances during this period. Appealing to Puritans and Laudians alike, the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter was remarkable for its widespread popularity and its entrenched status within Protestant communities.16 By creating a new hymn within this extremely popular verse tradition, Richardson displays a keen awareness of a Protestant audience beyond her immediate family, and she ensures that her hymn will be circulated within a Protestant print culture that was enormously successful at bringing spiritual texts, like the Psalms, to a wide audience.17 Indeed, Richardson’s possible personal interest in providing a Protestant devotional text to a public readership may help us account for her decision to publish the Legacie when she did. Richardson had been writing and circulating her prayers in manuscript for decades, so one might wonder why she decided to publish a new and revised version of the Legacie in 1645. As Brown notes: That year would not have been a hopeful one for those loyal to the monarchy or the old religion. The war turned decisively against the Royalists with the Battle of Naseby in July, but perhaps more important for Richardson was the fate of The Book of Common Prayer: in 1645 it was banned and replaced by the Presbyterian Directory for Public Workshop. So, not only may Richardson have felt that prayers were especially needed in these discouraging times, she may also have been seeking, through her own prayers, to rehabilitate some of the old reassuring phrases and rhythms of common prayer.18

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The timing of the Legacie’s publication, that is, suggests that Richardson might have been eager to offer Protestant readers beyond her immediate family a published substitute for the absent “phrases and rhythms” of the Book of Common Prayer. Political and religious exigency created a space for a new text that was deeply and necessarily sutured to a past history of Protestant textual forms. Even more suggestive than the date of the published Legacie is its publisher. The title page to Richardson’s volume includes the imprint: “Printed by Tho. Harper, and are to be sold at his house in Little Britaine, 1645.” Harper was a printer by trade, but he also seems to have occasionally served as a bookseller and publisher.19 What little we know about Harper and his role in the book trade suggests that he may have developed a specialty in Royalist and Laudian books. In his entry for Harper in the Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers: 1641–1667, H.R. Plomer notes: “[d]uring the early years of the Rebellion he was more than once in trouble for printing pamphlets against the Parliament.”20 Other books that Harper published suggest that he was particularly keen to publish defenses of the monarchy and the “true Protestant religion,” most notably Thomas Heywood’s A Funeral Elegie, Upon the Much Lamented Death of the Trespuissant and unmatchable King, King James, King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith (1625) and An Apologie and Vindication (From all false and malignant Aspersions) For His Excellencie, the right Honourable, and most Noble, Robert D’Evreux, Earle of Essex, and Ewe, Viscount Hereford, Baron of Chartley, Lord Bourchier and Lovain, Inheritour of all His thrice Noble Fathers Honours and Vertues: Now Lord Generall of all the Forces in Arms in England and Wales, for the present High and Honourable Court of Parliament, in defence of the true Protestant Religion, Laws and Liberties of the Subject (1644). Harper’s association with the publisher Nicholas Vavasour, for whom he printed an overtly Royalist text, Thomas de Grey’s The Compleat Horseman and Expert Ferrier (1639), further suggests that Harper may have specialized in published defenses of ceremonialism and the Book of Common Prayer, since, as Zachary Lesser has recently argued, Vavasour demonstrated a professional interest in exactly these types of publications.21 The publication history of Richardson’s Legacie, in other words, situates her text within a Protestant political discourse that is decidedly Royalist and Laudian in nature. As such, Richardson’s legacy book offers an intentional and highly politicized substitution for the recently banned Book of Common Prayer, insisting that the “phrases and rhythms” of Protestant ceremonialism continue to find a public audience during the civil wars. The Book of Common Prayer, produced and published under the reign of Edward VI, was intended both as a thorough reform of traditional liturgy and as a means of prescribing uniformity in Protestant worship and ceremonial practice throughout England. John E. Booty notes: The Book of Common Prayer was a set liturgy with prayers whose language was not to vary. The book was to be used day by day, week by week, year by year, until the words


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and phrases, the sounds and music, sank into the deep recesses of the mind and there effected the reformation of the individual in mind and will.22

As such, the Protestant Prayer Book stood in direct contrast to Puritan critiques of ceremonialism and set prayer, exemplified by the Puritan Prayer Book of the 1580s, which “presumed that the most able ministers would pray as inspired in their own words. The prayers set down were examples, or directions, to be used if necessary.”23 The unvarying language of the Book of Common Prayer, on the other hand, insisted on a reiterative, communal structure to spirituality that bound together worshippers across the country. The preface to the 1559 Prayer Book specifically addresses the need for uniformity in Protestant liturgy, informing readers: “And where heretofore there hath been a great diversity in saying and singing in churches within this realm, some following Salisbury use, some Hereford use, some the use of Bangor, some of York, and some of Lincoln, now from henceforth all the whole realm shall have but one use.”24 The Prayer Book thus attempted to consolidate Protestant worship in England by offering those who read it and listened to it a common language of set prayer that remained constant despite the idiosyncrasies of geography, parish, or minister.25 Richardson’s Legacie follows the model of set prayer and the desire for conformity in worship that distinguished the banned Book of Common Prayer. Richardson often borrows directly from specific passages and orders of worship in the Prayer Book. For example, the “confession of sins” in Book I of the Legacie recalls the Absolution given by the minister in the Prayer Book’s “Order for Morning Prayer.”26 The phrasing of the Prayer Book, “Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live” (51), becomes in Richardson’s text: “for thou art the most gracious Lord, full of mercy and great compassion, and of long suffering, that desires not the death of a sinner, but that he should repent and live” (A7v). Later in Book I, a “Prayer for Tuesday morning” asks God to “cleanse and reforme the thoughts of my wicked corrupt heart, by the inspiration of thy most holy Spirit,” a phrase that echoes the collect that begins the Prayer Book’s “Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper,” where the minister asks God to “cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Sprit” (248).27 These types of borrowings and reformulations appear frequently throughout the Legacie, infusing Richardson’s prayers with the deeply felt structures of Protestant piety and common worship. Protestant readers—particularly Anglican ones—who studied Richardson’s legacy book may have felt palpably if paradoxically comforted, as they found the phrases in front of them gradually recalling the temporally inaccessible, yet strongly remembered language of the Prayer Book. At a more subtle textual level, Richardson’s legacy book shares some of the dominant stylistic characteristics of the Book of Common Prayer. The most notable of these is the prevalence of doubling. Booty explains the significance of this stylistic device in the Prayer Book:

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Doubling, which is so prevalent in the book, is often glossatory, as in the second exhortation of the Holy Communion where the two words (“love and charitie”) with the same meaning explain one another. The same is true of “serche and examine,” and “confesse and open his sinne.” Doubling is usually emphatic. Where one word might slip too easily by, two are better suited to make the desired impact.28

Strikingly, Richardson consistently structures her prose in the Legacie according to a similar pattern of glossatory and emphatic doublings. In one prayer alone, she addresses God as a “preserver and disposer” whom we must serve with “due feare and reverence” so that we will not wallow in “weaknesse and disability” but instead learn to teach God’s word in “faith and verity” (A8v–B1r). Another prayer asks that the worshipper be allowed to “please and obey thee in all things, with reverence and feare” (B3r). Where Richardson’s direct borrowings of phrases from the Prayer Book serve as an overt reminder to her readers of the formal structures of Protestant worship, this ingrained stylistic pattern of doubling remakes and reimagines the underlying rhythms of that worship, the less obvious yet equally powerful structures of Protestant piety. The general format of the Legacie—set prayers to be said on set days—further emphasizes the systematic coherence of worship envisioned by the Prayer Book. As Alison Chapman has argued, the calendar devised by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer that serves as a preface to the Book of Common Prayer aids the reformers’ agenda to create uniformity in Protestant worship by “laying out a common order of collective reading” and creating a “system of nationally synchronized Bible readings and a shared liturgy.”29 In a similar manner, Richardson dictates the precise words to be read and studied on specific days of the week and at specific times of the day. By thus controlling the shape and content of the devotions she leaves to future readers, she is able to exert a powerful authority over them not unlike Cranmer’s pervasive influence over readers of the Prayer Book. The set prayers of the Legacie, like the set liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, discourage extemporaneous worship and instead create a Protestant community sustained by conformity.30 The overt structure of Richardson’s text and her citations and stylistic borrowings from the Book of Common Prayer thus seem designed largely to provide a rigid structure of devotion that can substitute for the banned Prayer Book. But this is only part of the story. While maintaining this formal template, Richardson manages to infuse it with personal and familial significance and unique opportunities for individualization. Though the Prayer Book did make room for personal interpretations of the Bible, it was not primarily intended for private use or for personalized meditations.31 Richardson’s Legacie, on the other hand, was explicitly designed to be used privately, for the personal devotions of her daughters or other individuals who might purchase it. The Legacie was printed in octavo, making it easily portable and ideal for personal use.32 In the opening epistle to her daughters, Richardson urges them “often to peruse, ponder, practice, and make use


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of this Booke according to my intention, though of it self unworthy,” suggesting both the necessity of spiritual routine—the repetitive acts of perusing and practicing—and the importance of developing that routine through an individualized process of meditation, a process that involves pondering the text and making use of it in order to achieve Richardson’s “intention”: to live a life of “vertue and piety” (A1v, A1r). Though the circumstances of its publication ground the Legacie in a larger political and religious discourse, this text also exhibits a sustained interest in the adaptability of Protestant piety to personal devotion. Though set down according to a precise order and wording, Richardson’s prayers allow for a great deal of spiritual experimentation and flexibility—a flexibility that is hinted at in her subtle, yet notable departures from the other generic models to which she is indebted. However much Richardson’s text echoes the language and structures of the Book of Common Prayer, she still chose to write and publish her own prayers, offering her readers a new, set liturgy for reflection. In Book II of the Legacie, Richardson includes two prayers designated as “A Prayer to be said at the Church, as soone as we are come into our seat” and “A Prayer after the Sermon is ended, before we go out of the Church” (D6v, D7v). The use of the pronoun “we” rhetorically imagines a community of believers who share a common prayer. And yet, Richardson’s text offers worshippers prayers that cannot be found even in the banned Prayer Book; meant to be said during Church services, these prayers from the Legacie are nonetheless extraneous to the liturgy recorded in the Book of Common Prayer. Intermingled with standard practices of Protestant worship, these extra-liturgical prayers tantalizingly suggest a community just on the margins of those practices. The Legacie creates a space for private prayers that can settle in between and fill the momentary gaps in Protestant liturgy. It also provides text for prayers to be said privately, when the reader is “from Church” and removed from the usual scope of the Prayer Book (C2r).33 Richardson’s prayers, that is, exceed and supplement the spiritual possibilities of the Book of Common Prayer, enabling a greater degree of individualization and privatization. Richardson also encourages readers to adapt and revise the specific, set language and circumstances of individual prayers. Book III of the Legacie includes a prayer with a remarkably specific headnote: “A sorrowfull widowes prayer and petition unto the gracious protector and defender of widowes, and father of the fatherlesse, which I composed shortly after the death of my dear husband: And this may also serve any other upon the like occasion” (I3r). In this prayer, Richardson mourns and commemorates the death of her second husband, Sir Thomas Richardson, in 1635. She writes: Almighty God … having in thy mercifull goodnesse made me see with comfort all my children, who were left destitute, now by thy provident provision and blessing, well settled for this life. … And now, O Lord, since it hath been thy will and pleasure, to take away, and call to thy selfe my deare husband out of this transitory life before me, and to

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bereave me of him who was my chiefe comfort in this world: I humbly beseech thee, vouchsafe to take me into thy care, and give me grace to choose with Mary, that better part which may never be taken from mee, chiefly to serve and follow thee, that so I may turne this freedome from the bond of mariage only the more to thy service, an may become thy bondwoman to serve and praise thee day and night like Hanna, so long as I live. (I3r, I3v)

In her study of the manuscript history of Richardson’s writings, Victoria Burke has convincingly demonstrated Richardson’s interest in revising her own prayers, her “revising sensibility” as an author.34 But what I find striking about this particular prayer is its explicit invocation of—and expectation of—not a revising author so much as a revising reader. Clearly Richardson expects her daughters and other future readers of her printed Legacie to transform the specific, authorial “I” of the “sorrowfull widowes prayer” into a new “I”: that of the pious reader who is experiencing a “like occasion.” The biographical details about Richardson’s children (“left destitute” but now “well settled for this life”) define the speaking “I” in terms of the specifics of Richardson’s own life. The hypothetical reader’s “I,” on the other hand, must sift through and reimagine these details, giving new identities to “my deare husband,” to “thy bondwoman,” and, ultimately, to “I.” The autobiographical context of Richardson’s writing informs and shapes her construction of this prayer, but it also bleeds into the future life of her text and its readers, who will resituate Richardson’s words to fit their own individual circumstances. This anticipation of and accommodation for her future readership depends upon a cyclical conception of time that makes room for the unique, individual experiences of future readers. Richardson’s prayers—unlike the more general spiritual advice found in Leigh’s A Mothers Blessing or Jocelin’s Mothers Legacie—are set down in precise language for future recitation and reflection, but they are not static or rigid documents. Despite its adherence to set forms, Richardson’s advice book is to a great degree an experimental text that offers sites for personal, spiritual adaptation as one of its key legacies to future generations. The penultimate prayer of Book I of the Legacie demonstrates a similar expectation for textual adaptation. An explanatory note before the prayer’s heading tells the reader: “Here is one Prayer more which I joyne to these, because it concerned one of my daughters, to whom this Book belonged, though it was lately penned upon a very strange accident” (C7v). The headnote elaborates further on this historical “accident”: the prayer is intended as “A thanksgiving to Almighty God, for his most mercifull preservation of my noble kinswoman the lady Eliz. Feeling, and of my owne daughter, the Lady Eliz. Cornwalleis, from drowning under the Bridge, and was long under water: and one worthy Gentlewoman in the company could not bee recovered. This may serve upon any such fearfull accident” (C8r). As with the “Sorrowfull widdowes prayer,” this prayer is meant to be adapted to the specific circumstances of future readers. But what makes this call for revision particularly remarkable is the unusual specificity of the original


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incident, compared with the relatively common condition of widowhood. Richardson provides so much detail about her daughter’s accident that it would be difficult to imagine an identical situation occurring in the future; this prayer of thanksgiving virtually requires future readers to adapt the circumstances of this “fearfull accident” to the particular context of their own lives for the prayer to have any meaning at all. Richardson takes personal events and encourages readers to transform them into a template for spiritual reflection; God’s mercy in this particular instance will translate into mercy for any future “fearfull accident.” In offering fellow Protestants this type of spiritual model—one that moves from the personal to the general, then back to the personal—Richardson creates both a guide for her children and other believers and a record of her own familial and spiritual history. Much in the same way that annotated Books of Hours could serve as systematic records of “a collective family identity,” Richardson’s Legacie not only creates structures for Protestant piety in the absence of the Book of Common Prayer but also provides a textual space for the personal histories and legacies that these prayers invoke.35 And yet, unlike Books of Hours, in which blank pages and borders were often annotated with notes and family records, this space in the Legacie is not a marginal one. Richardson strikingly asserts the validity of her own experiences and maternal agency within the body of her text, not in marginal annotations. Though the set prayers in the Legacie are adaptable according to cyclical changes in the calendar and the personal history of its reader at any given moment, Richardson’s front matter, overall rationale for her text, and inclusion of biographical details ascribe it a fixed historical position that functions quite tangibly to showcase her own construction of a maternal family lineage. It is in this confluence of prayer book and family history that the Legacie succeeds as far more than a substitute for the banned Prayer Book. The formal borrowings and experimentations that comprise Richardson’s text ultimately yield a generically flexible space that blurs the distinctions between prayer, family history, and legacy writing. Richardson offers a collection of prayers to her descendants that simultaneously produces a record of her own personal involvement in her family’s spiritual future. The explanatory note’s assertion that the prayer of thanksgiving was “lately penned” and added to the text of the Legacie reminds us that Richardson revised and expanded her collection of prayers during her lifetime. But it also makes visible that the textual legacy she leaves to her children is in part based on their own experiences. There is a temporal, diachronic fluidity implied by this document that shapes its family legacy: Richardson revises and adds prayers to the Legacie during her life, then passes along a spiritual template for her daughters that is based in part on one of her own daughter’s “fearfull accident[s].” She also notes at the beginning of Book II that many of her original prayers “composed for the instructions of my children, & grand-children” were modeled “after the example of my dear parents, Sir Thomas Beaumont, and his Lady, Of Stoughton,” an acknowledgment that positions the Legacie as an already inherited set of textual

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and spiritual discourses that Richardson can, in turn, transform and pass down to her own children (D2v). By citing the multiple steps in this process of bequeathal and de-emphasizing a strictly linear model of textual dissemination, the Legacie advertises a degree of give-and-take between mother and child and between author and reader that subtly counters seventeenth-century patrilinear modes of generational transmission in England, according to which younger generations substituted for and replaced previous ones, and maternal contributions to inheritance were often ignored or devalued.36 In offering her book to her children as a “portion of Grace” to replace the “portions of wealth” that she is unable to provide them, Richardson situates her prayers within a clearly defined system of inheritance. At the same time, she locates herself at the center of a multigenerational process of transmission, thereby reaffirming the value of her own spiritual and biographical experiences (A2v). Instead of relying on a bold assertion of authorial intent or maternal power, Richardson gains authority as a writer and mother through a tacit acknowledgment of the reciprocity between generations and through her ability to remember and record those moments when such give-and-take occurs. Neither completely self-effacing nor radically empowering, Richardson’s Legacie insists that the personal and spiritual circumstances of her own life are crucial components of the legacy that she offers to her daughters and necessary foundations for the spiritual template that she offers to a broader community of Protestants. Though Richardson borrows from a wide range of literary models—including the Bible, Catholic Books of Hours, and the Book of Common Prayer—the Legacie is not merely a textual collage. It is precisely because Richardson’s text is not a Bible, is not a Book of Hours, and is not the Prayer Book that it can transform material from these sources into an expansive and supplemental work that is more suitable to the complex range of Richardson’s spiritual, familial, and political agendas than any of these genres alone would be. Richardson’s creative use of literary and religious structures in the Legacie makes possible a text that cannot only substitute for the banned Prayer Book but can also advertise maternal authority and family history, contribute original poems and prayers to a bourgeoning Protestant print culture, and encourage the individualized development of personal piety. Building upon standard textual forms and the foundational documents of Protestant culture, Richardson creates not only a new form, but a new familial and spiritual community. I want to conclude by addressing the one genre that I have conspicuously omitted from my arguments about Richardson: the genre of the will. In The Imprint of Gender, Wendy Wall makes the important claim that early modern legacy books were often written by women who were denied the legal right to dispose of material goods through wills. Many women who published mothers’ manuals during this period, she argues, deploy the language and form of wills in order to subtly reclaim the inheritance rights that they were culturally denied. Women like Jocelin and Leigh who were married and therefore precluded from writing wills


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could use the rhetorical posture of the deathbed to authorize their writings, a substitution that explains in part the “flourishing of the legacy form” in early modern England.37 Wall’s thesis that the rhetoric of will-making was a particularly appealing and useful strategy to those women who wished to publish their advice has greatly influenced subsequent scholarship on women’s legacy books, and it offers a reading of the legacy genre that nicely takes into account the economic conditions (and specific economic limitations) under which these texts were produced. But considering Richardson as a case study brings to the forefront some of the limitations of Wall’s thesis and implicitly argues for a new critical method of approaching this group of texts. First, the argument that legacy books functioned as substitutions for women’s wills does not directly apply to Richardson, as both her text and the details of her life make clear. Though she is keenly aware of herself as an older woman, Richardson does not use the position of the deathbed to authorize her voice nor does she claim to be nearing death in her text.38 And, though the poverty in which she was left after the death of her second husband denies her material goods to pass down to her children, Richardson was a widow and legally able to write a will.39 She nevertheless chose to write her Legacie, publish it, and dedicate it to her daughters instead of writing a formal will. This fact alone suggests a motive for this text (and, by extension, this textual form) that lies beyond seventeenth-century limitations on women’s legal rights. Second and most suggestive, though Richardson’s personal situation was quite different from that of writers such as Leigh and Jocelin, the Legacie can still offer us another way of reading and understanding the textual, spiritual, and cultural significance of legacy books as a genre. I have argued here for the generic fluidity and creativity of the Legacie; a more complex understanding of the formal structure of this text and others like it will allow us to rethink the generic possibilities of the mother’s manual and to read anew the potential for selfauthorization that this form allows. Seeing legacy books as substitutes for wills, or the Legacie as a substitute for the Book of Common Prayer, gives us only part of the picture: the rhetoric of will-making is only one of the many generic models that help to shape these legacy books, and future scholarship will no doubt bring to light many other intertextual connections and structural models in addition to the ones I’ve discussed here. I suggest that the appeal of the legacy book as a genre to early modern women writers may be directly related to the ability of these texts to exceed and supplement the generic potential of any one of the many forms that comprise them. The extraordinary hybridity of early modern legacy books may ultimately tell us more about the cultural significance of these texts than do their individual structural components. Though they may have served as substitutes for legal impossibilities or banned religious texts, these books also bring into visibility forms of maternal agency that are largely invisible in the legal language of seventeenth-century wills or in the proscribed litany of the Book of Common Prayer. These texts thus make it possible to articulate the role of mothers in the

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generational transmission of educational principles, spiritual guidelines, and templates for private piety. For Richardson at least, the legacy book enables a localized discourse of maternal authority and Protestant ideology that is not limited to its moment of historical materialization but can inspire other lived patterns of piety as it is rehearsed, revisited, and reimagined in the future.

Notes I wish to thank Julie A. Eckerle and the members of the North Carolina Research Group on Medieval and Early Modern Women for their suggestions and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1

2 3

4 5 6

7 8

Valerie Wayne, “Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs,” Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 56–79, esp. p. 62. See Kristen Poole, “‘The fittest closet for all goodness’: Authorial Strategies of Jacobean Mothers’ Manuals,” SEL 35.1 (1995): 69–88, esp. p. 69, n. 1. Important critical studies include Sylvia Brown, ed. Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin and Elizabeth Richardson (Phoenix Mill, England: Sutton, 1999); Betty S. Travitsky, “The New Mother of the English Renaissance: Her Writings on Motherhood,” The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E.M. Broner (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), pp. 33–43; Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), esp. pp. 247–85; Martha J. Craig, “‘Write it upon the walls of your houses’: Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing,” Women’s Life-Writing: Finding Voice/Building Community (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1997), pp. 191–208; Teresa Feroli, “‘Infelix Simulacrum’: The Rewriting of Loss in Elizabeth Jocelin’s The Mothers Legacie,” ELH 61.1 (1994): 89–102; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), esp. pp. 283–96; Wayne; and Poole. See S. Brown, pp. 144–49. Ibid., p. 143. Victoria E. Burke, “Elizabeth Ashburnham Richardson’s ‘motherlie endeauors’ in Manuscript,” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700: Writings by Early Modern Women, vol. 9, ed. Peter Beal and Margaret J.M. Ezell (London: The British Library, 2000), pp. 98–113, esp. p. 111. Burke offers a thorough analysis of both manuscripts, MS V.1.511 in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC and ASH 3501 in the East Sussex Record Office at Lewes (Ashburnham Papers). See S. Brown, pp. 142–3 and Burke, pp. 105–11. See Margaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987), pp. 62–100 in addition to the essays in Beal and Ezell, English Manuscript Studies.

Structures of Piety in Elizabeth Richardson’s Legacie 9

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11 12

13 14 15 16

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Elizabeth Richardson, A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters (London, 1645). Unless otherwise noted, all citations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. See S. Brown, pp. 142–50 for biographical information on Richardson. For Buckingham’s association with Catholicism, see Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), pp. 95–6 and David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 33–44. S. Brown, p. 149. Roger S. Wieck, “The Book of Hours,” The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2001), pp. 473–513, esp. p. 473. Ibid., p. 478. Kathleen Ashley, “Creating Family Identity in Books of Hours,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.1 (2002): 145–65, esp. p. 148 and p. 150. S. Brown, p. 253, n. 131. For a detailed discussion of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter, see Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), esp. pp. 19–50. For the importance of the psalms to the English Reformation, see Beilin, pp. 144–50. See Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). S. Brown, pp. 149–50. The imprint phrase “to be sold at his house” strengthens the claim that Harper was the publisher—not simply the printer—of the Legacie. My thanks to Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser for their assistance on matters concerning the early modern book trade. H.R. Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers: 1641–1667 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907). Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), esp. p. 95. John E. Booty, “Communion and Commonweal: The Book of Common Prayer,” The Godly Kingdom of Tudor England: Great Books of the English Reformation, ed. Booty (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1981), pp. 139–216, esp. p. 177. Booty, “Communion and Commonweal,” p. 177. In Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), Ramie Targoff argues that “behind the introduction of a liturgy emphasizing the worshippers’ active participation and consent lies the establishment’s overarching desire to shape personal faith through public and standardized forms” (18). See also Targoff’s discussion of Puritan opposition to the Prayer Book, pp. 36–56. The Book of Common Prayer (1559), ed. Booty (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), esp. p. 16. All citations will be taken from this edition of the Book of Common Prayer and will be cited parenthetically in the text. It should be noted that the Book of Common Prayer was itself in many ways a hybrid text, based largely upon the structure of medieval liturgical texts but reforming these liturgies for the use and direction of Protestant worshippers. See Booty, Book of Common Prayer, pp. 366–68.

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26 See S. Brown, p. 249, n. 21 and p. 150 for Richardson’s particular affinity for this section of the Book of Common Prayer. 27 See also S. Brown, p. 251, n. 80. 28 Booty, “Communion and Commonweal,” pp. 172–73. 29 Alison A. Chapman, “Now and Then: Sequencing the Sacred in Two Protestant Calendars,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.1 (2003): 91–123, esp. p. 102. 30 Here again, the publication history of Richardson’s text is significant. In 1649, four years after publishing the Legacie, Thomas Harper printed and published An Annuall Almanacke: Shewing, how to read the Chapters of the whole Bible, from the beginning of Genesis, to the end of the Revelation, once in the Yeare, by so many Chapters every day by Walter Holmes. The similarities between the structure of this Protestant almanac and the Legacie’s own format of set prayers—both fitting substitutes for the banned Book of Common Prayer—offer scintillating, if speculative, evidence that political and religious motives may have driven Richardson to publish the Legacie in 1645, with Harper as its publisher. 31 See Chapman, pp. 114–17 and Targoff, pp. 14–35. 32 See S. Brown, p. 144. 33 See also the prayer in Book I designated as “A private morning Prayer” (B2r). 34 Burke, p. 111. 35 Ashley, p. 148. 36 The scholarship on early modern inheritance patterns is sizeable and impossible to cite fully here. Important studies include Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1993); Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E.P. Palmer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976); Eileen Spring, Law, Land & Inheritance: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300–1800 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993); and Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), esp. pp. 68–102. 37 Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 295. 38 For Richardson’s self-consciousness about her age, see S. Brown, p. 150. Burke notes that Richardson’s text was different from that of most other mothers’ legacies because “it was not published after her death … [but] in 1645 when she was still very much alive” (99). Richardson, in other words, did not use a narrative of impending death to authorize her publication of the Legacie. 39 For the details of Richardson’s marriages and subsequent poverty, see S. Brown, pp. 144–8.

Chapter 9

Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish Elspeth Graham

Margaret Cavendish was a prolific and innovative writer. She produced texts in a large number of genres, and the concerns of her texts range widely, often crossing our modern demarcations of subject discipline. The variety, range, and fluidity of her writings have made her work a particularly rich critical object in the last twenty years or so. This is in part due to the unusual nature of her writing; Cavendish herself refers to her writing as “scribbling,” alludes to the way her “words run stumbling out of [her] mouth,” and, in naming an early book The World’s Olio, implies that the composition of her texts is like a musical medley, or a thick stew, full of disparate ingredients, cooked together.1 If we take this description seriously, rather than as an instance of conventional feminine modesty or routine selfdeprecation, it suggests another aspect of the richness of her writing as a critical object. In its spontaneity, and with its lack of strict adherence to the stabilities of aesthetic tradition, her work has a curiously open quality: it is available for a plurality of readings because it is actually quite unworked.2 Because of the complexity and diversity of her texts (as well as the sheer number of them), critical writing on Cavendish has typically tended to isolate particular genres or themes within her oeuvre as a focus. My own essay here approaches her writing rather differently. It starts with the observation that Cavendish is, above all, a deeply autobiographical writer and that an autobiographical imperative cuts across her use of different forms and her explorations of different themes and subject matters. The prime questions the essay addresses are how and why Cavendish, in an age when there is no established autobiographical tradition for her to work within, or to respond to, uses autobiographical modes so extensively. Rather than separating out her most directly autobiographical texts (A true Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life and the biography of her husband, her Life of William Cavendish, which is also in many ways, I shall suggest, a further version of her own story) and concentrating

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on these, I approach the issue of her autobiographical compulsion by investigating her habit of thinking connectively, of cooking diverse ingredients into hot-pots. This essay, therefore, explores a range of texts, connecting them through her recurrent return to the autobiographical. And because issues of connection and separation are especially prominent in Cavendish’s mental world, exploration of these twinned concepts is central to the method of this essay which aims to work sympathetically with her characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and writing. The essay considers fundamental patterns of connection and separation in her construction of her subjectivity (the “auto” of autobiography) and in her life and personal relationships (the “bio”), and it treats these patterns as intrinsic to considerations of form, literary convention, and formal innovation (the “graphy”). It assumes that any capacity for radical innovation does not come about from a single cause nor via an entirely conscious determinism but arises out of a conjuncture of causes. It goes on to argue that Cavendish’s generic innovations derive from a coincidence of the very particular forms and circumstances of her subjectivity, her life, and her literary preoccupations.

An Overview: Separations, Connections, and Paradoxes in Cavendish’s Autobiographical Impulse My Lord was pleased to illustrate my Playes with some of his own Wit … Thus our Wits join as in Matrimony, my Lords the Masculine, mine the Feminine Wit, which is no small glory to me, that we are Married, Souls, Bodies and Brains, which is a treble marriage, united in one Love3 my Ambition is such, as I would either be a World, or nothing.4

A consideration of these two juxtaposed quotations introduces an argument for the centrality of autobiographical thought to Cavendish’s work and suggests some of the major preoccupations and informing paradoxes on which her writing and her construction of her own subjectivity are predicated. The quotations are from two of Cavendish’s prefaces, separated in original publication by nine years. Each of them presents a particular aspect of Cavendish’s selfhood or life (the first, her married condition; the second, her all-embracing uniqueness) as a significant factor in the creation of the ensuing text and its meaning. The very specificity of her selfreference in these two typical examples of prefatory writing is telling. For while it is conventional enough for a preface or other peritextual materials to allude to the person of the author, the particularly personal, emphatic, and extensive nature of Cavendish’s self-reference in these and all her other prefaces (themselves famously prolonged and comprehensive) implies an unusually intense identification of authorial being and textual being. This sense of a convergence between written and lived subjectivities is reinforced by the permeability of boundaries between

The Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish

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prefatory materials and texts proper that is equally typical of all of her writings. As many of her readers have noted, Cavendish herself, through direct self-allusion in her authorial voice or through deployment of characters, situations, and locations that are simultaneously fictional and self-referenced, constantly appears in her texts. It is this characteristic conflation of authorial self with textual content that leads to my suggestion that almost all of Cavendish’s writing is autobiographical and to my further argument that her most directly and obviously auto/biographical texts are not generically distinct writings but logical extensions of a mode of producing self-as-text and, reflexively, text-as-self which is prevalent in all of her writing. My reference to these two particular quotations serves, firstly then, to point to the extent to which Cavendish incorporates her own subjectivity in her writing. For her, autobiography is not an occasional form of output nor an accidental by-product of conventionally poetic, fictional, or dramatic texts but is intrinsic to the whole project of her writing. These two quotations also encapsulate Cavendish’s characteristic way of shifting between vehemently asserted autonomy and dependent femininity. This, in turn, links with one of the most widely debated paradoxes that emerges from Cavendish’s writing: the combination of her vaunted “singularity” with an equal insistence on her interconnection. My two opening quotations present starkly opposed versions of Cavendish’s core subjectivity in this regard. In the first quotation, from the prefatory material to her Plays, published in 1662, she seems to present herself straightforwardly as an equal partner in a married relationship. Her insistence is on complementarity and a balanced, participative literary endeavor. In contrast, the second quotation, taken from the earlier preface to Poems and Fancies (1653), could hardly contain a more extreme reference to unique, single being. It sets up two forms of selfhood against each other: complete annihilation, emptiness or non-being (“I would … be … nothing”) and a totalizing plenitude (“I would … be a World”) where the self is everything—form and content, subject and object, inside and outside—and is without relationship. Absolute completeness in the self, allowing no other, or total self-negation and non-being are presented as Cavendish’s only desired forms of subjectivity. The solipsistic grandiosity of such a fantasy of self seems quite incompatible with the version of self as married partner taken from the later preface to her Plays. (On scrutiny it is noticeable that even in this apparently straightforward description of self as married partner, the reference to collaborative work immediately—and characteristically in its slippage from doing to being—becomes a statement of Cavendish’s subsumption as an individual into a conflated authorial subject, in which she and her husband are merged selves. There is a tendency, even here, towards loss of individuation.)5 In spite of the slipperiness of even such a superficially simple description of self, however, the overall contrast between the two different self-articulations contained in the two prefaces serves generally to mark the recurrent oscillations in Cavendish’s writing between constructing her self as essentially part of a familial, social, and intellectual network and figuring her self as isolated individual.

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The fully relational self depicted in the preface to Cavendish’s Plays also differs radically from the selfhood suggested by the preface to Poems and Fancies in relation to their distinct imaginative sources. While the first quotation presents a convivial and social Cavendish, speaking in the public voice of aristocratic and courtly conventions of wit, love, and familial connection, the second quotation draws on much more idiosyncratic imaginative materials. In her statement of her desire to “be either a World, or nothing,” Cavendish’s phrasing is strikingly spatial. In setting “a World” against “nothing,” Cavendish fantasizes an abstract form of entirety rather than a cognate, but more predictable, fantasy of a subjectivity with complete control or power. The use of the words “World” and “nothing” evokes a sense of a depersonalized, somehow geographic—maybe also temporal— embodiment. She wants to be a form that encapsulates all space and time. One way of reading this is as an effect of the imaginative attraction that natural science had for her. It suggests not only that Cavendish’s immersion in political and natural science stimulated her production of directly scientific texts but that her assimilation of scientific thought also suffused her imagination in a more general fashion. Furthermore, the very particular use of temporal and spatial reference here points to a wider, lifelong preoccupation with a connection between the durability or temporality of selfhood and the spatial. Alongside the presentation of self as a social being, produced in and by the contexts of specific cultural and familial milieus which sometimes predominate in Cavendish’s writing, there is also a formation of self that draws upon a far more spatial imagination. In this, the locatedness of self is provided either through reference to an abstract evocation of the spatial (as in my quotation here) or through reference to place as concretized spatial form. Such a proclivity towards thinking spatially further manifests itself in her equally lifelong fascination with different aspects of form. A final function of my opening quotations is to point to this crucial, characteristic aspect of her writing. If subjectivity and writing are deeply enmeshed for Cavendish, so too is thought about the containing forms (families, social milieus, houses, and clothes) in which selfhood is fashioned. Thought about forms of life is, in turn, enmeshed with meditation on the process of writing itself and the forms and genres in which texts are produced and through which they achieve meaning. The prefaces from which I take my opening quotations include, as is typical of all her prefaces, extended deliberations on the aim of her writing and the texts’ generic demarcations. For instance, in the preface to Poems and Fancies we find a coalescence of a statement of her modesty, discussion of formal literary issues, and witty allusion to the atomistic makeup of the world as analogous to the elements of her text: And the Reason why I write it in Verse, is, because I thought Errours might better passe there, then in Prose; since Poets write most Fiction, and Fiction is not given for Truth, but Pastime; and I feare my Atomes will be as small Pastime, as themselves: for nothing can be lesse then an Atome. (Sig. &khgr, 2r )


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Issues of categorization and the separation or connection of different forms of writing can thus be seen to replicate, in the context of form as well, the series of paradoxes and concerns that recurrently shape Cavendish’s writing. My concern in this essay is to explore these very issues of categorization, separation, and connection. If Cavendish’s thought is characterized by paradoxes and oscillations between extremes, her writing occurs at the midpoint of these. Because of this, her texts are located at the brink of form, and her writing is always bound up with issues of finding form, both for her own subjectivity and for her texts. These quests are, I shall argue, intermeshed. In Cavendish’s writing there is a feedback loop: reference to her subjectivity anchors and validates her texts, and her texts articulate her subjectivity, bringing it into being. My opening section has aimed to highlight a cluster of recurrent features of Cavendish’s writing: her enduring autobiographical preoccupation; her oscillation between radically different formulations of selfhood (one characterized by connectivity and emphasis on the social networks which contain her, the other characterized by isolation, separateness, and a notion of the self as a containing world); and her preoccupation with the categorization of forms, and how distinctions and connections function. The remainder of my essay develops and elaborates on these themes. In my next section I concentrate on Cavendish’s subjectivity and how to characterize it. I go on, in my third section, to look at how issues of subjectivity relate to issues of literary form, suggesting that her scientific ideas about the way nature functions provide a template for us in understanding the radical interconnectivity of all her thought. My conclusion takes the form of a coda, suggesting through a brief discussion of three directly auto/biographical texts that Cavendish could not but have written in autobiographical form.

Selfhoods: Separations and Connections, Singularity and Relationship Critical writing on Cavendish has tended to choose between the versions of her self either as “singular” or as part of a network of cultural connections which she set up. Some feminist criticism in the second half of the twentieth century, seeking to establish Cavendish as the prototype of a feminist author in modern terms and anxious to take her work seriously on its own terms, particularly tended to promote the view of Cavendish as “singular.” Taking her own description of her younger self in A true Relation as someone who “always took delight in a singularity, even in accoutrements of habits,”6 much criticism has not only focused on positive readings of her eccentricity, the prime seventeenth-century meaning of “singularity,” but has emphasized related attributes such as separateness, solitariness, and uniqueness. This view of Cavendish is supported by sympathetic interpretations of her biography. She experienced multiple losses and restraints in her life from the cloistered nature of her upbringing by her mother in the Lucas family home after the death of her father early in her life, onward. In particular, her

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experience of exile from England during the Interregnum, first as a member of Henrietta Maria’s court, then as wife to William Cavendish (also exiled in France and later Antwerp) identifies her as a literally and metaphorically dislocated subject. Her singularity is produced by and represented as a form of detachment. This permits her unique capacity for creativity despite the constraints imposed by her status as a woman. The very constraints and displacements that isolated her and disarticulated her identity also paradoxically allowed her to produce a massive volume of original writing which consciously probes issues of gender and authorship. However, as critical responses to Cavendish and her work have increasingly registered, her thought and writing can equally be characterized by their connectivity and seen to be produced in circumstances of perpetual interrelationship, collaboration, and participatory activity. 7 Once again, it is the multiple addresses and commentaries which preface her carefully produced and strategically published texts, even her use of frontispieces, that emphasize this. Just as her preface to her Plays insists on the mutual and collaborative nature of her and William Cavendish’s literary production, so the frontispiece to the earlier Natures Pictures serves to present Cavendish as a participant in a wider, familial activity. As Julie Crawford has pointed out, the engraved frontispiece to the 1656 edition of Natures Pictures shows the Cavendish family, including William Cavendish’s daughters, Jane and Elizabeth, gathered in a circle, above the explanatory lines, “Thus in this Semi-Circle, wher they Sitt / Telling of Tales of Pleasure & of witt.”8 The 1671 edition has, in addition to the Clouwet engraving, Margaret Cavendish’s further lines: My Lord, and I, here in two chairs are set, And all his Children, wives and husbands met, To hear me tell them tales, as I think fit, And hope they’re full of Phancy and of Wit.9

So, not only does the engraving depict the familial nature of Cavendish’s activity, but since the Cavendish daughters were, along with their stepmother, playwrights engaged in the writing and private performance of plays, it also implies that Cavendish’s literary production does not emerge from an isolated and individualist creativity but from the collectivity of coterie interests. And in turn, recent literary history has argued that closet drama itself, once viewed as a limited, amateurish drama confined to the realm of the family, in fact had a much wider cultural influence and significance in the mid-seventeenth century than was once thought.10 Most particularly, it functioned to shore up and to assert political and artistic affiliations. Cavendish’s insertion of herself in a family circle comes, in this way, to have multiple and not always straightforward meanings. Since the aristocratic family has both a private and a public function, her alignment with the Cavendishes serves to


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reinforce her identification with Royalist politics. It also contextualizes her writing, normalizing the publication of her texts and establishing a continuity between the private, aesthetic world of the family and the wider world. Promotion of her familial over her individual subjectivity thus acts as a guarantor of her reputation, gives her writing a legitimating pedigree, and provides a bridge between a private, enclosed domain and public life. However, her published identification of herself within the literary circle of the family does not quite square up with the biographical facts of her life and her relation to William Cavendish’s children. Natures Pictures was actually written while William Cavendish’s daughters were in England and Cavendish herself was in exile. At the time of the later edition in the 1670s, after the Restoration and her return to England, her relationship with her stepchildren was complicated by issues of potential inheritance from William Cavendish’s estates and was not one of simple harmony. Even Cavendish’s own plays—if playwriting is taken as the connective familial activity—were written considerably later than her stepdaughters’. So, allusion to the writing of her texts as a participative familial pursuit has an important symbolic and strategic function but is by no means a direct reference to uncomplicated truth. What is actual, however, is the central role of William Cavendish in the family’s aesthetic and intellectual activities, the intensity of her relationship with him as her husband, and the crucial importance of this relationship to her work. It is this key relationship that I now examine. William Cavendish is, indeed, almost as present in her extensive prefatory writing as Cavendish herself is. He is a recurrent addressee in her prefaces and, in turn, through his letters and endorsements that were included as components of her peritextual materials, he also becomes an author of her. His construction of her occurs in constant dialogue with her own self-presentation: she is almost always present as both self-author and as written by him. William Cavendish himself might, correspondingly, be conceived of as a lifelong manager and producer of others, as much as he was a full agent (as aristocrat, courtier, and Royalist activist) in his own right.11 But if his predisposition towards educating, encouraging, and managing others characterizes him generally, it is the importance of this role in his and Margaret Cavendish’s marriage and how it is inextricably linked to her production of herself that is of concern here. The extent to which Cavendish’s writing of herself is simultaneously an inscription of her and her husband’s intersubjectivity is demonstrated by their courtship correspondence, which serves for me here as a foundational text. Occurring within the exiled Royalist circle, with its own distinctive politicoaesthetic culture that surrounded Henrietta Maria, the courtship between the Cavendishes was thoroughly literary. It was acted out through exchanges of letters and poems containing self-conscious reference to love traditions and infused with the courtly values and neoplatonic ideas and forms endorsed and promoted by Henrietta Maria. This is seen in the following letter from Margaret Lucas, as she then was, to William Cavendish:

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my lord, I wounder not at my love, but at yours, because the obiet of mine is good. I wish the obiet of yours wer so, yet me thinkes, you should love nothing that wer ell, therfore if I have any part of good tis your love makes me so, but loved I nothing elles but you, I love all that is good, and loving nothing above you I have loves recompense.12

Here she expresses her love in the witty form, with its platonic play on ideas about the interrelation of love and virtue, prevalent in the circle she inhabited. But the personal, romantic, and aestheticized articulation of love is intermingled with more worldly concerns that equally dominate her letters. Others of them describe her anxiety about matters of gossip, status, and reputation within the court, as when she writes, “it is imposabll to keep out of the rech of a slandering toung from an enves parson” (letter 3). Still others express her worry over Henrietta Maria’s disapproval of the secret courtship: “I hop the qeene and I am frindes; she sayeth she will seme so at lest, but I finde, if it had bene in her power, she would a crost us” (letter 20). There is, too, frequent reference to her own consequent melancholy and ill health. The letters repeatedly describe her sense of deep implication in the life of the Queen’s court as well as her equally strong feeling that she is an outsider within it—and her ambivalence towards courtly mores. Likewise, the letters suggest her sense of belonging to and separation from the England and family from which she is parted. Above all, her letters imply her own awareness of how jostling discursive strands are conflated in her construction of herself. Her self-construction here also works, of course, in tandem with her construction of William Cavendish as her lover, as the recipient of her confidences, and as safeguarding other to her fragile sense of self. Most strikingly, in her phase of melancholy she creates William Cavendish as a figure both within and without the world: my lord, I have not had much experience of the world, yet I have found it such as I could willingly part with it, but since I knew you, I fear I shall love it too well, because you are in it, and yet methinks you are not in it, because you are not of it; so I am both in it and out of it. (letter 13)13

As such, he becomes, as well as a love-object, a figure of identification for her. He validates her own paradoxical sense of belonging and separateness through his own more confident occupation of a position as insider and outsider at court. His position has both literal foundations and a figurative, almost mystical element. He appears as an “enchantment” to her. He is established as someone who embodies an alternate world for her to inhabit which provides locating form for her own dislocated sense of self. The importance to Cavendish of belonging to a stable and constant world is paradoxically implied through her evocation of the qualities of her current,


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melancholically inflected world. The strangeness of this world’s mutability is almost hallucinatory: supos me now in a very mellancolly humer, and that most off my contempaltions are fext on nothing but dessolutions, for I look apon this world as on a deths head for mortefication, for I see all things subject to alteration and chaing, and our hopes as if they had takin opum; therfore I will despis all things of this world, I will not say all things in it, and love nothing but you that is above it, but I should be lost to thos thoughts if I ded meet som of you to restor me to my self againe. (letter 7)

Allusion to “our hopes” (as detached, seemingly independent, externalized entities) having “takin opum” gives this passage the visual and spatial quality of dreams. And difficulties of relationship and allegiance are, as often in her writing, thus associated with a sense of locatedness or dislocation, so that she experiences interpersonal connection or separation, belonging to or exclusion from social and affective circles, as positioning her within or outside of place. The precision of her fantasized spatial location of William Cavendish here, as “above” rather than “in” the world, counterpoints her evocation of the loathsome mutability of her currently experienced world. Use of a platonic conceit (suggested by the “in” and “above”) is thus meshed with her imaginative tendency towards envisioning subjectivities, her own as well as her husband’s, through spatial positioning. Cavendish’s habit of imagining subjectivity through spatial figures comes about here through this very specific combination of literariness and personal imagination or psychology. Margaret Lucas’s letters are, of course, constructed in response to William Cavendish’s initiation of their courtship and his correspondence to her.14 Her letters, read as part of an interactive and intertextual sequence, become part of a mutual meditation on selfhoods and representation as well as on aesthetic traditions and modes and contextual matters of gossip, politics, and history. The textual interrelation between the lovers represents the relationship, explores the nature of its representations, and forms the matter of that relationship.15 But it is the particular complexity of inscription of identity into place, and from that into a specific sociopolitical world, that I want to focus on as central to the complex selfhood already produced by and for Margaret Cavendish in their correspondence. These issues are announced most insistently by William Cavendish’s poem “Love’s Muster”: I’le Muster Up my senses with delight; My taste, my touch, my smell, Hearing, and sight, All att one tyme; height’s pleasure shall obtayne, With gentle stroakes Upon my Ravisht Brayne. Best Various Pictures wee will have; nay, more, The Roofe with story fill’d, and gilt o’er. (1–6)16

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As Timothy Raylor has shown, this poem refers directly to Bolsover Castle, one of the Cavendish family properties, built for and planned by Sir Charles Cavendish and William Cavendish, his son.17 It was thought of as a place of retirement and retreat, William Cavendish’s favorite residence. And it was at Bolsover Castle that Charles I and Henrietta Maria had been entertained during the royal visit of 30 July 1634 by Ben Jonson's Love’s Welcome, which included banquets, songs, dances, and speeches staged at different places within the castle. The opening lines of William Cavendish’s courtship poem to Margaret directly invoke the architecture and decorative scheme of the castle, in particular the “Pillar Parlour” with its pictorial depiction of the five senses, “employed in,” as Raylor puts, “the very [and unconventional] order employed by Jonson in Love’s Welcome at Bolsover.”18 The Castle, in turn, in the fabric of its building, incorporates play on neoplatonic doctrines, especially notions of a circle of love (between, in the specific instance of the performance of Love’s Welcome for the royal couple, king and queen, the human and the divine, monarch and subjects), and the person of William Cavendish himself. For, as both Raylor and Lucy Worsley have observed, the series of paintings of the Four Temperaments in the anteroom, at the left of the entrance porch to the Castle, omits one humor: the sanguine. This is perhaps embodied in the person of the Castle’s owner, William Cavendish himself, who would complete the sequence when he stood below it.19 This brief excursion into architectural history suggests, then, that the courtship poem to Margaret Lucas, “Love’s Muster,” in alluding to Bolsover Castle, “designed for, and about love,” does more than proliferate artistic allusions to love traditions while presenting a compliment to her. 20 By integrating into his poem reference to one of his residences in England (with its particular history that combines the architectural, artistic, and literary, and which is a signifier of his dependence on royal favor and of his particular relationship with Charles I and Henrietta Maria), William Cavendish inscribes Margaret as a potential figure within the particular conjuncture of discourses and practices that make up his aristocratic identity. The poem serves to give Margaret Cavendish the concretized, locating environment that she apparently desires as embodiment of her subjectivity. But, further knowledge of Bolsover Castle and its role in the past and future lives of the Cavendishes adds another twist to this idea. When he produced “Love’s Muster,” writing Margaret Lucas into the built fabric of his life, William Cavendish was replicating for her the role of his first wife. She, Elizabeth Bassett, was already inscribed into the Castle, most particularly in the Pillar Parlour alluded to in his poem: the fireplace to the Parlour is embellished with her coat of arms and crest, along with his. Later, after the Restoration, Margaret Cavendish habitually used the Marble Closet at Bolsover for her writing and herself produced a poem on the links between Bolsover’s fireplaces and love: “Chimneys of th’touchstone of affection made, / Therein is beauty, as love’s fuel, laid.”21 In this verse we perhaps witness her response to and collusion in William Cavendish’s notion of the Castle


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as a concretization of ideas of love. She produces yet again what is already, through initial architectural design and later poetic representation of it, his double creation: Bolsover as a castle of love. But in this context we might also recognize the reality of Cavendish’s famously plaintive remark at the end of A true Relation when she is justifying having written her autobiography: Neither did I intend this piece for to delight, but to divulge; not to please the fancy, but to tell the truth. Lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing I was daughter to one Master Lucas of St John’s near Colchester in Essex, second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle; for my lord having had two wives, I might easily have been mistaken. (Ddd4r)

It is not only the general subsumption of women under their husbands’ identities that produces this fear of erasure from history. For Cavendish, whose courtship involved receipt of a love poem that writes her into a building already inscribed with a previous wife’s marks of identity, the possibility of invisibility or conflation with another is all too evident. The common paradox of identity afforded to women by marriage, a paradox comprising both a mark of identity and a recognition of deletion from history and view, is intensified further in this case by the context of the Cavendishes’ exile. Already in exile as a member of Henrietta Maria’s court, Margaret Lucas’s relationship with William Cavendish reinforces her status as banished. While he can write to her of Bolsover Castle, as both constitutive of and symbolic of his aristocratic status, he also emphasizes, again in poetic form, the danger of alliance with him. In “The Savinge Love” he writes, “To love me, tis high treason / Against your State and reason” (7–8), thus declaring his actual status as political exile, while also perhaps playing with the conventional notion of the beloved as a state or nation to be conquered.22 There is, thus, a conscious nostalgia—and possibly hope for the future—in writing Margaret Lucas into his familial locations in “Love’s Muster.” In a double move his poems offer an aristocratic identity based on property, land, and possession while recognizing this is also a dispossession related to a displaced identity. And the courtship correspondence as a whole can perhaps be seen as a seedbed of concerns that will grow to characterize Cavendish and her work more absolutely. It marks the parameters of her relationship with her husband, who gives her identity and allows her happiness while simultaneously compounding her sense of herself as having only ephemeral, shadowy, and above all, contingent being. Cavendish’s drive to articulate her selfhood is, then, produced in relation to a series of fears and desires that threaten the erasure or dissolution of self. However, her need to write herself into being is not a simple response to the fear of invisibility. Rather, Cavendish works from a more profound and complex sense of the indeterminacy of her being. Her self-writings reveal, at different moments, a wide variety of experiences of inhabiting the self. These are very often

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contradictory. She wants simultaneously to be her own sole author and yet to be written, or brought into being, by others. She fears dissolution but equally desires to merge into the other. She can assert her own solitary state and absolute individuation in vehement and extreme terms, but she can also present herself as someone defined by conventional social, marital, and familial relationships. All these versions of self recur in her writing throughout her career. Issues of connection and separation run as threads through this lifelong series of subjective oscillations: where to see relationship and linkage and where to see or create difference and distance is her constant question. Her need to rework patterns of connection and separation prompts her recurrent return to self-writing. It similarly motivates her repeated experimentation with different patterns of connection and separation in relation to literary form. My next section consequently turns to consideration of form as an intellectual issue for Cavendish. But it also suggests that, once again, issues of intellectual and literary form become inseparable from issues of her own subjectivity.

Form: Separations and Connections Just as Margaret Cavendish’s representation of her subjectivity oscillates between statements of self-authored autonomy and an unusually strong consciousness of the intersubjective nature of her subjectivity, where she inhabits absences and is brought into being by others as a sort of living intertextual node, so her experimentation with genre also plays with paradoxes of the separations between, and interdependence of, literary forms. Our own habits of thought as twenty-first century literary analysts encourage us to deal with texts by categories of genre. So, as I have suggested, work on Cavendish’s writing has inevitably tended to subdivide her extensive oeuvre, for practical reasons of manageability as much as anything, into groupings that separate, say, the dramatic from the scientific or from romance or poetry. And this is validated by Cavendish’s own emphasis on genre, which permeates her work. But this is also to ignore the importance to her work of the radical connectedness of different forms and the function of constructions of the self as simultaneously a point of origin, a binding mechanism, and a destabilizing and interrogative force in her writing. Cavendish was always interested in issues of categorization. All of her scientific writing is deeply engaged with contemporary debate about the makeup of natural forms, the relationship of parts and wholes, and the relationship between object of study and perceiver or observer.23 Her overall approach to natural philosophy, insofar as such extensive writings can be summarized, might be found in an extract from her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), which contains an articulation of her fundamental concept of nature:


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Nature is divided into infinite several parts, so each several part has a several and particular knowledge and perception, both sensitive and rational, and again that each part is ignorant of the others knowledge and perception; when as otherwise, considered altogether and in general, as they make up but one infinite body of Nature, so they make also but one infinite general knowledge. And thus Nature may be called both Individual, as not having single parts subsisting without her, but all united in one body; and Divideable, by reason she is partable in her own several corporeal figurative motions, and not otherwise; … the parts of Nature can onely joyn and disjoyn to and from parts, but not to and from the body of Nature. And since Nature is but one body, it is intirely wise and knowing, ordering her self-moving parts with all facility and ease, without any disturbance, living in pleasure and delight, with infinite varieties and curiosities, such as no single Part or Creature of hers can ever attain to.24

This vision of an animist, holistic nature constituted of interactive, but not independent, parts represents a pervasive habit of Cavendish’s thought. Through William Cavendish she knew the political and natural scientist Thomas Hobbes and was deeply influenced by him. This passage draws together thinking about contemporary natural science and about political order, stimulated particularly by Hobbes’ Leviathan, while introducing her own characteristic emphases on unity, interaction, fluidity, and dynamism. Through this combination of Hobbes’ and her own thought, she produces a critique of the depiction of nature as a purely mechanical aggregation of separated parts which she saw as typical of a masculinist approach to science. These ideas about ways in which parts constitute, and operate in relation to, wholes, which develop through her whole writing career, are mirrored by her equally continuing preoccupation with issues of genre. This connection between her conception of parts in nature and categories in writing is not merely a rhetorical one. For Cavendish, the work of fancy and imagination is itself an operation of nature: there is no ultimate separation between the functioning of the human mind and the functioning of objects in nature. Rather, there is a subject-object interrelation. Equally, imagination, fancy or the mental processes that produce romance and poetry are forms of scientific thinking. So, it is not surprising to find that in the deliberations on genre that repeatedly preface her published texts, she characteristically seeks to make generic demarcations, while at the same time erasing boundaries between genres. Her sense of genre is not limited to content but is further associated with the mental functions of the author and the action of a text on readers’ minds. Thus, prefacing Natures Pictures (1656), she writes: “I am to let my Readers to understand, that though my work is of Comicall, Tragicall, Poeticall, Philosophicall, Romancicall, Historicall and Morall discourses, yet I could not place them so exactly into severall Books, or parts as I would, but am forced to mix them one amongst another” (C3v). And then she further explains: I Must intreat my Readers to take notice, that in this first Book or part of this volume, I was forced to order my severall Chapters, as Musicians doe their tunes, when they play

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upon Musicall Instruments, who for the most part do mix light Aires, with solemn Sounds … although the light Aires and solemn Tunes, which are the Comicall & Tragicall discourse mixt together, will so disunite the thoughts and disturb the passions, as my Readers will hardly fix their minds seriously on either. (C5r)

This amplifies of the already extensive full title which has itself announced its generic components: Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies pencil to the Life. In this volume there are several feigned Stories of natural Descriptions, as Comical, Tragical, and Tragi-Comical, Poetical and Romantical, Philosophical, and Historical, both in Prose and Verse, some all Verse, some all Prose, some mixt, partly Prose, and partly Verse. Also, there are some Morals, and some Dialogues. (A2r)

Here, the function of the characteristically apologetic and self-deprecating tenor of the prefatory material becomes evident. Her prefaces display courtesy and proper feminine modesty as much as actual diffidence. Through the act of self-criticism and disavowal of real volition in her use of modes and models, Cavendish displays the subtlety of her understanding of and ability to manipulate genre while avoiding direct responsibility for use and misuse. This is an important issue in relation to some specific uses of genre (such as drama or her writings on natural philosophy) which could have directly political meanings.25 Further, her direct invocation of the reader, although it may initially read naively, replicates her philosophical position on the relation of subjects and objects. The insertion of the self into the text at all points serves a complex function. The text is never produced as a separated object standing in its own right. It is, rather, dialogic material, an effect of the relationship between author and reader, but perhaps even more insistently, it is material produced by, and therefore a constituent part of, the author herself. Just as nature motivates the movement and interactions of its constituent parts, so the author produces writing that, reflexively, functions to constitute the author. When Cavendish writes in A true Relation, “Yet I must say this in the behalf of my thoughts, that I never found them idle. For if the senses brings no work in, they will work of themselves, like silk-worms that spins out of their own bowels” (Ddd1v), she is delineating a complex series of ideas about the interparticipation of all aspects of nature and creation. Her reference to silkworms is precise: writing, like silk, is produced from the assimilation of what is taken into the self from without or out of the core of the self. But it, like the cocoon of the silkworm, provides a protective new layer to the self, which allows the further transformation of that self. The recurrent self-reference in Cavendish’s lengthy, repetitive prefaces is indicative, then, of an overall philosophy of interaction and interdependence and, more significantly, of the autobiographical as a deep structural element of her writing. The logic of that observation with which I began this essay—that autobiography is intrinsic to all her writing—becomes clearer in this context. And


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her most overtly autobiographical and biographical texts fall into place among her works as amplification of a mode that is pervasive in her writing. The first of these, A true Relation, is frequently described as being “appended” to the collection of stories Natures Pictures.26 However, viewed not as an anomaly in Natures Pictures, but as an extension of the production of self that is prominent in the prefatory materials and implicit in the stories, A true Relation can be seen to have a complex function and to mark a more significant generic innovation than notions of an accidental addition to an otherwise generically coherent collection might suggest. In fact, A true Relation occurs almost as the outcome of an associative sequence of issues raised by earlier sections of Natures Pictures. The Tenth Book concludes with the section titled Heavens Library, which is Fames Palace purged from Errors and Vices. This story of the spring-cleaning of heaven’s library constitutes a drawing up of a canon of the most valuable texts in the major categories of writing from classical to contemporary times through debates between classical Greek gods about what should be thrown out and what should be kept (Zz4r). Her meditation on the value of different texts and cultural heroes within various categories or genres leads directly into the Epistle which makes up The Eleventh Book of Natures Pictures. This letter relates issues of reputation directly to Cavendish herself as an author. It opens with response to two reported accusations: first that her “Wit seemed as if it would over-power [her] Brain”; and second that her “writings are none of [her] own” because she did not speak of them to visitors (Aaa2r). So, the quality and authenticity of Cavendish’s own writing is now at stake. Literary and historical judgment of the major texts of European culture leads into defense against reported judgments about the correspondence between the person of Cavendish and her texts. Her Epistle responds to this perceived challenge. And it is in this context that A true Relation is then inserted as an authenticating account of the being of the person who has authored the texts. Writing herself into her texts, then, has two major functions. Firstly, it responds to a need to articulate directly and to control a circle of relationships among text, author, and readers. There are social and material implications to this. And secondly, the explicit representation of self and readers in relation to the text as part of the text itself serves to replicate her philosophical understanding of the interconnection of subjects and objects. So, Margaret Cavendish who feared nonbeing, who feared but also desired merging into the other, the collapse of subjects and objects, also spent her life working to create distinct forms, to identify boundaries and categories. Her scientific thought and her experimentation with form provided an intellectual correlative to her personal dilemmas, enabling her to transform personal psychic tendencies into a more ordered philosophy of subjectobject relations.

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Formed Selves: Three Auto/biographical Texts In his discussion of A true Relation as an explicitly autobiographical piece of writing, Neil Keeble points out that Cavendish had “no sustaining tradition” to work from and no “authorizing precedent” or even “proper subject” to legitimate her text or validate her production of it.27 How and why Cavendish came to be an innovator of autobiographical forms have been my concerns in this essay. In order to investigate these questions, my method has been to inquire into the complex personal, intellectual, imaginative, and textual logics that lie behind the autobiographical imperative that drives her, rather than focusing on her directly autobiographical texts themselves. My interest has been in unpacking the conditions of thought, feeling, and historical circumstance that produced Cavendish as a threshold writer, operating at the brink of new forms and arrangements of thought. I have suggested that Cavendish’s formal innovations occur as a result of her transformative intelligence, which is enacted in her need constantly to interrogate and reformulate patterns and experiences of separation and connection. This core mental tendency itself emerges from a conjuncture of diverse factors: her subjectivity, social class, gender, married and familial relationships, political affiliation, and intellectual and aesthetic milieus. How these underlying factors rise to the surface to form the subject matter of three explicit life writings by or about Cavendish serves, in conclusion, to summarize these key determinants of her inextricably linked being and writing. Each of these texts is written, inevitably it seems, to mark both her relationship to, and her identity as separate from, her husband. A true Relation fully embodies this paradox of separate aloneness and entirely relational being. It takes its impetus from its ending, the plea, already quoted earlier, that she, as “daughter to one Master Lucas of St John’s near Colchester in Essex” and “second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle,” might not be mistaken in after-ages (Ddd4r). The description of her personal history that leads up to this aims to delineate her life and her personality, marking them as her own. In it, however, we find highlighted her lifelong themes of loss and of oscillation between safe enclosure in a safeguarding environment and displacement. From her reference to her father’s temporary exile as a punishment for killing a man in a duel before her birth (which prefigures her own experience of “banishment” from 1645–60), through her delineation of the tightly enclosing world of her mother in which she grew up, to her description of her exile in France, where she “was like one who had no foundation to stand” (Bbb3v), Cavendish constantly presents herself, the subject matter of the text, in terms of the central conflict of her life: erasure, disappearance, or non-being against self-assertion and autonomy. But there is another Cavendish here, too. As author and producing subject of the text, published as part of Natures Pictures, she occupies the position of the natural philosopher observing and delineating what can be seen in nature. She takes herself as her own natural object. She simultaneously reveals herself as authored by her upbringing


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but also as self-authored. Once more, she is both producer and produced, subject and object. Autobiography, as the life of the self who is writing, with its formally defining coincidence of writing subject and written subject, author and content, occurs as an inevitable form for Cavendish. It embodies precisely those paradoxical strategies of self-articulation that reverberate throughout all of her writing. A true Relation was published as part of her earliest writings and in the context of her lived experience of exile and consequent loss of status, financial resources, and propertied identity. Conversely, her Life of William Cavendish was published near the end of her life, after the Restoration and the couple’s return to their estates in England. It coincided with a visit by the Cavendishes to Charles II’s court in London and served to promote her husband’s claim to greater favor from the king. Whatever its particular strategic motivation, however, the Life displays, as a text, familiar concerns. It is introduced by an extended deliberation on matters of genre in which she establishes her aim as writing history (which she characteristically defines as having several subgeneric forms). And in the body of the text she once more revisits the major events and losses of her life, through a detailing of William Cavendish’s life, career, and losses. By writing about her husband she makes concrete all those aspects of identity from her younger life which had cohered around loss and being written into the social position of his wife. If, in the courtship letters, William Cavendish, from a position of exile, could inscribe her in his residences, especially Bolsover Castle (which he ultimately willed to her, rather than to his sons from his first marriage, in the event of his dying before her), Margaret Cavendish now returns the compliment—or perhaps, turns the tables. She describes in particularized detail his attention to his estates, the costs of repair, and the transactions involved. This writing of his life serves to inscribe her even more firmly into the activities and buildings that embody his being. In this manner, the fear expressed at the end of A true Relation of the possibility of fading from view as second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle is countered. Paradoxically, by becoming author of her husband’s life, she works towards finally gaining full authority over hers. A last text, however, adds further layers of irony to this lifelong negotiation of related and separated selves. Rather than inheriting Bolsover, the castle dedicated to love, Margaret Cavendish predeceased William. It was he who undertook the ultimate act of their mutual writing of each other. His famous inscription on their joint tomb is the final spatial and textual inscription of her as an author, reiterating yet again the themes of their joint lives: Here lyes the Loyall Duke of Newcastle and his Duchess his second wife by whome he had noe issue. …This Dutches was a wise wittie & learned Lady, which her many Bookes do well testifie: she was a most Virtuous & a Louieng & carefull wife & was with her Lord all the time of his banishment & miseries & when he came home never parted from him in his solitary retirements.28

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Over three hundred years later, Margaret Cavendish’s wish to be seen and remembered by after-ages has been fulfilled. She is much written about; her selfhood is much analyzed and reproduced. A very last twist is that this inscription from her tomb, written by her husband, is repeatedly quoted in her biographies, as indeed it is here, as a significant summarizing statement of her being.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Margaret Cavendish, The World's Olio (London, 1655), Renaissance Women Online, Women Writers Project, Brown University, 10 October 2004, <www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/wroentry.html>. See, for example, Judith Kegan Gardiner, “‘Singularity of Self’: Cavendish’s True Relation, Narcissism and the Gendering of Individualism,” Restoration 21.2 (1997): 52– 65, esp. 54. Gardiner similarly sees Cavendish’s writing in A true Relation and her Life of her husband, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, as unprocessed. She suggests it “imitates the structure of a[n anxiety] dream, even of a psychoanalytic session” by “loosely associating details.” Margaret Cavendish, Plays (prefatory and concluding matter) (London, 1662), Renaissance Women Online, Women Writers Project, Brown University, 10 October 2004, <www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/wroentry.html>. Sig. facing A6r. Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), Renaissance Women Online, Women Writers Project, Brown University, 10 October 2004, <www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/wroentry.html>, Sig. &khgr, 2r. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. A more directly psychological reading than is appropriate here might relate these negotiations of merging and separation to the anxiety of the narcissist in Cavendish. For such an interpretation see J.K. Gardiner. Margaret Cavendish, A true Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life, from Natures Pictures (London, 1656), Renaissance Women Online, Women Writers Project, Brown University, 10 October 2004, <www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/wroentry.html>, Ddd2r. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to A true Relation and to Natures Pictures are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. See, for instance, Margaret J.M. Ezell, “‘To Be Your Daughter in Your Pen’: the Social Functions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish,” Huntington Library Quarterly 51.4 (1988): 281–96 (rpt. in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594–1998, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies [London: Routledge, 1998], pp. 246–258); Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), esp. chapter 4; Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘How Great is Thy Change’: Familial Discourses in the Cavendish Family,” A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 40–50; and Wiseman, “Epistolary Networks: Harleys and Cavendishes,” InBetween: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1–2 (2000): 205–17. Frontispiece, Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures.

The Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish 9

10

11

12

13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22

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Margaret Cavendish, Natures Picture [sic], London, 1671. See also Julie Crawford, “Convents and Pleasures: Margaret Cavendish and the Drama of Property,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 177–223, esp. 180–81. See Crawford, pp. 180–81; Marta Straznicky, “Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama,” Criticism 37.3 (1995): 355–90; Wiseman, “Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,” Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Wiseman (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992), pp. 159–77; Julie Sanders, “‘A Woman write a Play!’: Jonsonian Strategies and the Dramatic Writings of Margaret Cavendish; or, Did the Duchess Feel the Anxiety of Influence?” Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama, pp. 293–305, esp. p. 298. He was Charles II’s childhood governor and a literary, architectural, and scientific patron. He supported his daughters’ and Margaret Cavendish’s literary work. Particularly, he was significant in encouraging Margaret Cavendish to undertake public roles that her womanhood would normally have debarred her from. Letter 13, Appendix B, “The Letters of Margaret Lucas Addressed to William Cavendish,” Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, Anna Battigelli (Lexington: UP Kentucky, 1998), pp. 119–32. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. This is the most currently accessible source of the letters written from Margaret Lucas to William Cavendish before their marriage in 1645. They are reproduced from MS Additional 70499 ff.259–97 held in the British Library. The letters are also reproduced in Richard W. Goulding, Letters Written by Charles Lamb’s “Princely Woman, the Thrice Noble Margaret Cavendish” to her Husband (London, 1909) and in The Phanseys of William Cavendish Marquis of Newcastle Addressed to Margaret Lucas and Her Letters in Reply, ed. Douglas Grant (London: Nonesuch, 1956). See Battigelli, p. 23. See Grant. See particularly Grant, letter 6, p. 103; “Love’s Consideration of his Mistres’ Picture,” pp. 3–4; and letter 13, p. 110. See also James Fitzmaurice, “The Intellectual and Literary Courtship of Margaret Cavendish,” Early Modern Literary Studies 14 (2004): 7.1–16 . Fitzmaurice also argues the need for consideration of the Cavendishes’ interconnection and their “powerful intellectual and literary affinity.” He provides a sustained reading of their courtship correspondence in this context. William Cavendish, “Love’s Muster,” Grant, pp. 55–56. Timothy Raylor, “‘Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue’: William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle,” Renaissance Quarterly 52.2 (1999): 402– 39. See also Cedric C. Brown, “Courtesies of Place and Arts of Diplomacy in Ben Jonson’s Last Two Entertainments for Royalty,” The Cavendish Circle, ed. Raylor, spec. issue of Seventeenth Century 9.2 (1994): 147–71. Raylor, p. 434. Lucy Worsley, Bolsover Castle (London: English Heritage, 2000), p. 16. Worsley, p. 26. Quoted by Worsley, p. 19. William Cavendish, “The Savinge Love,” Grant, p. 16.

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23 See Lara Dodds’s essay in this collection for another analysis of Cavendish’s use of scientific discourse. 24 Margaret Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (London, 1666), Renaissance Women Online, Women Writers Project, Brown University, 10 October 2004, <www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/wroentry.html>, B2v. 25 See, for example, Emma L.E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), pp. 33–4. She argues the use of genre functioned like a code during the period of Parliamentary rule. 26 This was indeed a phrase we used in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 88. 27 N.H. Keeble, “Obedient Subjects? The Loyal Self in Some Later Seventeenth-Century Royalist Women’s Memoirs,” Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), pp. 201–20, esp. 216–17. 28 This inscription on their tomb in Westminster Abbey is quoted in many biographies and critical texts, including Rees, p. 1 and Battigelli, p. 115.

Chapter 10

Margaret Cavendish’s Domestic Experiment Lara Dodds

Introduction As the subject of an essay in a volume about women writers and life writing, Margaret Cavendish is an obvious but perhaps problematic choice. Cavendish’s contribution to early modern life writing has not been unrecognized; rather, her life writing often overshadows her work in other genres, which has sometimes been dismissed as poorly disguised and repetitive representations of the egotistical self. This presumed identity between life and writing extends from Cavendish’s first readers to many recent critics. “Ever since the seventeenth century,” Hero Chalmers argues, “critics of Cavendish’s writing have consistently linked her unprecedentedly self-assertive stance as a woman writer to supposed psychological eccentricity.”1 Elizabeth Spiller summarizes the limitations of Cavendish scholarship concisely when she writes that “Cavendish continues to be treated as a kind of emblematic figure of the self.”2 This tendency to read eccentric self and eccentric text as transparent markers of one another privileges life writing at the expense of alternative contexts for Cavendish’s writing. Recent work on the “tremendous variety” of Cavendish’s literary works, however, suggests that “Cavendish takes up generic categories as a conscious strategy to integrate herself within a literary tradition.”3 Cavendish’s representation of self should thus be considered less an unquestioned representation of experience than repeated and various textual experiments. My essay rereads Cavendish’s life writing through the dual lenses of genre and experience. Cavendish, far from producing a failed autobiography,4 actually constructs a theory of life writing that, though scattered and ad hoc, defines the narrative of the female self between the poles of romance and work. In this essay I argue that Cavendish’s negotiation of the genres of romance and domestic conduct can serve as an interpretive frame for her writing life. Cavendish wrote books, she claims, because “I have no Children to imploy my Care, and Attendance on; and my Lord’s Estate being taken away, had nothing for Huswifery, or thrifty Industry

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to imploy my selfe in.”5 Exile from a general female experience of work justifies this experiment of the woman writer.6 An allusion to Mary Wroth’s Urania in another preface to the same book similarly establishes romance as a foil for Cavendish’s poetry and philosophy. Cavendish authorizes her writing as compensating for the absent virtue of housewifery and transcending the potential vice of romance. I argue that the figure of the housewife, which has been largely neglected by critics, is an important basis for Cavendish’s life writing.7 This figure recurs frequently in Cavendish’s work: as the metaphorical basis for a group of remarkable “domestic” poems, as the framework for an idealized portrait of her mother, and, in her later writing, as a figure for Nature and the grounds for a critique of experimental natural philosophy. These various engagements with the discourses of domesticity render life writing an opportunity to interrogate the construction of women’s experience. Replacing romance with “work,” Cavendish appropriates and contests the model of the female self constructed by the domestic genres of housewifery manuals and cookbooks, transforming the language of domesticity into the basis for a writing self. Beyond producing a generic framework for Cavendish’s own self story, however, the domestic provides a means for contesting the definition of experience itself. For experience to retain its usefulness as an analytical term, Joan Scott has argued, it must be redefined as “that which we want to explain” rather than “the origin of explanation.” Experience cannot be reduced to the generalized or universal, nor can its meaning be assumed. Instead, “what counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, always therefore political.”8 Cavendish, I believe, is making a similar claim when she uses the domestic—a register that associates women’s experience with the body and the home and even sometimes in opposition to language—as the foundation for writing. The question that Scott poses when she asks “what counts as experience?” unifies Cavendish’s earlier works with the critique of experimental natural philosophy in her later philosophical works. Cavendish writes at a historical moment in which the definition of experience is a fundamental question of natural philosophy. The rejection of textual authority in favor of experience could, in fact, be seen as central to the development of modern science. As Steven Shapin writes in his survey of the Scientific Revolution, No seventeenth-century modernist maxims seem more self-evidently sound than these: rely not on the testimony of humans but on the testimony of nature; favor things over words as sources of knowledge; prefer the evidence of your own eyes and your own reason to what others tell you. Here is the root idea of modern empiricism, the view that proper knowledge is and ought to be derived from direct sense experience.9

But these maxims were not self-evident to seventeenth-century thinkers. For historian of science Peter Dear, the central question for understanding the development of modern experimental science is the question of how these maxims

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came to be self-evident: “How can a universal knowledge-claim about the natural world be justified on the basis of singular items of individual experience?”10 The answer, as work by Shapin, Dear, and others has shown, is social: for experience to become a reliable basis for knowledge of nature, experimental natural philosophers had to develop protocols for its translation into public space. Cavendish critiques the attempts by contemporaries (including Royal Society luminaries Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle) to redefine experience as disinterested, objective, and the preserve of masculine scientists. As Eve Keller has argued, Cavendish’s challenge of the transparency and objectivity of experimental method “blurred the epistemological boundaries claiming to distinguish fact from fiction, discovery from creation, truth from fancy.”11 This interrogation of experiment can be understood as an extension of the interrogation of experience prompted by the challenges of life writing. For Cavendish, both the problems of narrative posed by life writing and the problems of knowledge posed by experiment can be expressed through the language of the domestic. Her writing challenges the process by which experience and experiment become separated from one another: the first as a marker of a private, feminine space that is personal and subjective; the second as a marker for the public, masculine, and objective basis for modern science.

Romance and “Work” Cavendish’s contemporaries were quick to interpret her public persona through the generic conventions of romance. As Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary entry for 11 April 1667, “The whole story of this lady is a romance and all she does is romantic.”12 Pepys, like Mary Evelyn when she wrote that Cavendish’s “mien surpasses the imagination of poets, or the descriptions of a romance heroine’s greatness,” invokes romance as both a particular narrative form and also a highly evaluative marker of a gendered and class-inflected performativity. These letters suggest that the literary genre, romance, provides a pattern for women’s experience. Evelyn’s letter continues to describe Cavendish’s behavior in terms that emphasize the intersection of text and experience: “her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is as airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books.”13 Cavendish’s contemporaries understood her “experience” through the lens of the generic conventions of romance, suggesting that the romantic model of the female self could be read equally well in both life and text. While others read her life as romance and her writing as the (already textual) experience of her life, Cavendish explores what it means to write life as romance. In Sociable Letters (1664) she considers explicitly the pleasures and challenges that romance poses for the “self Story” through the story of the pseudonymous Sir F.O.14 F.O. posits romance as a generic model for life writing because “he knows

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no reason, but he may write his own life as well as Guzman” (50). Guzman, who was the hero of a Spanish picaresque romance, poses a problem as a model for life writing: he sets a bar that is at once too high and too low. As a narrator of his life, Guzman could compensate for his less than admirable actions with his wit, but Cavendish does not have such high hopes for F.O. She writes, “his Life for anything I know to the contrary, hath been as evil as Guzman’s, but whether his wit be as good as Guzman’s, I know not, yet I doubt the worst, and to write an Evil life without Wit, will be but a dull and tedious Story” (50). Cavendish assumes that the function of life writing is to teach and delight, but though the fictional Guzman can at least delight, poor F.O. can do neither. Genre and form trump experience when, on the model of Guzman, F.O.’s failure of wit is deemed to be more serious than moral failure. F.O.’s life writing is like a “masking Dolphin” “where the outside is painted past-board or canvas, and the inside stuff’d with shreds of paper, or dirty raggs, scrap’d from dunghills” (50). Cavendish’s reflections characterize life writing quite differently from twentieth-century theorists of autobiography. F.O.’s “masking Dolphin” of a narrative suggests the impossibility of a direct translation between self (experience) and text. Georges Gusdorf, on the other hand, suggests that the most important generic qualities of life writing are its ability to provide a unified and comprehensive narrative of disparate and scattered material: “The author of an autobiography gives himself the job of narrating his own history; what he sets out to do is to reassemble the scattered elements of his individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch.”15 In contrast to the episodic form of the picaresque, which describes the variable fortunes of a hero who is, in Guzman’s case, “by turns scullion, thief, gentleman, beggar, soldier, page to a cardinal and to a French Ambassador,”16 life writing constitutes “personality as a unifying narrative principle.”17 Though a fiction, life writing, in Mary Beth Rose’s words, is a fiction of a “socially and psychologically integrated individual.”18 For Cavendish, however, Gusdorf’s criteria of comprehensiveness and unity may not have been the most important characteristics for evaluating life writing.19 In The Blazing World, Cavendish’s most extended exploration of the intersection of life writing and romance, the author’s personae are fragmented and multiple. Readers have sometimes assumed this work to be straightforwardly autobiographical and an exploration of Cavendish’s ideas about the female self.20 But while it is impossible to deny that this work is life writing in some sense, it is not an autobiography in Gusdorf’s sense. In addition to the fictional frame and the fantastic elements of the plot, The Blazing World also contains at least three distinct female figures who each reflect different aspects of the historical personality we know as Margaret Cavendish.21 Far from comprehensive or unified, the self represented in The Blazing World is deliberately scattered and multiple. Though romance is a constant reference point for Cavendish’s life writing, its meaning is complicated by issues of gender and work. Romance may have allowed Cavendish to speculate on the theoretical problems of translating experience to


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writing, but it could not be a viable model for women’s life writing. Given the widespread assumption that reading or writing romance posed a threat to women’s virtue, this reluctance to endorse romance is not surprising. Cavendish herself rejects romance, declaring extravagantly that reading even “some half a dozen lines” of a romance will cause her to “straight throw it from me, as an unprofitable study, which neither instructs, directs, nor delights me.”22 These concerns about the generic threat of romance also structure Cavendish’s two allusions to another writing woman, Mary Wroth, and the controversy surrounding her Urania, a text that became notorious because readers believed it was life writing masquerading as romance.23 In both cases, Cavendish’s reference is not to Urania itself, but to Sir Edward Denny’s poem on its author’s transgression in writing and publishing romance. Denny’s poem, which likely contributed to the suppression of Wroth’s romance, opens with the lines: “Hermaphradite in show, in deed a monster/ As by thy words and works all men may conster.” Denny censures Wroth for a book and a life that both demonstrate immodesty.24 In her allusions to Denny’s poem, Cavendish acknowledges that her multiple and various self-representations in print could invite censure. She twice cites the same couplet: “Work o the Workes leave idle books alone / For wise and worthyer women have writte none.”25 Denny assumes that “work” is women’s necessary occupation and, further, that work is antithetical to writing. Cavendish defends herself from this charge in part with the claim that her husband never required her to replace writing with work: “But your Lordship never bid me to Work, nor leave Writing, except when you would perswade me to spare so much time from my Study as to take the Air for my Health” (Sociable Letters 38). Cavendish does not rest, however, with this husbandly authorization. Instead, she challenges and redefines the ideological value placed on women’s work. Far from antithetical to writing, work is an authorization or even foundation for a writing life. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have argued, “work,” the various activities associated with the production of cloth and of clothing, was for most early modern women “a life-long bodily habit, in the sense of a habitus.” Yet though spinning was a “hard economic practice for poor women, not a fixed moral virtue,” it was also a moral ideal, “a sign of diligence (capable of deceptive use, as signs are) in discourses aimed at constructing a model of femininity for higherranking women.”26 These two values—economic and moral—produced contradictions in both women’s lives and the cultural meaning of work. Cavendish exploits this fissure between two sorts of value when she explains why she cannot work: “I cannot Work, I mean such Works as Ladies use to pass their Time withal, and if I could, the Materials of such Works would cost more than the Work would be worth, besides all the Time and Pains bestow’d upon it” (Sociable Letters 38). Cavendish uses the housewifely virtue of thrift to challenge the moral value placed on women’s work. For Cavendish, the moral utility of spinning cannot compensate for its economic futility. Her writing work, she makes clear, has greater value than the more conventional work that didactic domestic guides would require of her.

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In response to Denny’s challenge, then, Cavendish ostensibly accepts the injunction to work. But she redefines it so as to construct a model of the writing self that is congruent with the “work” that befits a woman’s experience. This substitution of writing for work can be demonstrated by an episode from Sociable Letters. Here Cavendish tells an anecdote about some neighbors’ complaints that she is a poor housewife because her maids don’t work. She responds by setting her household to spin flax. But the plan is unsuccessful because Cavendish lacks experience. As a friend explains, “though Nature has made you a Spinster in Poetry, yet Education hath not made you a Spinster in Huswifry, and you will Spoil more Flax, than Get Cloth by your Spinning, as being an Art that requires Practice to Learn it” (211). Cavendish is surprised to learn that this women’s work is a task that requires skill and even “Art” because “I thought Spinning had been Easie, as not requiring much Skill to Draw, and Twist a Thread” (211). Cavendish continues to experiment with housewifery, but her projects—making silk flowers, preparing sweetmeats—all have the same outcome: each activity requires more in consumption than it would provide in value to the household. Cavendish’s friend finally concludes that it is best for the maids to read and their mistress to write, for “they [the maids] cannot Employ their Time better, than to Read, nor your Ladiship better than to Write, for any other Course of Life would be as Unpleasing, and Unnatural to you, as Writing is Delightful” (212). For Cavendish, the instruction to work leads to a community of women reading and writing—perhaps even romances. The intellectual work and, in particular, the writing self so often denied to women are shown to be, paradoxically, more housewifely uses of resources than “work.” Cavendish’s revaluation of work is part of a broader engagement with the figure and discourses of the housewife as a model (and sometimes foil) for life writing. In citing and acknowledging Denny’s poem, Cavendish may give up romance for work, but in the exchange, she gains much more. The genres of domestic conduct that variously defined the nature and status of women’s work provided a rich resource for Cavendish’s life writing. The language of domesticity does not, however, provide a univocal model for women’s experience. Instead, recent scholarship has produced a portrait of the early modern housewife that is complex and sometimes contradictory. Wendy Wall suggests that domestic labor was represented in two different and competing registers: “as a reassuringly ‘common’ sphere in which people immersed themselves in familiar rhythms, and as a profoundly alienating site that could never be fully inhabited or comprehended.”27 Wall further suggests that the discourse of domesticity could advocate both the moral virtue of frugal household management and thrift and the social virtue of ostentatious and creative display.28 Mary Thomas Crane notes that the very word housewife could mean both “a woman (usually a married woman) who manages her household with skill and thrift” and “a light, worthless or pert woman or girl.”29 Natasha Korda emphasizes the dichotomies of keeping and getting, producing and consuming that developed in concert with nascent


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capitalism.30 What is clear from this proliferation of critical frameworks is that the housewife was a contested figure.31 For Cavendish, likewise, the competing virtues of housewifery provided multiple frameworks for the multiple facets of her life: an idealized childhood in a close and loving family; the violent disruptions of civil war, exile and return; and a vocation as a writer of poetry, philosophy, and fiction. In A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life, the autobiography published as a part of Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (1656), Cavendish represents the housewife as a model for female subjectivity that is ideal if no longer attainable. Writing from the position of what Emma Rees has described as a “triple exile,” 32 Cavendish attempts in A True Relation to memorialize and reconstitute a family scattered and even lost to the disturbances of the civil war.33 In response, Cavendish represents the members of her family as emblematic of embattled cultural values. At the center of this family portrait is Cavendish’s mother, Elizabeth Lucas, who managed her household with great skill and authority while simultaneously exemplifying the feminine virtues of modesty and devotion to family. First described as a devoted wife, who need only speak of her late husband “but love and grief caused tears to flow, and tender sights to rise, mourning in sad complaints,” Lucas is also “an affectionate Mother, breeding her children with a most industrious care and tender love.”34 In addition to the conventional roles of wife and mother, however, Lucas is also a good mistress, caring for the members of her household firmly and with kindness. She will “freely pardon a fault, and forget an injury” except on the occasion of a crime against that prime housewifely virtue, thrift, as when negligent servants “lavishly or unnecessarily waste, or subtilly, and theevishly steal” (49). Lucas is properly modest about her abilities, complaining that “her family was too great for her weak Management,” but Cavendish knows that her mother was skilled in the complex duties of maintaining a great estate, including “Leases, and setting of Lands, and Court-keeping, and ordering of Stewards, and the like affairs” (49). In many ways, Lucas is like the “character” of the good wife described by Nicholas Breton as a world of wealth, where just cause of content makes a kingdome in conceit: She is the eye of wariness, the tongue of silence, the hand of labour, and the heart of love: a companion of kindnesse, a Mistris of Passion, an exercise of patience and an example of experience: She is the kitchen physician, the Chamber comfort, the Halls care, and the Parlours Grace: She is the Dairies neatnesse, the Brue-house wholesomenesse, the Garnerss provision and the Gardens plantation ... she is a care of necessity, and a course of thrift, a booke of Huswifery, and a miror of modestie. In summe, she is Gods blessing, and Mans happinesse, Earths honour, and Heavens creature.35

Blazoned through both the spaces of domestic work and the products of the household the good wife’s subjectivity is equivalent to the “comfort,” “care,” “grace,” “neatness,” “wholesomeness,” and “provision” that are the internal and external signs of a well-functioning household. As Wall notes, the daily activities

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of an early modern housewife might include “medical service, distillation, water purification, dairying, confectionery, brewing, butchery, slaughter, textile-making, veterinary care, and the production of simple goods.”36 Cavendish wrote that her mother “took a pleasure, and some little pride in the governing” of her estate (49), a judgment supported by the range of duties the housewife undertook and her place at the center of the household. The combination of pride and pleasure in the duties and roles of the housewife defines and memorializes Lucas’s life. In contrast to her mother’s role as housewife, Cavendish describes her own experience with women’s “work” in terms of absence and lack. In writing her mother’s life, Cavendish recognizes the housewife as a form for the female self that is now lost. She concludes her description of her mother’s life by lamenting the destruction of her world and way of life. “My mother lived to see the ruin of her Children,” she writes, “in which was her ruin, and then dyed” (49). Cavendish’s portrait of her mother represents a way of life actively destroyed by the loss of the political and property relations that supported it. Elizabeth Lucas’s daughter marries successfully, even advantageously, but her entry into adulthood is not into the shared female experience of the wife and mother imagined by household guide authors like Gervase Markham, but into a sphere of activity constrained by exile and changing political and cultural norms. As a result, Cavendish seeks pride and pleasure elsewhere, in the writing of poetry, philosophy, and fiction. In her first publication, Poems, and Fancies (1653), the language of the domestic becomes Cavendish’s primary rhetoric for announcing her identity as a writer. In a prefatory letter, Cavendish explores the terms in which housewifery might provide a model for writing. Housewifery is discreet Management, and ordering all in Private, and Household Affaires, seeing nothing spoil’d, or Profusely spent, that every thing has its proper Place, and every Servant his proper Work, and every Work to be done in its proper Time; to be Neat, and Cleanly, to have their House quiet from all disturbing Noise. But Thriftiness is something stricter; for good Housewifery may be used in great Expenses; but Thriftiness signifies a Saving, or a getting, as to increase their Stock, or Estate. For Thrift weighs, and measures out all Expence. It is just as in Poetry: for good Husbandry in Poetry, is, when their is but little Fancy, which is not only spun to the last Thread, but the Thread is drawne so smal, as it is scarce perceived. But I have nothing to spin, or order, so as I become Idle; I cannot say, in my owne House, because I have none, but what my Mind is lodged in. (A7r)

In this passage, Cavendish rehearses conventional claims about the virtues of housewifery but then transforms such claims about the moral value of women’s work into an analogy for poetry itself. Markham wrote that the English housewife must be a woman of “great modesty and temperance, as well inwardly as outwardly.” Cavendish reflects Markham’s emphasis on temperance through her own emphasis on order and the “proper” distribution of resources and effort. Yet though Markham advised thrift, he, like Cavendish, recognized the importance of


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spending as well as saving. Though the wife must not exceed “the competency of her husbands estate and calling, making her circle rather strait than large,” she must ever strive to increase her husband’s credit and honor: “for as lavish prodigality is brutish, so miserable covetousness is hellish.” Just so, “good Housewifery can be used in great Expenses” and thrift itself is a savings that leads to increase.37 Initially, Cavendish’s domestic language in her prefaces appears to be compensatory. Poetry, she seems to be saying, is clearly a second-best substitute for the duties made impossible by the diminished status of her exiled family. Furthermore, poetry produced in these conditions is not threatening because it does not compromise the responsibilities of women’s work. With scant resources, Cavendish can spin only a small thread of poetry but, like a good housewife, she stretches that thread of fancy to its limit. But by emphasizing that thrift itself can lead to an increase in value and estate, Cavendish, like the housewives busily making the preserves or sugar sculptures described in books such as Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies, finds consumption can be the basis for a new kind of creativity. Korda’s discussion of the multiple significations of the wife’s role as “keeper” is a useful gloss on Cavendish’s rhetorical strategy here. “Keeper” can “stretch” “to signify either activity or passivity, labor or leisure, production or consumption, possession or mere custody.”38 This pattern can be detected in both the economics of Cavendish’s frequent and ostentatious publication and in her poetics. Though Cavendish’s prestige publications may have consumed scarce family resources, they were also productive of value. Chalmers argues that the publication of Margaret’s works served to preserve (or “keep”) the family’s aristocratic status.39 Cavendish equates housewifery with the work of the poet. This conflation of housewifery and poetry creates a poetics that, in the consumption of luxury objects, is likewise productive. In one of the prefatory epistles to Poems, and Fancies, a letter addressed specifically “To All Noble, and Worthy Ladies,” Cavendish uses the ornamental domestic as a mediating term to assign poetry to women: Besides, Poetry, which is built upon Fancy; Women may claime, as a Worke belonging most properly to themselves: for I have observ’d, that their Braines work usually in a Fantastically motion, as in their severall, and various dresses, in their many and singular choices of Cloaths, and Ribbons, and the like, in their curious shadowing, and mizing of Colours, in their Wrought workes, and divers sorts of Stitches they imploy their Needle, and many Curious things they make, as Flowers, Boxes, Baskets with Beads, Shells, Silks, Straw, or any thing else, besides all manner of Meats to eate, and thus their Thoughts are imployed perpetually with Fancies. (A3r)

Poetry is feminized, perhaps even trivialized, through the language of women’s work. Like Plat’s preserves and conserves, the work of these women is ornamental

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rather than useful; the value of their flowers, boxes, and beads lies in their playful variety and display of wealth rather than in an efficient use of resources. Her analogy between poetry and women’s work associates poetry with feminized and ephemeral surfaces (clothing, ribbons, decorative arts) and therefore depends on a definition of rhetoric and of poetry as primarily decorative: surface rather than substance, words rather than things. However, Cavendish also attributes to women’s work the creative power often limited to the male-gendered pen. When Cavendish describes poetry in terms of women’s decorative arts, she is revising a common trope for rhetoric itself. In a famous passage from George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, poetry is compared to women, who are shameful when naked, but “more amiable in every mans eye, when they be in their richest attire, suppose of silkes or tyssewes and costly embroderies.”40 For Puttenham, the image of the well-dressed woman figured the (male) poet’s making of a poem in a gendered and also class-specific trope for a textual act of imitation. For Cavendish, on the other hand, the same trope serves to acknowledge the creative potential and agency required by the beautiful surfaces of women’s bodies. The result is a crossing of the boundary that separates the (male) maker and poet from the (female) object and trope. Cavendish ascribes dignity to the alternate forms of making to be found in women’s work. Cavendish acknowledges the redefinition of housewifery of consumption but in the process transmutes the so-called trivial forms of women’s making into a productivity of even greater value. Spinning with fingers, she writes, “I had no hopes of gaining so much as to make me a Garment to keep me from the cold,” but writing poetry and philosophy—what she calls “spinning with the braine”—allows her to “spin a Garment of Memory, to lapp up my Name, that it might grow to after Ages” (Poems, and Fancies A2r). Cavendish’s redefinition of work has as its culmination her domestic poetry: a remarkable group of poems in which the skills and knowledge of the housewife provide the conceptual resources for exploring many different natural phenomena.41 More broadly, however, this translation of work into poetry demonstrates the nature of Cavendish’s engagement with the genre of domestic conduct. Finding in it a model for her portrait of her mother, she uses the genre in her life writing; however, in rewriting the domestic guide as feminized poetry, it is central to her writing life.

Housewifery, Science, and Experiment After the Restoration, Cavendish’s writing focuses increasingly on natural philosophy, but her return to the figure of the housewife suggests a continuity between her early interrogation of the forms of experience and her later critique of experiment. Cavendish’s virtuoso depiction of Nature as an industrious housewife is the cornerstone of an alternative model of the household and a positive, if largely unexplored, alternative natural philosophy. By making Nature into a housewife and


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the experiments of the natural philosophers into the everyday experience of women’s work, Cavendish challenges the emerging limitations on the sites and conditions under which reliable knowledge may be made and contests the restriction of experience to experiment. The broader significance of Cavendish’s housewife is provided by two historical contexts of early modern science. First, most experimental knowledge was produced within the household rather than in a public space dedicated solely to the performance of experiment. As Shapin explains, “The overwhelming majority of experimental trials, displays, and discussions that we know about occurred within private residences.”42 This circumstance required natural philosophers to develop procedures, including what Shapin has elsewhere labeled “boundary speech,”43 for determining which type of household activities could become the basis for knowledge. Second, experience itself was in the process of a fundamental redefinition as a source of authorization for claims in natural philosophy. Within the earlier Aristotelian science, experience referred to generalized knowledge of nature rather than a series of discrete events. As Dear has argued, this older meaning of experience, “in practice, amounted to knowledge that had been gained by someone who had perceived ‘the same thing’ countless times, so as to become thoroughly familiar with it.”44 The practitioners of experimental natural philosophy, however, developed a very different understanding of the term. By the time the Royal Society was founded, experience was “an event of which the observer was a part” and “the veracity of the report clearly depended on the original experience of a specified person on a particular occasion.”45 This redefinition had important consequences for the use of experience as evidence for or justification of knowledge claims. As Shapin and Simon Schaffer have argued, the redefinition of experience as a series of discrete observations required the development of codes to guarantee the credibility of such reports. In answer to Scott’s question, Shapin and Schaffer have shown that, when it comes to natural knowledge, what counts as experience is the experience of the gentleman or, in the words of apologist for the Royal Society Thomas Sprat, those gentlemen, “free and unconfin’d,” who are able to act as “equal observers without dependence” because of “the freedom of their education, the plenty of their estates, and the usual generosity of Noble Blood.”46 The work of Dear and others demonstrates how the shared experience of the English gentleman became, paradoxically, the foundation for the objective and disinterested observations of experiment. In Abraham Cowley’s well-known ode “To the Royal Society,” it is the (male) “Heir” who will be brought to full mastery of his “vast Estate” by the efforts of modern experimental philosophers (1, 9).47 By contrast, Cavendish’s representation of the scene of experiment focuses not on the man who owns the estate, but the woman who runs it. Shapin concludes that experiment took place in the private homes of gentlemen, but he does not consider whether, or the extent to which, women entered into or participated in such spaces.48 Cavendish, who is also concerned with the production of knowledge

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within the domestic space, asks the question that Shapin leaves unasked. What, she wonders, do the knowledge-making practices of experimental philosophers in their laboratories have in common with the production and consumption performed by the housewife and her maids in the kitchen, garden, or drawing room? Shapin does not consider this question because, in seeking to discover how seminal figures in the history of science conceptualized the limits of knowledge, he must determine from the perspective of Boyle or Hooke the difference “between a real and a relevant experimental public, between the population actually present at experimental scenes and those whose attendance was deemed by authors to be germane to the making of knowledge.”49 While not a democrat or a feminist, Cavendish nevertheless finds this definition of “relevant” inadequate to describing the true sites and practices of knowledge. She challenges these limitations by making the housewife the dominant figure in her representation of both domestic space and the production of knowledge. For Cavendish, Nature is decidedly not the dead, inert, and passive figure constructed by the discourse of objectivity. Instead, she is a housewife: Nature being a wise and provident lady, governs her parts very wisely, methodically, and orderly: Also, she is very industrious, and hates to be idle, which makes her employ her time as a good housewife does, in brewing, baking, churning, spinning, sowing, etc. as also in preserving, for those that love sweetmeats; and in distilling, for those that take delight in cordials; for she has numerous employments; and being infinitely selfmoving, never wants work; but her artificial works, are her works of delight, pleasure and pastime.50

While it is certainly conventional to represent Nature metaphorically as Woman, Cavendish’s trope of the “good housewife” is far from common. More common is the representation of nature as a new land ready for discovery and conquest by the heroic efforts of the natural philosophers. In Hooke’s familiar formulation, Nature is active only in deception: “the footsteps of Nature are to be trac’d, not only in her ordinary course, but when she seems to be put to her shifts, to make many doublings and turnings, and to use some kind of art in indeavouring to avoid our discovery.”51 In Cavendish’s conceit, however, Nature is, by contrast, the manager of the serious business that was the early modern household, actively producing works of both utility and pleasure. Cavendish’s trope reveals the secret places of Nature, her “doublings and turnings,” to be the domestic space, the home, the intimate daily necessities of food and drink, and, of course, the realm of women. Accepting the association between Woman and Nature, Cavendish turns it on its head. Nature is not a passive maiden to be seduced or controlled but the active manager of the “busy, chaotic, threatening, playful, transgressive, and gory workplace” that was the early modern household.52 Her writing invites us to move beyond the laboratory as the scene of early modern science and to account for the


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many spaces (often inhabited by women) where discourses of nature were produced. This figure for Nature is complicated by its function as both the grounds for Cavendish’s own philosophy and a resource for satire of the experimental natural philosophers. In this respect, Cavendish’s rhetorical strategy is similar to her authorization of her poetry in Poems, and Fancies, where the arts of fashion and decoration are both a trivializing gesture that excuses her entry into print and an alternative form of making. In service of satire, Cavendish invokes a division of men’s and women’s work based on their differing capacities to suggest that men should just stay away from experiment. She asks: to what purpose should a man beat his brains, and weary his body with labours about that wherein he shall lose more time, than gain knowledge? But if anyone would take delight in such things, my opinion is, that our female sex would be the fittest for it; for they most commonly take pleasure in making of sweetmeats, possets, several sorts of pies, puddings, and the like; not so much for their own eating, as to employ their idle time; and it may be, they would prove good experimental philosophers, and inform the world how to make artificial snow, by their creams, or possets beaten into froth: and ice, by their clear, candied, or crusted quiddities, or conserves of fruits: and frost, by their candied herbs and flowers: and hail by their small comfits made of water and sugar, with the whites of eggs. (Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy 105–6)

Cavendish alludes here to the wonderful works of illusion included in housewifery books such as Plat’s Delights for Ladies. Women’s experience making sugar sculptures and trompe l’oeil food, Cavendish suggests, would serve them well in the laboratory. This comparison also suggests a serious challenge to some of the fundamental assumptions of experimental natural philosophy. In Cavendish’s view, the observations and experiments of the Royal Society produce only illusion and deception, not knowledge: they are “hermaphroditical, that is, mixt figures, partly artificial, and partly natural” (50). The analogy between Nature’s work and the work and leisure of women continues the satire of experimental philosophy that is developed throughout Observations and its companion text The Blazing World. By transforming the practices of natural philosophy into the trivial and ephemeral productions of the household, describing them as the products of “idle time,” Cavendish deflates the natural philosopher’s claims for the economic and political utility of their work. Behind the satire, however, is a serious consideration of how domestic experience may reflect and inform knowledge of nature. Research by Shapin and others have shown the late seventeenth century to be a time when residential laboratories were increasingly defined as distinct from the domestic spaces that contained them. Reinserting experiment into the experience of domestic spaces, Cavendish suggests that contributions to knowledge may come from those spaces that modern science has excluded. By showing that what goes on in the kitchen is really not so different from what goes on in the laboratory, Cavendish leaves her

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readers to choose between a feminized and trivialized experiment and an expanded understanding of knowledge built on the experience of all the members of the household.

Conclusion Margaret Cavendish’s writing is central to any consideration of seventeenthcentury ideas of self. As Catherine Gallagher argues in her influential study, “Cavendish’s texts show that the infinitude of selfhood accompanies the birth of the subject. Specifically in this case, it is connected with the birth of woman as subject.”53 Yet in seeking to explain why early feminism grew out of Royalist political beliefs, Gallagher focuses on Margaret the First, that part of Cavendish’s literary persona that is, above all, singular and unique. My argument suggests, however, that this is only one aspect of her self-representation. Cavendish’s thorough engagement with the domestic—as the culturally sanctioned model for her mother’s life, as a rhetorically convenient frame that distinguishes her writing from a transgressive predecessor, and as the paradoxical basis for creativity itself—turns to the common and mundane experience that supposedly defines women’s lives in order to challenge its exclusion from rationality, textuality, and, eventually, science. For Cavendish, therefore, life writing became a space in which to express her lifelong experiment with genre and through which she explored her philosophical interest in the problems of experience. In this respect, Gusdorf’s theories of autobiography again provide a useful point of comparison. He suggests that the impulse of autobiography shares much with the impulse of science and claims that the Scientific Revolution and the first autobiographies share a common origin: the curiosity of the individual about himself, the wonder that he feels before the mystery of his own destiny, is thus tied to the Copernican Revolution: at the moment it enters into history, humanity, which previously aligned its development to the great cosmic cycles, finds itself engaged in an autonomous adventure; soon mankind even brings the domain of the sciences into line with its own reckoning, organizing them, by means of technical expertise, according to its own desires.54

Gusdorf here defines both science and autobiography as the accomplishments, above all, of the heroic individual, untethered by historical contingency. For all her singularity, however, Cavendish’s life writing does not confirm Gusdorf’s analogy between the scientist and the autobiographical subject. Rather, by seeking to expand “what counts as experience,” Cavendish’s life writing participates in the interrogation of the foundations of modern science and modern subjectivity. Her domestic experiment rewrites both the history of subjectivity and the scientific


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revolution to include a broadened, and thoroughly textual, account of women’s experience.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13

Hero Chalmers, “Dismantling the Myth of ‘Mad Madge’: The Cultural Context of Margaret Cavendish’s Authorial Self-Presentation,” Women’s Writing 4.3 (1997): 323– 340, esp. p. 323. Elizabeth A. Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), p. 139. Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz, introduction, Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, ed. Cottegnies and Weitz (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2003), pp. 7–17, esp. p. 11, p. 10. Another recent collection of essays that describes Cavendish as a conscious and sophisticated manipulator of genre is A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Mary Beth Rose describes Cavendish’s True Relation as an “interesting and most illustrative failure.” See “Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography,” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986), pp. 245–78, esp. p. 250. Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (London, 1653), A7r. All further references are to this edition and cited parenthetically in the text. For the extent to which any experience was a shared female experience, see Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 301. The one extended treatment of domesticity as an interpretive context for Cavendish’s writing focuses on her poetry. See Katharine Capshaw Smith, “‘Bisket of Love, which crumbles all away’: The Failure of Domestic Metaphor in Margaret Cavendish’s Poetic Fancies,” Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England, ed. Kari Boyd McBride (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne UP, 2002), pp. 48–73. Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 22–40, esp. p. 37, p. 38. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), p. 69. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), p. 13. Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH 64.2 (1997): 447–71, esp. p. 455. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: U of California P, 1974), vol. 9, p. 163. John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray, vol. 4 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), p. 8; quoted in Susannah Quinsee, “Margaret Cavendish’s Critical Heritage and the Creation of an Infamous Gendered Literary Identity,” In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1–2 (2000): 89–105, esp. p. 93.

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14 Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2004). All further references are to this edition and cited parenthetically in the text. For the sake of convenience, I will refer to the letter-writer of Sociable Letters as “Cavendish,” but it is important to acknowledge that the speaker of this work is a literary persona. See James Fitzmaurice, “Autobiography, Parody and the Sociable Letters of Margaret Cavendish,” A Princely Brave Woman, pp. 69–83, esp. p. 69. 15 Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” ed. and trans. James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), pp. 28–48, esp. p. 35. 16 Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), p. 431. 17 Rose, p. 249. 18 Ibid. 19 Cavendish’s biography of her husband, William, is further evidence for the claim that the “self” and “experience” represented in Cavendish’s life writing are fragmented, generically hybrid, and various. As Fitzmaurice argues, this “olio” of a biography serves Cavendish’s purposes even though (or perhaps because) it lacks a unified and unifying narrative principle. See “Margaret Cavendish’s Life of William, Plutarch, and Mixed Genre,” Authorial Conquests, pp. 80–102, esp. p. 82. 20 Perhaps the most influential argument of this type is Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (1988): 24–39. 21 I say at least three because, in addition to the narrative persona of the preface, the fictional character the Empress, and the fictionalized Duchess of Newcastle, the fragmentary text “A Piece of a Play” (first published in 1668 in Plays Never Before Printed) suggests that Cavendish may have planned this proliferation to extend to another genre and another character. 22 Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures (London, 1656), C2v. 23 As Jennifer Lee Carrell argues, “Without exception, all the extant response to the Urania reveals the assumptions that Wroth’s fiction masked facts and that she both could and should expose the masquerade.” Carrell also notes that “without exception, all the extant response is also male.” See “A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance,” SEL 34.1 (1994): 79–107, esp. p. 85. As the exception that proves the rule, Cavendish demonstrates her awareness of the complex status of romance as a genre for women. 24 All citations from Denny’s poem are from Josephine A. Roberts, “An Unpublished Literary Quarrel Concerning the Suppression of Mary Wroth’s ‘Urania’ (1621),” Notes and Queries 24 (1977): 532–35, esp. p. 533. 25 Roberts, “Unpublished Literary Quarrel,” p. 534. The first allusion is in Poems, and Fancies, where Cavendish writes that men will think women “incroach too much upon their Prerogatives; for they hold Books as their Crowne, and the Sword as their Scepter, by which they rule, and governe. And very like they will say to me, as to the Lady that wrote the Romancy: Work Lady, Work, let writing Books alone, / For surely wiser Women nere wrote one” (A3v). The second allusion is from Sociable Letters and is similar: “It may be said to me, as one said to a Lady, Work Lady Work, let writing Books alone, For surely Wiser Women ne’r writ one” (38).


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26 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 105, p. 106. 27 Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), p. 5. 28 Wall categorizes these values by contrasting two popular household manuals: Hugh Plat’s enormously popular Delights for Ladies and Gervase Markham’s equally popular The English Housewife. These two works can provide a convenient shorthand for the contested meaning of the Housewife in early modern England. Wall suggests that Plat defines housewifery as one of “several skills necessary for social advancement, including the crafting of expensive conserves and banqueting dishes that displayed conspicuous consumption and marked social status.” Markham’s “central goal is to promote efficiency and thrift so that the English home can remain as insulated as possible from professionalization and the market economy” (Staging Domesticity 26). 29 Mary Thomas Crane, “‘Players in Your Huswifery and Huswives in Your Beds’: Conflicting Identities of Early Modern English Women,” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 212–23, esp. p. 212. 30 Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002), pp. 28–9. 31 What is less clear is whether these competing versions of women’s roles and work can be sorted into a narrative of change in the experience or status of women’s work. See Judith M. Bennett, “Confronting Continuity,” Journal of Women’s History 9.3 (1997): 73–94. 32 Emma L.E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), p. 32. 33 For Cavendish the scattering was literal. Her family home had been captured and then destroyed by Parliamentarian forces; her family’s crypt, including the graves of her mother and sister, desecrated; and her brother Sir Charles Lucas made a martyr to the royalist cause after his execution without a trial. See Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen (New York: Basic, 2002), pp. 105–6. 34 A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2000), pp. 41–63, esp. p. 48. All references to A True Relation are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 35 Nicholas Breton, The Good and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies, and Unworthies of this Age (London, 1616), p. 30. 36 Wall, Staging Domesticity, p. 19. 37 Gervase Markham, The English Housewife (London, 1653), p. 3. 38 Korda, pp. 32–3. 39 Chalmers suggests that William’s decision to print his wife’s works was part of his “project of refusing oblivion and sustaining the impression of noble largesse. His financing of their publication served as another chance to display his continuing refusal to capitulate to ignoble penny-pinching” (327–8). In this context, Cavendish’s denial of domestic competence is also a witty example of the modesty topos. Just as the hundreds of poems in this volume reflect more than a small “thread” of fancy, the Cavendish family’s housekeeping retained the extravagance befitting their aristocratic station even

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40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52 53 54


in their straitened circumstances. See, for instance, Margaret’s description of her husband’s extensive stables and extravagant entertainments for the king and her assertion that they always lived “freely and nobly” in The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe, Duke, Marquess and Earl of Newcastle (London, 1667), p. 62. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1936), p. 137. See the poems on pages 121–54 of Poems, and Fancies. These poems take cookery and other domestic pursuits as their subject. Titles include “Natures Cook,” “A Posset for Natures Breakfast,” and “Natures House.” Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis 79.3 (1988): 373–404, esp. p. 378. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985). Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), p. 5. Peter Dear, “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76.2 (1985): 145–61, esp. p. 152. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (St. Louis, MO: Washington U, 1958), p. 67, p. 68. Abraham Cowley, Poems, ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1905), pp. 448– 53. Shapin, “House of Experiment,” p. 393. For an essay that does explicitly consider the question of women in the domestic space of experiment, see Deborah E. Harkness, “Managing an Experimental Household: The Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy,” Isis 88.2 (1997): 247–62. Shapin, “House of Experiment,” p. 394. Margaret Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), p. 105. All further references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (New York: Dover, 1961), a2r. Wall, Staging Domesticity, p. 7. Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute,” p. 32. Gusdorf, p. 31.

Chapter 11

“That All the World May Know”: Women’s “Defense-Narratives” and the Early Novel Josephine Donovan

Not surprisingly perhaps, given the taboo against women making public utterances, nearly all women’s nonfictional writing in English in the seventeenth century contains a defense of the practice. Yet, since women’s reputations—their honor—was a vital (perhaps the vital) component of their social capital, women felt compelled to tell “all the world” their side of the story when defamed or maligned. Lady Anne Clifford (1590– 1676), for example, involved in a contentious legal battle with her husband, Richard Sackville, the second Earl of Dorset, expressed a common female sentiment when she issued a sworn public statement defending her position: “Now my desire is that all the world may know that this stay of mine proceeds only from my husband’s command, contrary to my consent or agreement.”1 Rather than submitting silently, allowing others to shape their stories and characterize their “selves,” these women were driven to articulate their own stories in order to defend their positions and/or their identities against often slanderous misrepresentation. The practice of women defending themselves in writing, which I am calling the “women’s defense-narrative,” is a tradition that emerged in the late medieval period and continued as a dominant vein in women’s writing through the early modern period. While the assertion has been made by a few critics that Daniel Defoe, usually considered the first English novelist, relied heavily on latter-day authors of the women’s defensenarrative, such as Mary Carleton, in constructing his early novels, none of the major histories of the novel has recognized the role played by the women’s defense-narrative in its formation.2 Indeed, the women’s defense-narrative has not heretofore been identified as such, nor studied as a discrete subgenre of early modern women’s literature. In this article I attempt to outline its history, with an emphasis on the seventeenth-century examples that contributed so importantly to the formation of the novel. Nearly every piece of nonfictional prose writing by English women in the seventeenth century belongs wholly or in part to the defense-narrative tradition. In many cases the women are defending themselves against castigation for having spoken out on religious

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matters; in others, on political issues; in still others (as with Clifford), on personal economic disputes with family members over property or entitlement. Along with this developing tradition of nonfictional defense-narratives (and likely feeding into it) was a fictional tradition of women characters defending themselves, often acting as their own defense attorneys in court. This tradition extends back to French late-medieval writer Christine de Pisan whose Livre de la cité des dames (1405), translated into English in 1521, had a considerable influence on seventeenth-century English women writers, such as Margaret Cavendish. (Indeed, it has recently been established that Cavendish owned a copy of Christine’s work.)3 The two traditions—nonfictional and fictional—flowed into one another such that by the latter half of the century it is sometimes difficult to discern one from the other. As Elspeth Graham notes, “the boundaries between fiction and autobiography ... were ... especially unfixed in the early modern period.”4 Fiction shaped nonfictional narratives because writers often relied upon fictional models in constructing their “selves” and therefore their life-histories. The idea that the construction of the self is to a certain extent a fictional project in fact became a commonplace in the early modern era. Especially prevalent was the idea that individuals might model themselves on fictional characters they encountered in reading. (This conceit is indeed at the heart of a major genre of the early modern novel, the antiromance; one has only to consider Don Quixote de la Mancha, Cervantes’ popular novel [translated into English in 1612 and 1620], where the main character models himself on characters he encountered in romance books.) The most important of the women’s novelesque defense-narratives—those that hover between fiction and nonfiction—are the works by Mary Frith, Mary Carleton, Elizabeth Cellier, and Delarivier Manley, all of which are based on verifiable historical events that actually happened (and in this respect are nonfiction) but which also rely heavily on fictional models. Although the accusations against these women were somewhat more serious—theft, bigamy, even treason—than those seen in most of the nonfictional defense-narratives, these authors are similarly concerned with defending their reputations (or their protagonists’) and similarly aware that in so doing they are defending themselves against having violated norms of female behavior. Their narratives helped to establish the prototype of a maligned female figure protesting her innocence and defending her reputation that Defoe satirized in what are considered the first examples of the English novel, Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). As Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox note in their introduction to Her Own Life, a collection of autobiographical writings by seventeenth-century women, most were written for the purposes of public vindication: “repeatedly we find the texts ... entitled ... ‘a true relation,’ ‘a vindication,’ a ‘plea,’ or a ‘record,’ all of which suggest factuality or a demand to be believed.”5 Anne Wentworth, for example, in her Vindication (1677) defends her decision to leave her husband who had forbidden her to write her religious reflections. For 18 years, she notes, she endured “Severe and Cruel persecutions ... from the unspeakable Tyrannies of an Hard-hearted Yoak-Fellow” and from her coreligionist Baptists who “declared” her “an Heathen.”6 She protests against being “represent[ed] ... as a Proud, Passionate, Revengeful, Discontented, and Mad

Women’s “Defense-Narratives” and the Early Novel

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Woman, and as one that has unduly published things to the prejudice and scandal of my Husband; and that have wickedly left him” (2). Aside from denying these allegations, Wentworth defends herself through casuistical reasoning, a practice much used by fictional women characters in their defense-narratives (a point noted below and developed at length in my Women and the Rise of the Novel).7 In leaving her “earthly husband,” Wentworth argues, she was obeying her “Heavenly Bridegroom,” who ordered her to “finish a work, which my earthly Husband ... hindered me from performing, seizing and running away with my writings” (5). “In the true reason of the case,” she concludes, “I have not left my Husband, but he me” (5) because, as she argues in A True Account (1676), he and her persecutors attempted the “rape of my Soul,” and “Soul oppression is far greater than Bodily oppression.”8 Wentworth is basically arguing, therefore, the casuistical point that to rebel against unjust earthly authority is no sin. The real sinners, she contends, are her husband and those who harassed her for speaking out. Anna Trapnel, in her Report and Plea (1654), also states that she is writing to vindicate her reputation in “defiance against all the reproachful, vile, horrid, abusive, and scandalous reports raised out of the bottomless pit against her.”9 Trapnel had been arrested for sedition and also accused of witchcraft. In her address “to the Reader,” she asserts, “I go not about to vindicate myself but the truth” (73). Trapnel claims she was “forced [by her arrest] out of my close retired spirit by rulers and clergy who have brought me on the world’s stage of reports and rumours, making me the world’s wonder and gazing stock.” People came to see her as “a monster”; she wants them to see she is but “a woman like others” (74). Like many other women of the seventeenth century who took up the pen, she explains, “I have written ... to take off these falsities and contrary reports ... concerning my suffering” (84). Numerous further examples could be cited. The titles alone often indicate that selfdefense is the issue at hand. Consider, for example, Hester Shaw’s Mrs. Shaw’s Innocency Restored (1653) or Dorothy Waugh’s Lamb’s Defense against Lies (1656).10 Other pertinent works include An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditations (1653); Susanna Parr, Susanna’s Apology against the Ancients (1659); Joan Voikins, God’s Mighty Power Magnified (1691); and Alice Thornton, A Book of Remembrances (1875; written ca. 1688).11 Because the very fact of writing for publication or circulation made them appear “monstrous” by conventional notions of womanhood, most women were compelled as well to justify not just their own perceived audacity but the right of women as a class to speak publicly. The women petitioners to Parliament of the mid-century, whose activity is considered the first widespread assertion by women of political agency—their “first breakthrough into public political discourse”12—felt the need to defend their behavior, knowing that they were violating a deeply ingrained cultural prohibition. A 4 February 1641 petition A True Copie of the Petition of Gentlewomen and Tradesmens-wives appended a list of “Reasons why their sex ought thus to Petition, as well as the Men.”13 While acknowledging that they thereby feel “imboldened” and that they anticipate “reproaches,” they deny that they are acting out of “selfe conceite, or pride of heart.”14 A petition of 5 May 1649 To the Supreme Authority of England the Commons assembled

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in Parliament, The humble Petition of diverse Women of London and Westminster defends their right as women to express their wishes: “we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to Petition or represent our Grievances.”15 While undoubtedly the individualistic antinomian strain of Protestantism seen in the more radical sects (many of the petitioners were Levellers) encouraged these political women, as well as many of the religious writers, to thus assert themselves, there were also literary prototypes that may have influenced them. Mihoko Suzuki suggests the character Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, who effectively petitions a magistrate for clemency for her brother.16 But there is a long literary tradition of women arguing their own cases in court that also likely provided models for women writers of both nonfiction and fiction in the seventeenth century. An early example is the story of Bernabo’s wife, a novella Christine reworked from Boccaccio’s Decameron (II.9) in her Livre de la cité des dames. Based on fraudulent evidence, Bernabo had come to a hasty conclusion that his wife was unfaithful and had ordered a servant to kill her. She, however, presents her case in a court like proceeding before a magistrate in which she acts in disguise as her own attorney, disproving the evidence that had earlier convicted her in her husband’s eyes. In Christine’s version the slandered wife displays considerable forensic skills (more so than in Boccaccio’s version), requesting the magistrate to rule “according to the merits of the case,” and confronting the husband directly for so gullibly accepting false evidence: “You deserve to die for not having sufficient proof!”17 Thus, like Wentworth, Bernabo’s wife redefines the question of guilt and innocence, arguing that it is the husband—not she—who has committed a mortal offense. Spanish writer María de Zayas picked up this tale and elaborated it considerably in her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) as “El Juez de su causa” (“The Judge of Her Own Case”) where the maligned woman ends up serving in disguise as judge in the trial of her accuser. This story was available in English translation in 1665, although the author’s name was deleted in the process.18 Three of the novellas— no. 15, no. 21, and no. 61—in French writer Marguerite de Navarre’s L’Heptaméron (1549), translated into English first in 1597 and again in 1654, feature women acting as their own defense attorneys, as if in a court of law, arguing with casuistical reasoning similar to Wentworth’s that the crimes they are accused of are not really sins and/or that they were justified in their commission. In novella no. 15, a woman, long ignored by her philandering husband, takes a platonic lover in courtly love fashion. When the husband forbids her to see the lover, she bursts forth with a lengthy speech damning the double standard in sins: Why is what is regarded a major crime for a woman considered a minor peccadillo for a man? Confronting her husband, she protests, “Now, Monsieur, do you intend ... to take revenge on me for the very kind of thing of which you yourself have been guilty for years ...?”19 In novella no. 21, Rolandine argues her case before royal authority, contending that she and her bastard, penniless lover were morally justified in marrying outside the Church and in opposition to royal decree. In her defense she claims (in terms similar to Wentworth’s) that what she has done is not a sin: “If it were the case that I had sinned against God, the King, [the Queen], my parents and


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my own conscience, then indeed I would be obdurate not to weep tears of repentance” (248).20 A similar position is argued by the main character in novella no. 61, who has abandoned her husband and lived in an essentially bigamous but happy second alliance for 14 or 15 years. In defending herself, the woman claims that she had not sinned against God and that it would instead be a sin to take her away from her second “spouse” and return her to the first: “Let no one imagine that my way of life contradicts the will of God. ... [W]e live ... without either of us ever uttering a word of disagreement. ... And it would be a sin to make us part, for [he] is nearly eighty years old, while I am only forty-five, and he would not live too long without me!” (482).21 In all of these cases, the characters challenge misogynist laws, norms, and assumptions by arguing for a reconception of morality that is less prejudicial to women, calling, in short, for redefinitions of sin, guilt, and innocence. The fictional defense-narrative was picked up by Cavendish in “The Contract,” a novella in Natures Pictures (1656), a work in the framed-novelle genre that was modeled on the Heptaméron, as well as in all probability on Christine’s Livre de la cité des dames (a copy of which, as noted, she owned). Cavendish relies on her French models in having her protagonist argue her case in court, but while the issue remains that of a woman’s right to choose her husband (in defiance of convention), Cavendish poses the conflict as between a young woman and her guardian, thus anticipating the English female bildungsroman, such as Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), by over a century. The story presents a complex casuistical plot, revolving around the issue of which of two marriages a bigamous duke has contracted is valid; it ends with a court hearing where his first wife, Delitia, successfully argues that her marriage to him is valid. Delitia had been contracted in marriage to him at the age of seven but had lost touch with him until as adults they fall in love, although he has by then wed another. An uncle-guardian wants her to marry an older, wealthier man, but in conversations with the uncle Delitia resists the idea of “traffick[ing] for a Husband.”22 The uncle warns her “not to use Rhetorick against your self, and overthrow a good Fortune” (197). In a court hearing over the validity of the marriages, Delitia argues that the original marriage is valid, urging the judges to “cast aside your Canon Law ... and judge it by the Common Law” (210). Canon law generally favored marriages made with free consent of the parties and opposed the arranged marriage of minors. Canon law would thus hold the duke’s second marriage (and not the first, to Delitia) valid. The judges rule in her favor. By means, therefore, of clever casuistical subtleties, Cavendish’s protagonist presents her side of the story, ironically “choosing” a contracted marriage but in the process critiquing the practice of marriage “trafficking.” While Cavendish’s novella is clearly a fiction, The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse (1662), written several years later, is ostensibly a nonfictional life-history. But, like The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, which was published the following year, and several succeeding narratives, it is one that is infused with fictional or fictionlike components, such as novella-like trickster tales and numerous allusions to fictional antecedents, particularly the antiromance. At the same time, there is documentary evidence to suggest that at least some of the narrative may be factually true.

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For example, there is an extant 1621 trial record of “Mary Markham, alias Frith, alias Thrift, alias ‘Malcutpurse’” in which the defendant sounds much like the author of The Life and Death.23 Nevertheless, it is clear that the author, who acknowledges being “well-versed in Tale-Books and Romances,”24 saw herself in terms of various fictional predecessors. In her opening remarks, Frith states she followed the “laudable example” of fictional figures such as “Seignior Gusman, and the Spanish Tribe of Cheaters” (17)—an allusion to Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, translated into English in 1622), which concerned a trickster con artist, characteristic of the rogue picaresque tradition. At the same time she is rebelling against the stereotypical female roles in the romance: “I was no Lady Errant [n]or this story a Romance” (25). She imagines herself instead as Sancho Panza, a character in Don Quixote: “In my own thoughts ... I was Squiresse to Dulcinea of Tobosso the most incomparably beloved Lady of Don Quixot, and was sent of a message to him from my Mistress in the Formalities of Knight Errantry” (37). On another occasion she refers to an “Imp” she hired to carry out an exploit as “my Sancho Panza” (30). The introduction, ostensibly written by a critical third party, similarly highlights Frith’s relationship to fictional traditions: “nothing appertaining to her ... [can] be matcht throughout the whole Course of History or Romance,” for she went “farre beyond ... the ... band of Knight Errantry” (4). Indeed, her “heroick impudence hath quite undone every Romance” (13). It would seem therefore that fictional models helped Mary Frith to shape her conception of herself and her life-history. That story is one of defiant resistance to conventional norms, acknowledgment of which compelled her write a “Defence and Apology” (17), she says. Hardly apologetic, Frith’s tone throughout is cocky and prideful—itself a reflection of her determination not to be “beholden to any Stale-Artifice whatsoever of any Woman preceding me” (18). The introduction stresses that she had a “boysterous and masculine spirit” (9) and was “a libertine” (11). While Frith herself does not use these terms, she does (pridefully) admit to cross-dressing and engaging in unfeminine habits such as smoking tobacco: “no Woman before me ever smoakt any” (23). Frith’s story is that she was a pickpocket, indeed, the leader of a gang of pickpockets who specialized in stealing items which they held for ransom. She justifies her occupation in casuistical terms, believing “that it was no deceit, to deceive the Deceivers” (25), following the by-then familiar casuistical logic that it is no sin to sin against a sinner. And, as with many other authors of defense-narratives, Frith successfully defends herself in a court hearing, in her case by having an accomplice steal the evidence. Frith’s contribution to the women’s defense-narrative is therefore twofold. She infuses it with fictional elements derived from the antiromance tradition, thus inviting a satirical reading, and she was the first to use her life-history as a defense-narrative. She thus provided the model picked up by her successors, including, eventually, Defoe. The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663), which has been designated as part of “a missing chapter in the history of the English novel,”25 is like Frith’s an autobiographical defense. The author, Mary Carleton, was a somewhat notorious figure tried for bigamy and later executed as a thief, about whom circulated a series of narratives that debated her


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guilt or innocence. She maintains her innocence in The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, arguing in the process that the feme covert laws, which deprived wives of legal standing and ownership of property, were unjust. The narrative includes a purported transcript of her trial in which she acts as her own defense attorney against a charge of bigamy. Like the other women writers of the defense-narrative, Carleton claims she is writing for self “vindication”26 and to counter the “diligent ... slanders of my accusers, who by lewd and most false suggestions have precluded all ways to my justification and defence” (3). Having heretofore “suffer[ed] those calumnies to pass unrefuted” (3), she now feels compelled to lay out her defense in writing: “I will tell the world the naked truth” (5). Like Frith, Carleton carves her defense by recounting her life story: she was born in Germany, orphaned at age three, and placed in a nunnery, which she soon tired of (“I was as it were buried as soon as I was born” [14]). Indeed, she wishes she were “(what my inclinations prompted me to) a man, and exempt from that tedious life ... because it was altogether passive and sedentary” (16). Using language that echoes the introduction to Mary Frith, she admits to a “Libertine spirit” (17) and to having “Masculine” ambitions (19), which prompt her to leave the convent for the wider world. Soon after, she acquires an English governess from whom she learns English and various other languages (21–4). After arriving in England, she engages in a duplicitous courtship with John Carleton. When he discovers after their marriage that she doesn’t have the fortune he’d assumed, he has her arrested (having in the meantime received a letter charging her with fraud and bigamy). She is imprisoned and brought to trial, in which she competently defends herself, winning acquittal from the jury by discrediting prosecution witnesses. There has been considerable debate over whether Carleton’s narrative is fiction or nonfiction. In her preface Carleton refers to her life as a series of novellas, asking her readers to “cast a favorable eye upon these Novels of my life, not much unlike those of Boccace, but that they are more serious and tragical” (A4v). (The term novel with the accent on the second syllable was used at the time to mean novella, which then meant a tale or short story.) At the very least, then, Carleton consciously constructed her life-story in terms of a received literary format—the framed-novelle (a collection of framed novellas, a form used by Christine, Marguerite de Navarre, Zayas, and Cavendish, among others). In addition, Carleton, like Frith, displays a knowledge of other fictional traditions; she acknowledges reading romances (23) and compares herself satirically to romance heroines: “I might as well have given lustre to a Romance as any ... of those supposed Heroina’s” (33). She also uses the term “Lady Errant” (34)—a female version of “knight errant”—somewhat differently than Frith, to refer to powerful, adventurous women (like herself) who travel widely. She alludes as well to the Spanish picaresque tradition, when she predicts her husband will continue the “second part of the Gusmanstory, against he shall knight-errant it abroad” (122). Here she is equating her husband with the charlatan trickster character Guzmán, whom Frith saw as a model. Like other women writers of the defense-narrative, Carleton often uses casuistry to argue her case. In relating her amusingly deceitful courtship (where both she and her suitor are pretending to wealth and status that neither has), Carleton argues that “to deceive the deceiver is no deceit" (38), which she claims is "a received principle of

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Justice” (38). In fact, it was a received principle in casuistry, one that was analyzed in the Athenian Mercury (a popular penny weekly); used, as we have seen, by Frith; and picked up by Defoe in Moll Flanders, one episode of which, as G.A. Starr notes, is “built around a case of conscience ... namely, the question of whether it is legitimate to deceive a deceiver.”27 Carleton seems, therefore, like Frith, to have constructed her life-history in part based on received literary prototypes. This doesn’t mean her story is a complete fiction. It may well be that the basic outline is historically accurate. However, it does suggest that writers used literary models to identify aspects of their story and that in this way fictional models came to shape nonfictional narratives. Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated (1680) is another work that, while clearly a nonfictional record of her arrest for treason and subsequent trial, is infused with fictional allusions that further suggest how writers were using fictional models to shape their selfidentities, relationships, and behavior. Cellier, a midwife married to a Frenchman, was arrested based on forged papers found in her home that purported to show a Whig conspiracy behind the so-called “Popish Plot,” an earlier Catholic plot to depose the king. Thomas Dangerfield, who had planted the papers, later turned informer, saying Catholics had “paid him to forge” the material,28 thus implicating Cellier, who was a Catholic and active in Catholic political activity. Cellier was arrested 28 October 1679, at the time the forged papers were discovered. She spent several months in prison awaiting trial in which she acted as her own defense attorney, finally winning acquittal on 11 June 1680. In the trial Cellier defends herself primarily by unmasking Dangerfield (whom she renames Willoughby in Malice Defeated) as a fraud. She does so by providing witnesses who attest to her innocence and records that show Dangerfield to have a history of criminal activity. She wrote Malice Defeated shortly thereafter to tell her side of the story; it includes a purported transcript of the trial, An Abstract of the Tryal of Elizabeth Cellier. She also wrote a parody of Dangerfield’s own autobiographical narrative, Don Tomazo (1680), entitled The Matchless Rogue (1680), which places him in the trickster rogue tradition. Malice Defeated includes numerous literary allusions, particularly to the romance tradition (treated satirically) and to Don Quixote. In explaining why she acted as her own attorney, she states, “I was forc’d to defend my Life, both against the Knights and the Dragon, for in this unequal Combate there was no St. George to defend me”29—a transparent reference to the romance literary tradition. When Willoughby came to visit her in her prison cell, he “peep’d through it like Don Quicksot through his Helmet, when he was mounted upon Rosinant and going to encounter with the Windmil” (13). Later when Sir William Waller tries to get her to confess, she rebuffs him, saying, “I am not such a Distressed Damosel to use your service. ... [I]t is not in your power to fetch me out of this inchanted Castle (27). On another occasion Cellier requests that a third person be present during Waller’s interrogation, “for ... I durst not trust my self with such a Doughty Knight ... lest he should make Romances of me” (33). It is clear that Cellier is using the romance allusions to suggest that the charges against her are fiction. In her first court appearance, for example, she says, “I was


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examined before His Majesty and the Lords of the Councel, where the Fable of the Husband-Man, and the Starved Snake, was proved a Truth; for Willoughby accused me of all the Forged Stories he tells in his Lying Narrative; and I unfeignedly told the Truth” (18). But Cellier also understands the transformative power of fiction. When she rebuffs Willoughby’s attempt to bribe her to confess, she says, “Stone Walls and Iron Bars, do not make a Prison; but a Guilty Conscience” (19)—an allusion to Richard Lovelace’s 1642 poem “To Althea, From Prison.” In further asserting that she would far rather remain in prison than “Lie my self to Liberty,” she claims, “I am a Prisoner for Truth sake, and that cause, and the joy I have to suffer for it, makes this Dirty, Smoaky Hole to me a palace, adorned with all the Ornaments Imagination can think upon” (26). Like others in the women’s defense-narrative tradition, Cellier is sensitive to the fact that she is transgressing gender roles, as seen in the St. George comment cited above. In a lengthier discussion, she further defends her allegedly “masculine” behavior in explaining why she was drawn to political activity: I was left to study, manage, and to support my self. ... Thus have I laid open the Truth of my Case. ... As to my own Sex, ... though it may be thought too Masculine, yet was the effects of my Loyal ... Zeal. ... And in all my defence, none can truly say but that I preserv’d the Modesty, though not the Timorousness common to my Sex. And I believe there is none, but had they been in my Station, would ... have acted like me; for it is more our business than men’s to fear, and consequently to prevent the Tumults and Troubles Factions tend to, since we by nature are hindered from sharing any part but the Frights and Disturbances of them. (32)

Her point is that as women have no political power and can experience “Tumults and Troubles” only reactively by their frightful and disturbing results, it is in women’s interest to prevent such conflict, even if they have to violate cultural norms in order to do so. Frith’s and Cellier’s (and to a lesser extent Carleton’s) explicit rejection of the romance is consistent with an already well-developed position in women’s writing; however, their critique is more pointed than seen heretofore. As early as the women troubadours of the thirteenth century, women writers had repudiated aspects of the courtly love tradition. In seventeenth-century England, Cavendish was perhaps the most explicit in expressing strong dislike of the genre, having all romances thrown out of her canonical library in an allegorical sketch in Natures Pictures. In her 1671 preface to the second edition of that work, Cavendish explains, “I would not be thought to delight in Romances, having never read a whole one in my life; and if I did believe that these Tales ... could create Amorous thoughts in idle brains, as Romances do, I would never suffer them to be printed.”30 Cavendish is imagining what later became termed the “female Quixote,” a woman who imbibes romances to the point where she (like the prototype Don Quixote) begins seeing the world in their terms. The best-known examples of this satirical genre are Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752) and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), one of the first American novels.

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By rejecting the (passive) roles women (damsels) played in the traditional romance more directly than the writers in the female quixote tradition (who used satire to indirectly criticize its vapid heroines), Frith, Cellier, and, to a lesser extent, Carleton therefore advanced the antiromance tradition in women’s literature seen in later writers such as Delariver Manley, Jane Barker, Sarah Fielding, and others.31 Frith’s is, however, the only narrative I am aware of where the woman character adopts the male roles of the antiromance. A counter tradition to the women’s defense-narrative tradition arose in the form of satires written by men which debunked the women writers’ and characters’ claims of innocence. The women petitioners of Parliament were subjected to satire and ridicule in the form of “parodic petitions,” which stigmatized them as “illegitimate and marginal.” Such negative attention paradoxically succeeded in reinforcing the “collective identity”32 of women as a protesting political group, Suzuki notes, in part because they often included reprints of the women’s petitions, which gave them wider circulation.33 Similarly, Mary Carleton was subjected to satirical treatment in a number of works, beginning shortly after her imprisonment with two pamphlets: The Man in the Moon, Discovering a World of Knavery (1663) and The Lawyers Clerk Trappan’d by the Crafty Whore of Canterbury (1663). Several further lampoons followed,34 and her husband John Carleton published his side of the story (which debunked hers) in Ultimum Vale ... Being a True Description of the Passages of that Grand Imposter, Late a Pretended Germane-Lady (1663). Likewise was Cellier subjected to a number of satirical critiques, in some of which she was accused of being a “lady errant,” which by this time had come to mean a transgressive woman. And she was, perhaps inevitably, compared to Mary Carleton.35 In his satirical pamphlet, Answer to a Certain Scandalous Lying Pamphlet. Entitled Malice Defeated, Or the Deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier (1680), Thomas Dangerfield ridiculed Cellier’s rhetoric as “Female Tittle Tattle,” deriding it as “Gossiping [which] is so much the soul of Midwifery.”36 As Suzuki notes, “In recounting [a] fabricated tale of ... serial marriages and extramarital affairs, Dangerfield renders Cellier a female picaro, on the order of Mary Carleton and Moll Flanders.”37 In retaliation Cellier wrote The Matchless Rogue, which satirizes his life-history in turn. Defoe adapted the women writers’ defense-narrative in Moll Flanders and Roxana. Both protagonists bear considerable resemblance to Carleton, Frith, and Cellier—as constructed by her critics—and Rivella, the protagonist of Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella (1714), another novelesque life-history in the defense-narrative tradition (though space precludes further discussion of it here). All are victims of circumstance, all are touched by scandal, and all manage to survive by engaging in questionable moral behavior (at least as construed by their enemies). Indeed, Roxana at one point acknowledges her resemblance to Mary Carleton, noting “I might as well have been the German Princess.”38 And Moll Flanders, in a series of episodes where she is operating as a pickpocket, remarks “I grew as impudent a thief, and as dexterous as ever Moll Cutpurse was.”39


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Where the women authors of defense-narratives present themselves as innocent, however, Defoe’s sharply satirical presentation suggests that his protagonists are not only guilty of various crimes but are also egregiously self-deceiving hypocrites. He thus carries on the satirical tradition established in the parodies of the Parliament petitions and in the writings of John Carleton, Dangerfield, and other critics of Mary Carleton and Cellier. Like Boccaccio, who undercuts the feminist declamation of Bernabo’s wife by juxtaposing it against a tale with a misogynist message (II.10), Defoe undercuts his characters’ often feminist assertions through his ironical frame. For example, Roxana articulates one of the strongest feminist defenses in early modern literature in her denunciation of the slavelike status of the wife, choosing herself to remain a whore, and thus retaining her independence. “The very Nature of the Marriage-Contract was,” she said, “in short, nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing to the Man, and the Woman was indeed ... a Slave” (148). Yet the statement is ironized both by the context—Roxana soon repents of the vanity and “ambitious Mind” (161) that led her to such an opinion—and by her character, which is, like Moll Flanders’, that of an unmitigated reprobate. Thus, as Starr notes, one can easily construe Defoe's heroines’ use of casuistry (seen extensively in these novels) as serving “to confirm rather than qualify their guilt”40—unlike in the defense-narratives by women. The ironical context (derived albeit from the satirical predecessors noted above) is therefore Defoe’s addition to the genre; it is clearly not present in any of the defense-narratives written by women. Defoe’s negative treatment of the women’s defense-narrative unfortunately won the day, for women’s writing in England with few exceptions lapsed for several decades into the sentimentalist “heroine’s text,”41 which focused on the trials and tribulations of woman seen as victim rather than on the escapades of woman as defiant rebel. One might speculate as to why one of the first assertions of literary agency by women was thus subverted and superceded by its satirical inversion. Certainly, antifeminist political and ideological currents were at play. However one chooses to interpret these transitions, it is nevertheless important that future literary historians take into account the critical modeling role played by the women’s defense-narrative in the formation of the early English novel and for historians of women’s literature to be aware of submerged traditions such as the defense-narrative in their reconstruction of women’s literary genealogies.

Notes 1

2

The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford, ed. Vita Sackville-West (London: W. Heinemann, 1923), p. 23. Emphasis added. Lady Clifford’s husband had prevented her from returning to London, as she wished, from their country estate by ordering her retinue to leave without her. Ernest Bernbaum is the main theorist to emphasize the importance of the Carleton material to the formation of the novel. See The Mary Carleton Narratives, 1663–1673: A Missing Chapter in the History of the English Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1914). Ian Watt

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3

4 5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England considered the dean of authorities on the “rise of the novel,” acknowledges the Carleton influence on Defoe in a footnote (“the closest seventeenth-century analogue to Moll Flanders” is Mary Carleton [p. 101, n. 1]) but neglects other representatives of the “defense-narrative” tradition, such as Elizabeth Cellier and Mary Frith. See The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: U of California P, 1957). Similarly, Michael McKeon only briefly mentions Mary Carleton (under “criminal biographies” [pp. 99–100]), and neglects Frith and Cellier. See The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987). Cristina Malcolmson, “Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies in Early Modern England,” Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700, ed. Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 15–25. Elspeth Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self,” Women and Literature in Britain, 1500– 1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 209–33, esp. p. 212. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, introduction, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Graham et al (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–27, esp. p. 16. A Vindication of Anne Wentworth, Tending To the better preparing of all people for Her Larger Testimony, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, series 2, part 1, vol. 2, comp. Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 1. Further references follow parenthetically in the text. See chapter titled “Circumstances Alter Cases: Women, Casuistry, and the Novel” in Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 59–78. A true Account of Anne Wentworths Being cruelly, unjustly, and unchristianly dealt with by some of those people called Anabaptists, The Early Modern Englishwoman, p. 18, p. 5. Anna Trapnel, Report and Plea, Her Own Life, pp. 71–86, esp. p. 71. Further references follow parenthetically in the text. Listed in “Appendix 6: Women Writers of the English Renaissance: A Chronology of Texts and Contexts,” comp. Eric Sterling, “The Muses Females Are”: Martha Moulesworth and Other Women Writers of the Renaissance, ed. Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1995), pp. 281–307. Excerpts included in Her Own Life. Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, The Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 25. As cited in Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, p. 147. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 91. Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982), pp. 182–3. The French original reads: “justement selon le cas” and “Vous estes digne de mort; car vous n’aviez mie preuve soubffisant.” See The “Livre de la cité des dames” of Christine de Pisan, ed. Maureen C. Curnow, vol. 3 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1975), pp. 920–21. Paul Scarron included several Zayas novellas in his Roman Comique, part 2 (1657), and Nouvelles tragi-comiques (1655–57). “El Juez de su causa” was then translated into English from the French as “The Judge of Her Own Case” by John Davies in Scarron’s Novels in 1665.


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19 Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. and ed. P.A. Chilton (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 196. The French reads: “Et vous, monsieur ... vouldriez-vous prendre vengeance d’un oeuvre, dont si, long temps a, vous m’avez donné exemple ... ?” In L’Heptaméron, ed. M. François (Paris: Garnier, 1991), p. 123. Further references to the English translation follow parenthetically in the text. 20 “Quant je aurois offensé Dieu, le Roy [la Reyne], mes parens et ma conscience, je serois bien obstinée si, de grande repentance, je ne pleurois” (L’Heptaméron 170). 21 “Et, s’il ne fault point que l’on pense que je vive contre la volunté de Dieu, car ... [nous] vivons ... sans que jamais entre nous deux y eut eu parolle ... Et, qui nous separera fera grand peché, car le bon homme, qui a bien près de quatre vingtz ans, ne vivra pas longuement sans moy, qui en ay quarante cinq” (L’Heptaméron 375). 22 Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures (London, 1656), p. 189. Further references follow parenthetically in the text. 23 Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing, introduction, Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse; The Case of Mary Carleton, ed. Todd and Spearing (New York: New York UP, 1994), pp. vii–liii, esp. pp. x–xi, pp. xviii–xix. See also Appendix I, pp. 157–60. 24 Mary Frith, The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse, Counterfeit Ladies, pp. 1–73, esp. p. 70. Further references follow parenthetically in the text. 25 By Ernest Bernbaum. See n. 2. 26 Mary Carleton, The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, Lately Stiled the German Princess (London, 1663), A2r, pp. 1–2. Further references follow parenthetically in the text. 27 G.A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971), p. 128. 28 Anne Barbeau Gardiner, introduction, “Malice Defeated” and “The Matchless Rogue,” by Elizabeth Cellier (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1988), pp. iii–xiv, esp. p. iv. 29 Cellier, Malice Defeated: Or a Brief Relation of the Accusation and Deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier, “Malice Defeated” and “The Matchless Rogue,” (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1988), p. 42. Further references follow parenthetically in the text. 30 Cavendish, preface, Natures Picture [sic], 2nd ed. (London, 1671), B2v. 31 For more on this anti-romance tradition, see Donovan, pp. 113–27. Cellier may in fact have known and directly influenced Jane Barker, the author of A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), one of the earliest protonovels by a woman and one that continues the defensenarrative tradition (though space prohibits further discussion of it here). Cellier is thought to have joined other Catholic exiles at the Court of St.-Germain in France where Barker spent the years 1689–1704 with the Stuart court in exile. The similarly caustic wit seen in both their protagonists might suggest such an influence. 32 Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, p. 154, p. 17, and p. 152. 33 Ibid., p. 154. 34 C.F. Main, “The German Princess; or Mary Carleton in Fact and Fiction,” Harvard Library Bulletin 10.2 (1956): 166–85, esp. pp. 181–5. 35 See Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), pp. 187–8. Thanks to the editors for bringing this study to my attention. 36 As cited in Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, p. 259. 37 Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, p. 260. 38 Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, ed. Jane Jack (New York: Oxford UP, 1964), p. 271. Further references follow parenthetically in the text.

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39 Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 190. 40 Starr, p. 186. 41 So labeled by Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia UP, 1980).

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Index Acheson, Kathleen Osler 76n3, 77n8, 78n9, 79n20 Akkerman, Nadine 31n17 Alexander, Meena 30n1 Anglicanism 83, 116, 118, 121 Anselment, Raymond A. 42–3 antiromances 170, 173, 178, 181n31; see also romances Appelbaum, Robert 60n10 Ascham, Margaret 105 Ashley, Kathleen 118, 130n35 Austen, Jane 23–4 Bachelard, Gaston 78n15 Bacon, Francis 56 Baker, Elizabeth 35–8 Barker, Francis 79n25 Barker, Jane 178, 181n31 Battigelli, Anna 150n28 Baumfylde, Mary 54, 58, 63n52 Baxter, Richard 36–8 Beal, Peter 61n13, 128n8 Beaumont, Agnes 38–9, 42 Beilin, Elaine V. 112n15, 128n3, 129n16 Bennett, Judith M. 167n31 Benstock, Shari 3, 11n5, 30n2 Berger, Harry 79n25 Bernbaum, Ernest 179n2, 181n25 Bewley, Mary 36, 40 Bible, Ann Vollmann 62n31 Blodgett, Harriet 12n9 Boccaccio, Giovanni 172, 179 body, see female body Boland, Eavan 30n1 Book of Common Prayer 83, 91, 118–27, 129n23, 129n25, 130n30 Books of Hours 118, 125–6 books of secrets, medieval 50

Booty, John E. 120–22, 129n25 Booy, David 11n2, 12n15 Bottrall, Margaret 94n4 Boyle, Robert 56, 153, 162 Breton, Nicholas 157 Brown, Cedric C. 149n17 Brown, Sylvia 119, 128n3, 128n4, 128n7, 129n10, 129n11, 130n26, 130n27, 130n32, 130n38, 130n39 Burke, Victoria 124, 128n6, 128n7, 130n38 Burney, Fanny 173 Burton, Robert 19 Bury, Elizabeth 34, 40 Butler, Judith 30n4 Camden, Vera 38–9 Carberry, Mary 42 Carleton, John 178–9 Carleton, Mary 169–70, 173–9, 179n2 Carlton, William 47n17 Carlyon, Mrs. 53, 56–8, 62n29 Carrell, Jennifer Lee 166n23 cases of conscience 8, 84–94, 95n15, 176; see also casuistry Casey, Edward S. 78n15 casuistry 84–5, 171–6, 179; see also cases of conscience Catholicism 117–18, 126, 176, 181n31 Caton, Mary Anne 61n22 Cavendish, Margaret 5, 9–10, 26–9, 111n7, 131–68, 170, 173, 175, 177 The Blazing World 154, 163 and drama 26, 132–4, 136–7, 144, 166n21

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and housewifery 151–65, 165n7, 168n41 and letter-writing 27–8, 137–9 Life of William Cavendish 131, 147, 148n2, 166n19, 168n39 Natures Pictures 136–7, 143–6, 157, 173, 177 Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy 142–3, 163 and patterns of connection and separation 131–50 Poems and Fancies 26–7, 133–4, 158–60, 163, 166n25, 168n41 and prefaces 111n7, 132–7, 143–5, 152, 158–9, 177 and romances 151–60, 166n23, 177 and science 134, 142–6, 152–3, 160– 65 Sociable Letters 27–8, 153–6, 166n14, 166n25 A True Relation 131, 135, 141, 144– 7, 148n2, 157 The World’s Olio 131 Cavendish, William 131–3, 136–41, 143, 146–8, 148n2, 149n11, 155, 166n19, 167n39 “Love’s Muster” 139–40 “The Savinge Love” 141 Cellier, Elizabeth 170, 176–9, 180n2, 181n31 Malice Defeated 176 The Matchless Rogue 176, 178 Cervantes, Miguel de 170, 174, 176–7 Chalmers, Hero 151, 159, 167n39 Chapman, Alison 122, 130n31 Charles I 85, 87–90, 140 Charles II 88, 147, 149n11 Chew, Elizabeth 77n4, 78n8, 79n18 Christine de Pisan 170, 172–3, 175 Cicero 4, 97 Civil Wars 5, 81–90, 93, 119–20, 136–7, 157, 167n33, 171–2 Clarke, Elizabeth 12n9, 40, 45, 46n4 Clifford, Anne 8, 65–80, 169–70, 179n1 and ancestral history 68–73, 77n4

compared with Samuel Pepys 73–5, 79n23 and diary writing 65–76 and family motto 72 and legal battles 66–8, 73, 169–70 Clucas, Stephen 165n3 Coleman, Linda S. 11n5 Colie, Rosalie 4, 22, 32n26 collaborative writing 50, 54–6, 59, 133, 136–7, 147 Collins, An 171 commonplace books 42, 50–51, 54, 61n13, 61n14 Conrad, Joseph 110n1 conversion narratives 34 cookbooks, see recipe books coteries, see collaborative writing Cottegnies, Line 165n3 Couper, Samuel 84, 91, 95n6 coverture 67, 73, 175; see also inheritance Cowley, Abraham 85, 90, 161 The Guardian 85, 90 “To the Royal Society” 161 Craig, Martha J. 128n3 Crane, Mary Thomas 156 Cranmer, Thomas 122 Crawford, Julie 136, 149n10 Crawford, Patricia 165n6 Cressy, David 11n4 Cromwell, Oliver 87 culinary arts, see recipe books; see also housewifery Cullen, Patrick Colborn 112n18 Dangerfield, Thomas 176, 178–9 Dante 97 Dawson, Jane 53, 62n32 Daybell, James 11n3, 31n17 Dear, Peter 152–3, 161 defense narratives 8, 10, 169–82 defenses of women 99–103, 107, 109–10 Defoe, Daniel 169–70, 174–6, 178–9, 180n2 Moll Flanders 170, 176, 178–9, 180n2 Roxana 170, 178–9

Index Delaval, Elizabeth Livingstone 41 Denny, Edward 155–6 Depas-Orange, Ann 32n29 Dering, Edward 61n14 Derrida, Jacques 78n12, 97 diaries 3, 8, 40, 50, 65–76, 77n4, 80n26; see also entries for Clifford, d’Ewes, and Pepys Dolan, Frances E. 129n10, 181n35 domestic papers 7, 33–46 domesticity, see housewifery Donker, Marjorie 12n16 Donovan, Josephine 171, 181n31 Dowriche, Anne 108 Dragstra, Henk 12n12, 12n13, 12n14, 31n6, 59n4 drama, see plays Ducke, Margaret 35–6 Duff, David 32n26 Dunn, Kevin 110n1 Dunton, Elizabeth 35, 40 Eamon, William 60n8, 63n49 Education of children 35–6; see also mothers’ manuals of servants 36 of women 51–2, 61n16, 106–7, 109 Edward II 66 Edward III 65, 73 Edward VI 120 Elizabeth I 41 Elizabeth of Bohemia 31n17 empiricism, see scientific experimentation epistolarity 98, 102–3; see also letters Erasmus, Desiderius 115 Erickson, Amy Louise 80n29, 130n36 Evelyn, Mary 153 d’Ewes, Simonds 79n21 experimentation, see scientific experimentation Ezell, Margaret J.M. 11n1, 46n1, 47n11, 47n21, 93, 117, 148n7 Fane, Mary 55 Fanshawe, Ann 34–5

207 female body 49, 51–4, 57–9 feme covert, see coverture Ferguson, Margaret W. 11n1 Ferguson, Moira 109 Feroli, Theresa 128n3 Fielding, Sarah 178 Fitzmaurice, James 149n15, 166n14, 166n19 Fletcher, John 81, 86, 90 The Humorous Lieutenant 81, 90 Philaster 90 food, see recipe books Forme of Cury 50 Foucault, Michel 96n39 Fowler, Alastair 32n26 Freke, Elizabeth 42–5 Frith, Mary 170, 173–8, 180n2 funeral sermons 33–6, 40–41, 43, 45–6 Gallagher, Catherine 110n1, 164, 166n20 Gardiner, Anne Barbeau 181n28 Gardiner, Judith Kegan 148n2, 148n5 Geertz, Clifford 55 Gillespie, Katharine 60n6 Glyde, Anne 42–5 Goody, Jack 130n36 Goulding, Richard W. 149n12 Graham, Elspeth 3, 11n2, 12n13, 34, 41, 150n26, 170 Grant, Douglas 149n12, 149n14, 149n15 Grantham, James 79n25 Granville, Ann 57 Granville, Mary 55–7, 62n40 Green, Ian 129n17 de Grey, Thomas 120 Gristwood, Sarah 31n9 Gunter, Mary 35 Gusdorf, Georges 2–3, 12n9, 154, 164 Halkett, Anne 5, 8, 35, 41, 81–96 and Bampfield, Joseph 81–3, 88–93, 95n6 devotional writings of 83–4, 88, 93– 4 and Halkett, James 81–2, 89–92, 94 and Howard, Thomas 81, 85–8, 93

208


and self-examination 83–6, 93 Hall, Kim 60n10 Hamlin, Hannibal 129n16 handwriting 18–19, 31n11, 33–4, 36–7, 54–7 Harkness, Deborah E. 168n48 Harley, Brilliana 57 Harper, Thomas 120, 130n30 Harries, Elizabeth W. 110n1 Hass, Lorna S. 60n9 Havens, Earle 61n14 Heale, Elizabeth 31n6, 32n25 Henrietta Maria 53, 56, 87, 136–8, 140– 41 Herbert, William 20–21 Heywood, Thomas 120 Hinds, Hilary 11n2, 34, 150n26, 170 historical formalism 6 historical writing 65–76, 77n4, 77n8, 125–6, 147 Hobbes, Thomas 143 Hobby, Elaine 11n2, 34, 60n11, 150n26, 170 Hoby, Margaret 78n13, 80n27 Hodgkin, Katharine 48n31, 79n17 Holmes, Walter 130n30 Hooke, Robert 40, 153, 162 Hopkins, John 119 housewifery 10, 35–8, 50–54, 57–8, 151–65, 165n7, 167n28, 168n41, 168n48 Howard, Jean E. 13n17 Hull, Suzanne 11n4 humanism 23, 50–51, 61n13, 115 humility topos 98, 101, 103, 107–8, 167n39 humoral body, see female body Hunter, Lynette 53, 56, 60n11, 63n41, 63n42 Hutchinson, Lucy 34 inheritance 66–76, 80n29, 125–8, 130n36 James I 18, 43, 67, 79n20, 115, 120 James II (Duke of York) 81–2, 88, 90 Jameson, Fredric 6

Jardine, Lisa 130n36 Jelinek, Estelle 94n1 Jocelin, Elizabeth 115–16, 124, 126–7 Johnson, Barbara 97 Jones, Ann Rosalind 155 Jones, Katherine 56, 58 Jonson, Ben 20, 140 Love’s Welcome 140 “A Sonnet to the Noble Lady, the Lady Mary Wroth” 20 Kadar, Marlene 3 Kay, Jackie 15–17, 25, 29–30 “African Masks: Three, Rubber Girl” 29 “Clay=Freedom” 29–30 “Mid Life Mask” 16 “The Model” 15–16, 25 Keeble, N.H. 82, 85, 88, 146 Keller, Eve 153 Korda, Natasha 156–7, 159 Kothe, Anamaria Harriette 110n5 Lamb, Mary Ellen 79n17, 100, 112n20 Lanham, Richard 13n16 Lanyer, Aemilia 101–4, 109 Larsen, Anne R. 98–9, 103, 110n1, 110n3, 110n4 Laudianism 118–20 Lefebvre, Henri 78n15 Leigh, Dorothy 115–16, 124, 126–7 Lennox, Charlotte 177 Lensink, Judy Nolte 12n9 Leong, Elaine 60n12, 61n13 Lesser, Zachary 120 letters 16–30; see also entries for Cavendish, Osborne, and Stuart Levellers 172 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 11n1, 19, 31n19, 79n17 Lewkenore, Dorothy 52–3 Ley, John 34, 36–7, 95n15 Locke, John 40 Loftis, John 82, 90–91, 94n1 Love, Harold 41, 62n40 Lovelace, Richard 177 Luckyj, Christina 32n24

Index McDonald, Russ 12n16 McGrath, Lynne 31n6 McKeon, Michael 180n2 Mack, Phyllis 47n8 Main, C.V. 181n34 Makin, Bathsua 41, 61n16 Malcolmson, Christina 180n3 Manley, Delarivier 170, 178 manuscripts 6–7, 11n1, 33–46, 49–59, 113n29 and collaboration 50, 54–6, 59 and editorial intervention 34, 38–9, 42–3 generic categorization of 39–42, 50– 54 and Halkett, Anne 8, 93 marginalia 56–7 and the public/private divide 39–43 and Richardson, Elizabeth 117, 119 and the space of the page 41–6 Marguerite de Navarre 172–3, 175 Markham, Gervase 158–9, 167n28 Marxism 13n24 Masten, Jeffrey 32n24 Mayer, Thomas F. 12n13, 12n14, 13n19 medical practice 51–3 and the female body 57–9 Galenic vs. Paracelsian 53, 62n27 memoirs 45, 69; see also entries for Fanshawe and Halkett Mendelson, Sara 40–41, 165n6 Mildmay, Grace 51–2, 55, 58, 62n40 Miller, Nancy K. 182n41 Milton, John 32n31 Moore, Elizabeth 34 Moss, Ann 61n14 mothers’ manuals 9, 50, 113n29, 115– 30; see also entries for Jocelin, Leigh, and Richardson generic hybridity of 116–28 justification for 115–16 popularity of 115–16, 127 and relationship to wills 126–8 Moulsworth, Martha 7, 17, 22–5, 28–9 Muldrow, George M. 12n16 Mullan, David George 11n3, 47n7 Mullinger, James 84

209 natural science, see science de Navarre, Marguerite, see Marguerite de Navarre novels compared with Halkett’s Memoirs 81 development of 5, 10, 169–82 Nussbaum, Felicity A. 13n23, 30n2, 30n4, 35, 95n10 Oliver, Kelly 73 Olney, James 2 O’Neill, John H. 79n25 Osborne, Dorothy 7, 17, 24–5, 27–9 Ottway, Sheila 11n3, 12n12, 12n13, 12n14, 31n6, 32n32, 45, 49–50, 59n4, 95n6 Packer, Katherine 53, 56–7 Palmer, E.P. 130n36 Parr, Susanna 171 Paster, Gail 49, 57–8 Peacham, Henry 12n16 Pearlman, E. 79n25 pedagogy 28 Pelling, Margaret 52, 61n24 Pender, Patricia 111n5 Pennell, Sara 42, 45, 60n12 Pepys, Samuel 73–5, 79n23, 79n25, 153 Perdita Project 48n29 Perkins, William 84, 92 physic, see medical practice picaresque 154, 174–5 Pickering, Thomas 84 piety, see spirituality de Pisan, Christine, see Christine de Pisan Plat, Hugh 159, 163, 167n28 plays 8, 81–3, 85–7, 90, 93–4, 132–7, 144 Plomer, H.R. 120 poetry as self expression 17, 20–30, 50 Pollock, Linda 52, 61n17 Poole, Kristen, 59n6, 128n2, 128n3 Porter, Roy 30n4 Potter, Lois 85, 87 de praesenti marriage 91 prayer, see spirituality

210


prayer books 101, 104, 112n15, 115–28; see also entries for Richardson and Wheathill prefaces 8–9, 83, 97–113, 132–7, 143–4, 158–9 as defenses of authorship 99–100 as defenses of women writers 100– 101 and epistolarity 98, 102–3 and the humility topos 98, 101, 103, 107–8 and language of inclusivity 103–5 and new conceptions of female authorship 108–10 and autobiography 105–10 varieties of 99 pregnancy, see female body Pressick, George 95n15 primogeniture 66–7, 73, 76; see also inheritance print culture 4–9, 11n1, 97–9, 103, 116– 17, 119–20, 126; see also manuscripts Protestant Reformation 5 Protestantism 1, 5, 9, 35, 111n15, 115– 30, 130n30, 172 Psalms 119, 129n16 Pudsey, Lettice 54–5, 57 Puttenham, George 12n16, 160 Quakers 35 Quintilian 4 Raoul, Valerie 12n9 Ratcliffe, Jane, 34–7 Raylor, Timothy 140 Rebhorn, Wayne 13n16 recipe books 5, 7, 10, 41–5, 49–59, 152 Rees, Emma L.E. 150n25, 150n28, 157 religion, see spirituality; see also entries for Anglicanism, Catholicism, Laudianism, Levellers, Protestant Reformation, Protestantism, and Quakers rhetorical manuals 4, 12n16, 97 Richard II 50 Richardson, Elizabeth 9, 115–30

and the Bible 118–19, 126 and the Book of Common Prayer 118–27 and Catholicism 117–18, 126 and personal devotion 123–5 and Protestantism 115–30 and publication history of the Legacie 117, 119–20, 130n30 Richardson, Samuel 18 Ricoeur, Paul 78n15 Rippl, Gabriele 81, 94n3 Riviere, Joan 30n4 Roberts, Josephine A. 32n20, 32n21 Roberts, Michele 30n1 Rogers, Timothy 40 romances 8, 10, 24, 41, 81–3, 85–7, 89– 90, 93–4, 100, 105–6, 151–60, 166n23, 170, 174–8 Rose, Mary Beth 2, 11n2, 11n5, 12n13, 13n21, 154, 165n4 Royal Society 56, 153, 161, 163 S.C., see Couper, Samuel St. John, Johanna 55–6, 62n40 Sanders, Eve Rachele 11n4, 31n14 Sanders, Julie 149n10 Sauer, Elizabeth 59n6 Sawday, Jonathan 49, 58 Schaffer, Simon 161 science 5, 9–10, 56, 134, 142–6, 152–3, 160–65; see also scientific experimentation scientific experimentation 5, 9–10, 56–7, 63n41, 152–3, 160–65 Scientific Revolution 57, 152, 164 Scott, Joan W. 5–6, 152, 161 Scott-Douglass, Amy 110n5, 111n6 Segar, Jane 41 Shakespeare, William 31n19, 172 Shapin, Steven 152–3, 161–3 Shaw, Dorothy 35 Shaw, Hester 171 Sherman, Stuart 78n14, 79n22 Sherman, William 61n14 shorthand 40–41, 47n19 Sidney, Philip 106 Smallwood, Frank T. 62n40

211

Index Smith, Katharine Capshaw 165n7 Smith, Nigel 4 Smith, Paul 95n10 Smith, Roger 59, 59n1 Smith, Sidonie 30n2, 95n10 sonnets 20–22, 25, 28–9 space of the home 51–2 and manuscript pages 41–6 of the preface 97–113 and relationship to time 65–76 and scientific experimentation 162–4 Spearing, Elizabeth 181n23 Speght, Rachel 99, 101–3, 105–7, 109, 112n24 Certain Quaeres to the Bayter of Women 107 Mortalities Memorandum 99, 102–3, 105–7 A Mouzell for Melastomus 101, 103, 106–7 Spence, Richard T. 70, 77n5, 77n6, 77n8, 78n9, 78n10 Spenser, Edmund 90 Spiller, Elizabeth 151 spirituality 9, 35–8, 41, 44, 50, 71, 80n27, 81–94, 101, 104, 112n15, 115–30 Sprat, Thomas 161 Spring, Eileen 130n36 Spufford, Margaret 11n4 Stallybrass, Peter 155 Starr, G.A. 176, 179 Stauffer, Donald 94n1 Steen, Sara Jayne 18, 31n11, 31n15, 31n18, Sternhold, Thomas 119 Stine, Jennifer 50, 52, 60n12, 62n29 Stone, Lawrence 91 Straznicky, Marta 149n10 Stuart, Arbella 7, 17–22, 25, 28–9, 31n19 Stuart, Elizabeth 115 Sutherland, James 94n1 Suzuki, Mihoko 77n8, 172, 178, 180n12 Swetnam, Joseph 106–7, 112n19

Targoff, Ramie 129n23, 130n31 Taylor, Charles 30n4 Teague, Frances 61n16 Tebeaux, Elizabeth 60n11 Temple, William 17, 24–5 temporality 65–76, 124–6, 134 Tenney, Tabitha 177 Thirsk, Joan 130n36 This is the Boke of Cokery 50 Thomas, Taylor 46n4 Thornton, Alice 171 time, see temporality Todd, Janet 181n23 Torshell, Samuel 95n15 tragicomedy 8, 81–3, 85–7, 90, 93–4 Trapnel, Anna 171 Travitsky, Betty S. 128n3 Turner, William 51, 61n17 Twysden, Isabella 78n13, 80n27 Tyler, Margaret 100–109, 111n13, 112n27 Underdown, David 129n10 Vaughan, Henry 16 Vavasour, Nicholas 120 Vickers, Brian 13n16 Vigoe, Bartholomew 51 Voikins, Joan 171 Walker, Kim 81–2, 86, 95n6, 96n31 Wall, Wendy 60n10, 99, 110n1, 111n9, 126–7, 128n3, 156–8, 167n28, 168n52 Watson, Julia 30n2, 95n10 Watt, Ian 179n2 Watt, Tessa 129n17 Waugh, Dorothy 171 Wayne, Valerie 115, 128n3 Weamys, Anna 101, 105–6 Wear, Andrew 62n27 Weitz, Nancy 165n3 Wentworth, Anne 170–72 A True Account 171 A Vindication 170–71Wheathill, Anne 101, 103–6, 109, 111n15

212


Whitaker, Katie 32n33, 167n33 White, Hayden 80n28 Wieck, Roger S. 129n12 Wilcox, Helen 11n2, 11n5, 12n12, 12n13, 12n14, 31n6, 34, 39, 51, 59n4, 60n6, 60n7, 79n17, 150n26, 170 Wilkinson, Elizabeth 34–5 Williams, Raymond 6 Williamson, George C. 76n3, 77n5 wills 55–6, 66–7, 126–8, 147 Wilson, Thomas 12n16 Winthrop, John 40 Wiseman, Susan 82, 88–9, 95n6, 95n7, 148n7, 149n10

Woods, Susanne 102, 112n20 Woolf, D.R. 12n13, 12n14, 13n19 Woolley, Hannah 50 work, see housewifery Worsley, Lucy 140, 149n20, 149n21 Wroth, Lady Mary 7, 17, 20–23, 25, 28– 9 Countess of Montgomery’s Urania 90–91, 152, 155, 166n23 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 20–22 Wynne-Davies, Marion 148n7 de Zayas, María 172, 175

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