Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen's Life Writing 1409443787, 9781409443780

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Life Writing through the Lens of Romance
1 Women’s Literacy Practices and the Mechanics of Reading Romance
2 The Woman’s Autobiographical Voice in Early Modern Romance
3 Becoming the Heroine
4 The Specter of Romance
5 Romancing the Self in
Autobiographical Romance
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

Julie A. Eckerle

ROMANCING THE SELF IN EArLY MODErN ENGLIsHWOMEN’s LIFE WrITING

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Titles in the series include: English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 Edited by Micheline White The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England Jennifer Heller Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England Ruben Espinosa

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

JuLIE A. ECKErLE University of Minnesota, Morris, USA

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 Julie Ackerle Julie A. Eckerle has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Eckerle, Julie A., 1971– Romancing the self in early modern Englishwomen’s life writing. (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. English prose literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – Women authors. 2. English prose literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 3. Autobiography – Women authors. 4. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) – History – 16th century. 5. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) – History – 17th century. 6. Love stories – Influence. I. Title II. Series 820.9’492072’09031-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eckerle, Julie A., 1971– Romancing the self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s life writing / by Julie Eckerle. pages cm. — (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-4378-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. English prose literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—H2. English prose literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—16th century. 4. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—17th century. 5. Autobiography—Women authors. 6. Romance literature—Influence. I. Title. PR756.A9E35 2013 820.9’492—dc23 2012050688 ISBN 9781409443780 (hbk) ISBN9781315606866 (ebk)

For Michael, Anya & Katya – the most important characters in my story & For Jan Lackey (1940–2012) – who wrote and lived her story to its fullest

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Contents List of Figures   Acknowledgments  

ix xi

Introduction: Life Writing through the Lens of Romance 

1

1 Women’s Literacy Practices and the Mechanics of Reading Romance   25 2 The Woman’s Autobiographical Voice in Early Modern Romance  

55

3 Becoming the Heroine  

85

4 The Specter of Romance  

129

5 Romancing the Self in Autobiographical Romance  

159

Bibliography   Index  

187 209

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List of Figures 5.1

St. Peter’s Church, Ampton. July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

165

5.2

Former Calthorpe-endowed almshouse, Ampton. July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

166

5.3

Dorothy Calthorpe monument, St. Peter’s Church, Ampton. July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

167

5.4

Title page from Dorothy Calthorpe manuscript, in red ink (b421 v.1). The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

169

5.5

Calthorpe’s grave in the chancel of St. Peter’s Church, Ampton, July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

173

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Acknowledgments As I bring this project to a close, my gratitude is great and my list of individuals to thank long. I am particularly grateful to John Watkins for his ongoing support and enthusiasm, as well as for the compelling concept of “haunting”; Elaine Beilin, whose early mentorship continues to inform my work; Elizabeth Clarke, who first told me about the amazing Dorothy Calthorpe manuscript and—along with the other members of the Constructing Elizabeth Isham Project team—first introduced me to Isham’s manuscript; Heather Wolfe, who guided my early attempts to read early modern hands and who is always generous with her time and expertise in the archives; Georgianna Ziegler, who shared with me her list of female-owned STC books at the Folger Shakespeare Library and patiently addresses my questions whenever I work there; Margaret Hartley and Mel Wallage, who provided personal tours of important Calthorpe sites like the Ampton church in which she is buried and the former almshouse that she founded; Mary Ellen Lamb, who is unrelenting in her support of my work and always willing to offer a perceptive reader’s eye; Erika Gaffney, whose expert editorial work at Ashgate instills confidence; the attendees at my works-in-progress session at the Folger in June 2011; and the Ashgate reader of my manuscript, whose suggestions helped instigate an important restructuring at a crucial stage in the writing. Additionally, I am grateful for the financial support and extraordinary research opportunities provided by the Mellon Summer Institute in Early Modern Paleography; the University of Minnesota (for a McKnight Summer Fellowship, Faculty Summer Research Fellowship, Imagine Fund grant, International Travel Grant, and Grantin-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship); a Folger Shakespeare Library shortterm fellowship; and the University of Minnesota, Morris (for generous Faculty Research Enhancement Funds and a single-semester leave). I am also indebted to the staff at the St. Edmundsbury Heritage Service, especially Collections Manager Keith Cunliffe, for assistance with the cover image, a self-portrait by Mary Beale (1633–99). I selected this image for the way in which Beale depicts herself as a gentlewoman—much as so many of the life writers considered in this book use words to give themselves romance-inflected attributes—but also, more sentimentally, because she shares with Calthorpe the home region of Bury St. Edmunds. Finally, on a more personal note, I wish to thank those individuals whose support has come in the form of deep friendship as well as collegiality, including Marcela Kostihová and Linda Shenk (expert early readers and cheerleaders); Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Jennifer Rothchild (colleagues, writing group members, and dear friends); Michelle M. Dowd (who has made numerous collaborations more satisfying and whose wisdom on all things scholarly I am forever grateful for); and Michael Lackey, whose unflagging support is simply impossible to put into words.

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Introduction: Life Writing through the Lens of Romance When Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–93) finished recording the romantic tale of Dorinda and Jewlious in her notebook, she punctuated the effort with three lines of flourishes, a fancy “Finnis,” and a neat “1677.” But she was not done. For reasons not entirely clear given the seemingly private nature of Calthorpe’s literary endeavor, she proceeded to explain and justify her decision to fictionalize the surface details of what was actually a true story: the designe of this Littell Memoise [i.e. memoir] was onLy to giue a true reLation of my owne fameLy and to deuert my selfe and make my story pleasenter I changed the names to discourse of it by way of history but being resolued not to stire from my point but to tell the truth of all the accidents that happned from my grandfather to my fathers death haueing no reason to un reauell any furder because he prouided for us all out of his own industerry without beholding to his fameLy therefore I begine with the father and end with the Son which giues me uery Littill Liberty to inLarge because I can not parsnett more peopell as other bookes doo which onLy pretends truth which gius a greater freedom to wons fancy when it makes choice of a subiect as well as the words it can take what scope it please and euery body that understands this way of entertaining of there selfs knowes it to be much easeyer then to be confined but this needs a [g]reater ex[c]u[.] (61v–62r)1

This passage, which indeed takes the form of an “excuse” despite the unclear antecedent for “this” (does Calthorpe mean fictionalized tales or her own true-tolife approach to “history”?), richly suggests many of the issues and tensions that inform the present study. Why, for example, do writers often resort to roman à clef veiling techniques even when a text is destined for a limited readership? What is the impetus for recording family history, especially for women? How do writers and readers 1 All references to Calthorpe’s manuscript—an autograph volume in Calthorpe’s hand in which this narrative, A Short History of the Life and Death of Sr Ceasor Dappefer, appears—are to my transcription of Osborn b421, vol. 1, at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I have maintained Calthorpe’s spelling and capitalization, but I have modernized lineation in the interest of space. I am indebted to Elizabeth Clarke for bringing this manuscript to my attention and for providing assistance with early stages of my research on Calthorpe. In addition to A Short History, the manuscript includes two short devotional pieces (“A Discription of the Garden of Edden” and a dream vision recounting the speaker’s journey to heaven titled “A Castell in the Aire or the Pallace of the Man in the Moon”) and three poems (“Philismena to Philander,” “Philander to Philismena,” and “In Commendations of a Country Life It Being So Innocent”).

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Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

manipulate the blurry borders between truth and fiction in life writing?2 And to what end? What kinds of moral or ethical judgments attach to the degree of truth or fiction? How necessary is that “excuse” alluded to so vaguely by Calthorpe when a woman takes up the pen to chart a family or personal story? And, most centrally, why does romance—a secular, fantastical, sensational form that enjoyed immense popularity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England3—so often provide the form, language, or motifs for auto/biographical tales, especially those written by women? All of these questions testify to the complex, dynamic relationship between life writing and romance, both of which might be labeled as “history,” a term complicated in the early modern period by its use for narratives of all types, true or fictional, as well as for records of past events.4 When Calthorpe claims that she intended to convey “a true reLation … by way of history,” therefore, she does not necessarily un-muddy the waters but instead hints provocatively at the juxtaposition of truth and fiction in her tale. Furthermore, she acknowledges both the value and pleasure of using “history” to relate a series of otherwise straightforward facts, thus echoing the most common defense of romance as a 2 The phrase “life writing,” defined by Marlene Kadar, “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice,” as “a less exclusive genre of personal kinds of writing” (4), not only allows for greater formal variety than terms like “autobiography” but also acknowledges that all instances of writing about one’s life may offer insight into the auto/biographical impulse. I use “life writing,” therefore, to denote a wide range of both biographical and autobiographical texts. For similar reasons, Douglas Catterall, “Drawing Lives and Memories from the Everyday Words of the Early Modern Era,” uses the term “(auto)biography”; see esp. 652n8. For exclusively autobiographical forms, “self-writing” is also a more inclusive term. See also Elspeth Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self”; Nicky Hallett, Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period, esp. 1n1; and Suzanne Trill, ed., Lady Anne Halkett: Selected Self-Writings. 3 For valuable surveys of romance in this period, see Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History, and Amelia Zurcher, “Serious Extravagance: Romance Writing in Seventeenth-Century England.” For definitions of this rather slippery genre, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare; Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance; Barbara Fuchs, Romance; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act; and Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode, among others. 4 See Zurcher, “Serious Extravagance,” for a useful discussion of romance’s evercomplicated relationship with history, and Jeslyn Medoff, “‘Very Like a Fiction’: Some Early Biographies of Aphra Behn,” for the similarities between fiction and biography in seventeenth-century England. See also Margaret Cavendish’s preface to her biography of her husband, The Life of William Cavendish Duke of Newcastle, for her understanding of the types of history current in her time. Cavendish identifies her biography as “a particular history,” or “the history of the life and actions of some particular person,” which she also claims to be the most “heroical” (lv) form. Similarly, Richard Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret … Wife of Richard Baxter, elevates one form of history over the other when he says he wrote and published his life of his wife in part to replace “false” histories (like romance) with “true and useful History” (A2r–A2v).

Introduction

3

genre that both teaches and delights while also acknowledging the dangerous specter of seductive pleasure, one of the greatest concerns about romance. Yet Calthorpe insists on the verity of her tale and does not allow such pleasure to tempt her “to stire from my point” or “un reauell” the tale indefinitely. Her example thus undermines many of the claims about romance’s dangers that were used to deter women from the genre and in turn offers one possibility for how an early modern woman might productively engage with it. Put simply, Calthorpe’s decision as an unmarried 29-year-old woman to author a personal story in the terms of romance taps into a range of controversial issues about genre, literacy, and gender. But Calthorpe was not alone, as many now familiar examples testify. Lady Anne Halkett (1621/22–99) fills her autobiography with the stuff of romance, producing “emotional nuances and conflicts that we are more accustomed to encounter in prose fiction than in seventeenth-century biographical writing” (Loftis, Introduction ix). Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80) also includes numerous romance-like adventures, including cross-dressing, in her tale of a passionate and deeply satisfying marriage. And Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1624/25–78),5 creates two different versions of her marriage to Charles Rich in her diary and autobiography, the second of which is clearly informed by romance motifs. These examples are simply the tip of the iceberg, the best-known examples of a trend that has been acknowledged since the early 1980s6 but not yet studied in a comprehensive and systematic way. Raymond A. Anselment, introduction to The Occasional Meditations of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, makes a convincing case for dating Rich’s birth in 1624; see 6n20. 6 Critical texts that discuss the influence of romance on one or more examples of early modern English life writing include Cedric C. Brown, “The Two Pilgrimages of the Laureate of Ashover, Leonard Wheatcroft”; Hero Chalmers, “‘The Person I Am, Or What They Made Me to Be’: The Construction of the Feminine Subject in the Autobiographies of Mary Carleton”; Susan Cook, “‘The Story I Most Particularly Intend’: The Narrative Style of Lucy Hutchinson”; Lara Dodds, “Margaret Cavendish’s Domestic Experiment”; Josephine Donovan, “‘That All the World May Know’: Women’s ‘Defense-Narratives’ and the Early Novel”; Margaret J.M. Ezell, “Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Modern Women”; Sandra Findley and Elaine Hobby, “Seventeenth-Century Women’s Autobiography”; Derek Hirst, “Remembering a Hero: Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of Her Husband”; Judith Kearns, “Fashioning Innocence: Rhetorical Construction of Character in the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett”; Neil H. Keeble, “Obedient Subjects? The Loyal Self in Some Later Seventeenth-Century Royalist Women’s Memoirs”; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs”; Donna Landry, “Eroticizing the Subject, or Royals in Drag: Reading the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett”; Medoff, “Very Like a Fiction”; George Parfitt and Ralph Houlbrooke, introduction to The Courtship Narrative of Leonard Wheatcroft, Derbyshire Yeoman; Gabriele Rippl, “‘The Conflict Betwixt Love and Honor’: The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett”; Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680; Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing, introduction to Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mary Frith; The Case of Mary Carleton; Kim Walker, “‘Divine Chymistry’ and Dramatic Character: The Lives of Lady Anne Halkett”; Helen Wilcox, “Her Own Life, Her Own Living? Text and Materiality in Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Autobiographical Writings”; and Ramona Wray, “[Re]Constructing the Past: The Diametric Lives of Mary Rich.” 5

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

4

Indeed, despite a critical assumption that early modern Englishwomen’s life writing was predominantly spiritual in nature, the romance genre exerted a powerful and pervasive pressure on women’s life writing—and self-formation— during this time. As I demonstrate in the following pages, when an early modern woman picked up the pen to write of her self, she almost immediately confronted romance. To move forward with her text, then, the female life writer had to make a choice about how to respond to this complex cultural form that had so much to say—for good and ill—about female identity as it was then understood. The life writers considered here responded to this challenge in ways as diverse as their individual personalities and experiences—some choosing to ignore the genre altogether, some to critique it, and some to manipulate it in a range of creative and useful ways. The result is an extraordinary body of work informed to varying degrees by “inescapable romance.”7 This influence was both negative and positive. As a literary genre and as a textual container for a relatively negative idea of “woman,” romance was a force to be reckoned with. But when approached instead as a strategy or mode, romance became a flexible, powerful tool to be wielded by women as well as men and it was adaptable to an extraordinary range of genres. This distinction between genre and mode, a long-term point of contention among romance scholars and theorists, actually goes a long way toward explaining the complex and often contradictory relationship between early modern women and romance. As is further discussed in the following section, women confronted and were confronted with romance as a genre. But in many cases, they took control of it as a strategy. This approach to romance, thoroughly and compellingly treated by Barbara Fuchs in her critical survey, Romance, recognizes its “ubiquity and malleability … as a set of strategies that organize and animate narrative” and, as Calthorpe seemed to recognize, “mak[e] texts pleasurable” (36, 58). Early Modern Englishwomen and the Romance Genre Early modern Englishwomen had a vexed relationship with romance. Although the genre was, in its earliest manifestations, written primarily by men, it has long been associated with women because of its focus on love, tendency to digress, seeming encouragement of idle behavior, often scandalous or immoral subject matter (again revolving around love, or lust), and dedications or internal appeals to female readers.8 This association with women worked in a circular fashion to demean the genre, its writers, and its readers even more. Therefore, whether belittled as trivial or attacked as powerfully dangerous, seductive, and immoral, romance was a genre that—so the moralists would have one believe—“good girls” did not read. I allude here to Parker’s book of this name. Of course, twenty-first-century romance continues to be associated with and

7 8

is marketed almost exclusively to women. For a fascinating analysis of romance’s late twentieth-century female readership, see Janice A. Radway’s ground-breaking Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.

Introduction

5

Of course, the reality was much more complicated, and numerous studies have addressed the seeming contradiction between this “feminine” genre and the male intellectual world that actually created and marketed it, especially in the sixteenth century. Particularly useful is Helen Hackett’s Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, which traces the progression of women’s relationship to romance from imagined readers to real readers to writers, usefully reminding us that “the female readership came gradually to exist while also being exaggerated for rhetorical and satirical purposes” (67, emphasis added). In “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England,” Lori Humphrey Newcomb garners a wealth of evidence to further debunk the myth of the female reader that was propagated by a “host of references in Renaissance texts to women reading prose romance” (121). This imaginary readership was often said to include, among other frightening scenarios, servant women who would drop all responsibilities and flee with the first available boy upon concluding a romance. But Newcomb exposes a much different reality, arguing that, “while romance attracted a large audience of both genders, its association with women readers became a powerful literary convention. Educated men pretended to consign romance to women, displacing ambivalence about a genre long on appeal but short on cultural sanction” (121, emphasis added). Indeed, in the absence of cultural sanction and in the presence of an increasingly commonplace falsehood about the dangerous intimacy women shared with romance, a wealth of didactic texts discouraged all readers, but women in particular, from having any association with the genre. These well-rehearsed arguments suggested that no reading at all would be better for a person than reading romance, which—once embarked upon—threatened to “set a person on fire and devour him in its flames” (Vives 73); distract women from chaste thoughts (73); lead them instead to an “addict[ion] to vice” (74); and ultimately—by supplanting “all books of godly learning”—lead the reader “first to think ill of all true religion, and at last to think nothing of God himself” (Ascham 69). The slippery slope articulated in these passages put not only women’s morality at stake but also a whole nation of Christian believers. Even intellectual female readers like Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) seemed to concur when, a century after Juan Luis Vives and Roger Ascham penned their concerns in the immensely popular and influential treatises The Education of a Christian Woman (1524) and The Schoolmaster (1570), respectively, she (or, rather, one of the fictional letter writers she created in Sociable Letters [1664]) famously critiqued her own sex for reading romance. As a result of such reading, Cavendish’s speaker claims, women would “fall in love with the feign’d Heroes and Carpet Knights, with whom their Thoughts secretly commit Adultery, and in their Conversation and manner, or forms or phrases of Speech, they imitate the Romancy Ladies” (67–8).9 All references to Sociable Letters are to James Fitzmaurice’s edition. Of course, the ever-contradictory Cavendish must often be read with a grain of salt, since many of her own works include romance elements and since Sociable Letters is itself a piece of fiction that blends satire with more straightforward critique. I consider her attitude to romance in more depth in Chapter 4. 9

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Ironically, my book might seem to support this assertion, since I argue that some early modern Englishwomen did indeed find the discourse of romance to be a useful means of articulating the self in their personal writings. In some cases, such women “in their … forms or phrases of Speech” (and in many other ways on the written page) do in fact “imitate the Romancy Ladies.” But this is a bad thing only if one accepts the whole gamut of assumptions about romance that were critical to early modern anti-romance propaganda: that romance lacked meaningful or moral value, that “imitating” romance characters inevitably meant adopting immoral behavior, that reading romance was an idle or vapid (rather than intellectual) endeavor, and that romance readers were simple-minded and easily indoctrinated (rather than critical thinkers or active readers).10 In reality, however, romance reading was not thought to be entirely vapid, despite the relatively successful early modern propaganda campaign. Indeed, even as the vituperative rhetoric against romance urged women to protect their reputations by avoiding it at all costs, other voices argued in the maligned genre’s defense. The most common argument drew from the early modern revival of the principles laid out in Horace’s Ars Poetica, namely the idea that the best poetry would both teach and delight the reader. That romance was entertaining was not a hard case to make, especially since many of its detractors made the same point. But the key to increasing the genre’s respectability meant linking its capacity to entertain directly to its capacity to instruct, much as Sir Philip Sidney did for Poetry itself when he claimed in A Defence of Poetry (1595) that moral lessons are best conveyed to the reader when disguised in pleasant tales, in the same way that medicine is best administered to children when hidden in something sweet (40).11 Without the sweet, enjoyable container, so the logic goes, the reader may not even get to the moral nugget it contains, much less be predisposed to hear and internalize its edifying message. Although some attempts to make this case for romance would of course be more successful than others, the “profit and delight” defense became commonplace. Thus Robert Greene explains to Margaret, Lady Hales, the dedicatee of his Menaphon (1589), that she can turn to his “little treatise for recreation, wherein

By “active reader,” I mean someone capable of thinking about a text in a critical way, from considering if and how to apply its principles to her own life to rejecting some or all of the text’s ideas. I do not mean a “resisting reader,” the phrase Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, uses for someone who consciously reads from a feminist perspective. Although I have been deeply influenced by Fetterley’s work on female readers, her label is obviously anachronistic when considering early modern England, whose female readers may have sympathized with the female perspective or even been intrigued by what we would now call a “feminist” idea but who could not have set out to read with a “feminist” agenda. 11 Metaphors that depict poetry as sugar-coated medicine are common in Renaissance defenses of poetry (G. Smith xxiv). As has been duly noted, Sidney’s Defence draws extensively on Horace. 10

Introduction

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there be as well humors to delight as discourses to advise” (77).12 And Margaret Tyler, in her address to the reader of her 1578 translation of a Spanish romance, explains that Diego Ortuñez de Calahorra’s The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1555) “is done into English for thy profit & delight.”13 On the one hand, she says, The chiefe matter therin contained, is of exploits of wars, & the parties therin named, are especially renowmed [sic] for their magnanimitie & courage. The authors purpose appearth to be this, to animate thereby, and to set on fire the lustie courages of young gentlemen, to the aduauncement of their line, by ensuing such like steps.

The Mirrour’s delight, on the other hand, subsists in “the varietie & continuall shift of fresh matter …, in the speaches short & sweet, wise in sentence, and wary in the prouision of contrary accidents. … I would that I could so well impart … the delight which my selfe findeth in reading the Spanish” (Aiijr). In other words, the author’s stylistic choices, which create an appealing container for the text’s inspiring content, produce pure readerly delight that in turn fosters moral growth.14 Tyler’s justifications are particularly pertinent for this study, since they come from the pen of a woman and defend not only women’s writing but also their reading.15 After all, before Tyler could take it upon herself to translate a man’s work, she first had to actually read it. Her prefatory arguments thus become valuable evidence in the case for early modern women’s reading of romance, which increased throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries despite the rabid anti-romance propaganda and explicit instructions to parents not to allow their daughters to read romance.16 In addition to Tyler’s example, many forms of evidence demonstrate the increased acceptance of “female romance-reading, and even writing” (Hackett, Women 9) over time, not least of which is the romanceinflected life writing by women that is the primary subject of this book. Only the first edition included this dedication (Brayman Hackel, Reading 183). Significantly, Greene was among the most popular of the English romance writers and developed a particular “reputation as the chief author for women” (Hackett, Women 95). 13 All references to Tyler’s text, which was licensed in 1578 but probably not published until a year or two later (Coad x), are to the facsimile edition published by Scolar; I have silently expanded thorns and other abbreviations. 14 As late as the mid-seventeenth century, this rationale still obtained, as indicated by defenses of romance along Horatian lines by Robert Boyle and Sir George Mackenzie, among others. See, for example, Lawrence Principe, “Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso: The Shaping of Robert Boyle’s Literary Style.” 15 Tyler was not the only member of her sex to defend women’s right to write, but most did so in a much safer way, typically by defending religious genres instead. 16 Tyler was “the first woman to publish a romance in England” (Coad ix), but her achievement had positive ramifications for writers of both genders, marking as it did “the beginning of the popularity and availability of continental romance in England. … After The Mirrour’s publication, the popularity of continental chivalric romance increased in England, as the surge in printing romances and the negative reactions to their wide readership indicate” (ix). 12

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Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

Several developments in romance reading accompanied the increase in romance readership of both genders. First, whereas profit and pleasure had been seen as two separate, though often coexisting, qualities, the former appealing to men and the latter to women, late seventeenth-century readers were more likely than their sixteenth-century counterparts to understand the two esteemed functions of fiction as intricately intertwined for readers of both genders (Newcomb, “Gendering” 137). Second, whereas “[e]ducated readers of the Renaissance were trained to digest books systematically though respectfully: to annotate, pull out apothegms, construct indices, compile commonplace books, compare, and translate,” the reading associated with both fiction and women was increasingly “extensive, relaxed, empathetic” (133). However, Newcomb argues, this new approach to reading was only acceptable because romance’s negative associations were shifted down the social ladder, thus allowing upper-class men and women to read certain romances while lower-class readers idly consumed “popular” versions of the genre. In other words, the romance stigma eventually became one almost entirely of class rather than one of gender and class.17 Throughout the period in question, women clearly found much to value in the genre, including stylistic technique, authorial pleasure, exemplary characters, and the language itself, which could be mimicked by readers of both genders in courtly settings (Newcomb, “Gendering” 130) or adapted by women in particular in their first forays into auto/biographical writing. Romance likely also allowed for “reflecting on gender constraints” and other kinds of “subversive reading experiences” (129), a point made by many feminist scholars. It is not surprising, therefore, as Newcomb speculates, that “patriarchs” may have “feared that romances could model not falling from virtue, but resistance to abuse” (130). Finally, there are the numerous personal, familial, and political uses to which romance could be put, especially in its roman à clef form.18 To produce a roman à clef was to encode secondary meaning into a plot, and to read one was to actively seek out that meaning (hardly an idle form of recreation). In all cases, readers of both genders were capable of applying even a far-fetched romance to their personal lives. Perhaps this was sometimes even the point, for—as Nigel Smith argues in Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660—“in no other genre 17 Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England, usefully explains this important cultural shift that ultimately made romance a kind of “popular” literature increasingly accessible to lower-class individuals with varying degrees of literacy. For more on literacy rates and the popularity of prose fiction, see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England; Salzman, English Prose Fiction; Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640; and Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590–1660. 18 See Newcomb (“Gendering” 131–3); Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660; and Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. I discuss women’s authorship of roman à clef romance in Chapter 5.

Introduction

9

is the matter of identification between characters and readers so prominent in the intention of the author and in the assumptions of the readership” (234). Indeed, rather than “lose themselves in narrative” (Newcomb 134) as so many feared, I argue here that many women found themselves in romance—or at least versions of themselves that they might bring to life on the written page. Early Modern Englishwomen and Life Writing Whereas the critical history of romance is intricately wrapped up with the history of women and gendered notions of reading, the critical history of life writing is just the opposite. Until the last few decades, in fact, autobiography was construed as a male genre and women’s place in it completely unrecognized. This is because autobiography as it traditionally has been understood is written toward the end of a life looking back and based in the “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life.” As Georges Gusdorf further explained it in an important 1956 essay, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” “[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” (29, 35).19 Fortunately, the work of a number of feminist scholars, among others, has led to a radically different understanding of autobiographical writing, especially in the early modern period when generic innovation and flexibility were the rule rather than the exception. As Adam Smyth explains, “Early modern writers and readers generally treat genres as loose, tentative and negotiable—as momentary frames for holding a text together, which yield quickly to other frames.” Therefore, disregarding this fact by reading early modern texts through “restrictive” definitions “of early modern categories of genre … anachronistically betrays this spirit of invention” (“Commonplace” 94). Not surprisingly, then, broadening the parameters around what may be considered “autobiographical” writing has led to an outpouring of critical work on early modern women’s life writing.20 A brief review of recent trends may be useful here to set the stage for the texts I consider in this study. This “traditional” definition persisted for decades, as evidenced by Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1592–1791, defining the genre in 1997 as “the unified, retrospective first-person narrative [that] uniquely totalizes its subject as both author and hero” (23). 20 Ironically, this work has tended to overshadow consideration of early modern men’s life writing, as Michelle M. Dowd and I note in “Recent Studies in Early Modern English Life Writing,” esp. 159. See also my “Recent Developments in Early Modern English Life Writing and Romance,” esp. 1090, and Kearns, whose useful summary of three stages of criticism in response to Halkett’s Memoirs also explains the basic trends in autobiographical studies that have “moved women’s life-writing from the periphery to the center of discussions of the genre” (343). For an excellent introduction to theoretical approaches to women’s autobiography, see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. 19

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

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Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life writing evolved before generic conventions for autobiographical writing had solidified and before the term “autobiography” itself was even used.21 Understandably, then, life writing in this formative period adopted a range of structural frameworks and often made use of multiple generic conventions. As Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow explain, each early modern life writer “was inventing the genre anew, and the way their manuscripts juxtapose genres, sometimes even on a single page, conveys a tangible sense of grappling with the form, struggling to find ways of structuring and containing their experiences in writing.”22 Furthermore, multiple forms for life writing coexisted, and despite the fact that spiritual forms were most prevalent, there was no real hierarchy by which some genres were seen as superior to others.23 This variety, moreover, informed texts by both men and women, even though material conditions and life experiences—often determined by gender—were more conducive to certain forms.24 Here the work of feminist critics has been particularly useful for a number of reasons.25 First, it helped to expose the flaws in the traditional The dates most often noted for the first recorded usage of this word are 1797 (Booy, General Introduction 3) and 1809 (Nussbaum 1). See also Linda Anderson, Autobiography 7, and Mascuch 19. In contrast, other forms of life writing, like “memoir,” were in circulation much earlier; see Helen M. Buss, Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women, esp. 1–26, for an overview of the history and development of the memoir form. Significantly, the term denoted autobiographical as well as biographical accounts in early modern England. 22 For more on the generic flexibility and fluidity of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury life writing, see James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices; Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England; Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Wilcox, Betraying our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts; Graham; Thomas F. Mayer and D.R. Woolf, eds., The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV; and Smyth, “Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England.” 23 Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation, usefully suggests that the spiritual and secular forms developed out of two separate traditions, “the narrative of religious conversion tracing its roots to Augustine’s Confessions and the secular res gestae tracing its roots back to the classical period” (86). 24 For critical work on the relationship between genre and gender in the production of early modern autobiographical texts, see Dowd and Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing; Graham; Mary Beth Rose, “Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography” (and her significantly revised version of this essay in Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature); and Seelig. 25 See Shari Benstock, “Authorizing the Autobiographical”; Estelle C. Jelinek, “Introduction: Women’s Autobiography and the Male Tradition”; Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation, for a critique of feminist approaches to autobiography; and Linda H. Peterson, “Institutionalizing Women’s Autobiography: Nineteenth-Century Editors and the Shaping of an Autobiographical Tradition,” for a useful summary and further critique of feminist intervention in the study of women’s autobiography. 21

Introduction

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approach to autobiography, in part by drawing attention to this model’s assumption of a male writer, a public life, and notions of individualism and autonomy that are more in keeping with the “Romantic notion of selfhood” (Anderson 5) that was prevalent when autobiography solidified as a distinct genre in the eighteenth century than with the very different notions of selfhood that dominated in early modern culture. Second, feminist critics took a leading role in revising definitions of autobiography to account for writers of both genders, collective authorship,26 and a greater range of life experience and formal possibilities,27 as well as in creating altogether different terms like “life writing.” And third, collectively speaking, feminist critics have argued simultaneously for recognizing that women’s material conditions have often led to their production of texts that look quite different from men’s and that—even so—women have the ability to produce the full range of generic options given the right conditions.28 Indeed, despite the now familiar argument that early women writers could not produce traditional “autobiography” because they wrote without a clear subject position, without the sense of agency that would allow one to actively construct a clearly defined self, without an eye to unity or chronology, and without the material conditions necessary for sustained retrospective reflection, women not only did, on occasion, produce just this kind of text but were also instrumental in developing new forms.29 In other words, perhaps the most important lesson that we have learned from the last few decades of work on autobiographical writing is that categorization along purely gendered lines is at best misguided and at worst dangerous. As Sharon Cadman Seelig argues in Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature, while it is useful to reject the notion of a single (male) model and to broaden the range of works considered in an analysis of the genre, it is surely not the case that all autobiographies written by men are linear and unified, and all those written by women are discursive and fragmentary. (6)

For example, “at least for the early modern period, some of the quality of discursiveness or fragmentary construction that might be attributed to female authorship or to the particular nature of women’s lives may well be a matter of broader generic instability” (7). Similarly, Elspeth Graham argues that “[t]he exploration and exploitation of a variety of forms, rather than adherence to a recognized format for articulating the self, is the crucial characteristic of self-writing, and in particular of women’s self-writing, of the period” (213). See esp. Hallett, Lives, for examples from a spiritual context. See, for example, definitions provided by Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries:

26 27

Gender and Genre,” 60; Graham 209; and Anderson 8. 28 Sidonie Smith, Poetics, provides a provocative analysis of how “autobiography” is based in a “decidedly male-identified” “conception of selfhood” and yet was written by women in the very period of its emergence and development. See 39–43, esp. 39. 29 For example, Eckerle argues that Elizabeth Isham produced a “traditional” autobiography in “Coming to Knowledge: Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiography and the SelfConstruction of an Intellectual Woman.”

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

12

It is within this exploratory and experimental moment that early modern Englishwomen first took up the pen in significant numbers to investigate and articulate the self through writing. And experiment they did. Instances of women’s self-writing can be found in prefatory comments to published writing, the margins of receipt books, occasional meditations, letters, diaries, biographies of male relatives (especially husbands), poems, autobiographical narratives and memoirs, conversion narratives, and a range of personal and political tracts.30 The endless possibilities suggest that the trend toward self-reflection that came into being during these centuries was not only a result of individuals following the example of others (such as their ministers) in order to engage in intense self-examination but also indicative of a deep-seated need for self-expression. Significantly, especially when explicitly informed by romance, this written expression of self is not nearly as self-critical as in predominantly spiritual life writing. Instead, romance-inflected life writing’s embedded criticisms are directed outward toward the culture rather than inward toward the self and, on the whole, tend toward self-justification and often somewhat heroic self-representations. The variety of autobiographical forms adopted and produced by early modern Englishwomen was matched only by the variety of motives that provided the impetus for their writing. First and foremost, of course, was a woman’s desire to take account of herself, to conduct the kind of self-examination encouraged by many Protestant faiths at the time. Particularly in the seventeenth century, individuals were influenced by “the Protestant emphasis on the responsibility of each believer for his or her salvation, and in particular … the spiritual self-examination required by Puritan ministers” (Hinds 13). This desire for self-examination and meditation on one’s sins, the most common autobiographical impulse since Saint Augustine, led to many different kinds of spiritual life writing, including meditations, prose autobiographical narratives, and diaries. Elizabeth Isham (1609–54), for example, notes on the first page of My Booke of Rememberance—one of the earliest femaleauthored prose narratives about the self—that she will “pe\r/use my ugly sinnes a space.”31 Ralph Thoresby’s father, John, when recommending that his son keep a diary, explicitly equates documentation of this kind of reflection with spiritual accountability:

Several of these forms are addressed in the essays collected in Dowd and Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing. 31 All references to My Booke of Rememberance are to Alice Eardley’s transcription of the Princeton University Library manuscript, Robert H. Taylor Collection RTC01, no. 62; I have not indicated deletions or lineation, as Eardley does, but I have maintained her editorial insertions in the form of “\ /.” An online edition of her transcription is available at the Constructing Elizabeth Isham website, and a print version co-edited by Clarke, Eardley, and Longfellow is forthcoming in the University of Toronto Other Voices series. I am indebted to Clarke, Longfellow, and the other members of the Constructing Elizabeth Isham project team for bringing Isham’s fascinating manuscript to my attention. 30

Introduction

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I would have you in a little book, … make a little journal of anything remarkable every day principally as to yourself. … I have thought this a good method for one to keep a good tolerable decorum in actions because he is accountable to himself as well as to God, which we are too apt to forget. (qtd. in Ponsonby, English Diaries 134)

Hugh Peter offers similar advice to his daughter in A Dying Father’s Last Legacy to an Only Child (1660), suggesting that she “[k]eep a book by you (I mean it literally) in which every night before you sleep you set down on the one side the Lord’s gracious providence and dealings with you, and your dealings with Him on the other side” (qtd. in Charlton, Women 119). And Hannah Allen (c. 1638–before 1683) explains in her post-madness account, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings (1683), the outcome of this kind of writing habit, when the writing reflects her sins back to her: It was my custom … to write in a Book … in Short-Hand, the Promises, together with my Temptations and other afflictions, and my experiences how God delivered me out of them, mixing therewith Prayer and Praises, … This Book in my Affliction I would oft say, would rise up in Judgment against me. (7)

Spiritual self-examination was a serious matter, and textual self-accounting became an equally serious tool for administering it. However, what begins as a spiritual text often becomes something else or, at the very least, absorbs other forms and goals as it proceeds. Isham’s narrative offers an excellent case in point for this process, so characteristic of life writing in this period. For example, her straightforward beginning quickly becomes more complicated as her first stated goal seamlessly blurs into the next: to “tell of [God’s] wonderous workes” (2r). This goal in turn alters the text from a purely personal exercise done “for my owne benefit” (2r),32 to one with an eye toward a broader audience, as she plans to “declear[e] thine arme unto this generation and thy power to them that shall come” (2r). Specifically, as Isham explains in a marginal annotation replete with commonplace defensive gestures (such as a denial of intent to publish), she intends, “if it may doe my Brother or his children any pleasure … to leave it them” (2r). However, although spiritual autobiographies often appealed to external audiences as exemplary and thus instructive texts (Stephens 12), Isham’s intent is more ambiguous, for she also says that she hopes her brother and his children “will charitable censure of me” (2r). Again, although this kind of statement is not uncommon in exemplary genres like the mother’s legacy,33 Isham’s version seems more defensive. Indeed, the somewhat mysterious reference to a “charitable censure” may be clarified by a later passage, in which she seems to reference her controversial decision not to marry: Eardley’s transcription indicates that this phrase appears as a marginal comment. See Dowd, “Genealogical Counternarratives in the Writings of Mary Carey,” in

32 33

which she argues for Isham’s intentional use of aspects of the mother’s legacy genre.

14

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing my sister telling me the speeches of divers conserning my selfe about Marriage. and I having reasonings within me whereby I was satisfied before thee (and as I thought I was able to defende my … cause) yet I tolde my Sister it may be I will leave my mind to my friends when I die. to give them satisfaction. which I thought I ought to \doe/ especially to my father. … which otherwise I could not so well expresse. (30r)

Isham’s Booke of Rememberance thus combines the most traditional autobiographical motive of all (self-examination) with two other common motives for life writing in the early modern period: establishing exemplarity and justifying and/or defending past behaviors. In both cases, the life writer is concerned with representing herself in the best possible light, either as an exemplary Christian woman whose life may serve as a model for others and/or as a woman whose maligned reputation may be improved by her own explanation of events. In the former case, establishing exemplarity often blends with instructing or advising, as is most obvious when a mother writes a text designed for her children to read34 but is also common in spiritually motivated texts that offer the woman’s life as a model for virtuous Christian living. Although many such texts were produced by men—including men’s biographies of their wives and female parishioners; compilations of women’s self-writings for publication; and a common hybrid of these two types, the funeral sermon-turnedpublished life that includes excerpts of the woman’s diary entries35—women were quite capable of offering their own lives as exemplary as well. Halkett, for example, describes placing her personal writings with a few trusted ministers for safe keeping and just in case they might be useful to others: perhaps itt might excite some to haue Charity to my Memory. And others of greater capacity imploy them to the honor of God[,] when they see what an vnworthy person like my selfe hath indeauered from most of the sadd dispensations of my life to ariue att the setting forth the praise of my neuer enough to bee admired who is the god of my Saluation. (188)36 34 Of course, fathers wrote similar books for their children, in the form of what Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England, calls “Advices” (118). 35 Examples of male-authored biographies of women include Arnold Boate’s The Character of a Trulie Vertuous and Pious Woman and Baxter’s Breviate. Examples of compilations of women’s life writings that were selected and edited by men include Thomas Hunter’s Life of the nun Catherine Burton, or Mary Xaveria of the Angels; Samuel Bury’s An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury; and Anthony Walker’s The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker. In a typical prefatory gesture, Bury describes his hope that, through his text, others will see Elizabeth as an “Exemplar to the Practice of [religion]” (2). Female-authored biographies of women were less common but certainly existed, as demonstrated by The Lady Falkland: Her Life, written by one of Elizabeth Cary’s daughters, and the “memoirs” of Lady Grisell Baillie, also written by a daughter, Lady Grisell Baillie Murray. Female-authored biographies of their husbands and fathers will be discussed in subsequent chapters. 36 All references to Halkett’s writings are to Trill’s edition; unless noted otherwise, all editorial insertions (such as the brackets in this passage) are also Trill’s.

Introduction

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Margaret Hoby (1570/71–1633) maintained a diary that—as Michelle M. Dowd has persuasively argued—she may have intended in part to advertise her model housewifery and devotional practice.37 And even the writers of published meditations participated in creating exemplarity, as L.E. Semler explains of the ironically anonymous author of Eliza’s Babes: or The Virgin’s Offering (1652) in the introduction to a recently published edition: “Meditation functions and records itself in real time for the meditator, but it also, having been written, stands as a general record and model of a believer’s experience. It is diachronic and synchronic, daily practice and sealed exemplarity” (42). Additionally, women, like their male counterparts, also produced “family memoirs … which deliberately set out to report on ancestors as moral exemplars for future younger generations” (Charlton 121). Significantly, an early modern Englishwoman writing of herself as exemplary is not as audacious as it might initially appear. In some cases, in fact, it is simply a matter of generic convention. In the case of conversion narratives, for example, “the subject should be exemplary for the reader, and the triumph of God over the devil should be reenacted” (Wilcox, “Metamorphosis” 215, emphasis added). In other cases, as with the mother’s legacy, women were simply fulfilling their Christian duty to educate their children.38 But it is also worth remembering that exemplarity in this period was typically not about demonstrating one’s unique life, as more modern notions of autobiography would assume, but just the opposite: a person’s life story was meant to reflect the patterns assumed by a Christian world view. Again, in the case of conversion narratives, the writers “should be construed as ordinary Christians, typifying a pattern of sin and redemption that all readers could recognize” (Wilcox 215). Moreover, a writer’s life story in a number of life writing genres was often modeled on previous examples, whether Augustine (in the case of spiritual autobiographies) or classical figures (many of whom were understood as ideal models for virtuous living). As Peter Burke explains, “[t]oday it may seem odd or even contradictory that the biography or autobiography of the unique individual should follow a pattern, but for readers and writers of the Renaissance, who were taught to model themselves on the exemplary figures of antiquity, there was no paradox” (23). What is paradoxical, especially for women, is that writing according to the exemplarity model entailed a kind of self-effacement, an erasing of the self into ordinariness at the very moment of bringing it into being on the page. Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly effectively articulate this problem in their discussion of early Protestant women’s life writing, noting that “the self-assertion permitted by the narrative form necessitates self-effacement, a constantly remarked-upon subjection to God’s design that becomes, in effect, the ‘statement’ of selfhood” (Early Modern English Lives 169). Nonetheless, as discouraging as this reality 37 See Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, esp. 98–106. 38 As has been well documented, the writer of a mother’s legacy often gained unusual authority—and the freedom to express it—because of her supposedly imminent death.

16

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

may seem to twenty-first-century readers, it is essential that we recognize the world view that informed early modern women’s understanding of self and their depiction of that self in writing: “Self-description … referred to understandings of oneself within a wider frame, and more often than not individuality was marked less by how one stood out than by how effectively one fitted in” (Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern Autobiography 14). It is not surprising, therefore, that so many life writers produced texts in which exemplarity plays a central role, as this was not only understood as a worthy and useful purpose (especially within a Christian framework) but also a means of demonstrating the validity of one’s own life.39 Nor is it surprising that these writers turned to the models that were at hand, whether spiritually sanctioned ones or those in less acceptable genres like romance. Again, the exemplarity motive is similar to the self-defense motive in that both seek to present the most positive self-construction possible. Especially when a woman’s reputation was at stake, as Sandra Findley and Elaine Hobby note, words—“explaining, vindicating, confessing” (19)—may have been her only recourse. Isham, as discussed above, seems to be engaged in just this type of work, even though the decision she defends—choosing to devote her energies to her relationship with God rather than to a husband—is not nearly as scandalous as the actions many of her contemporaries attempted to justify. As Isham explains her motivations at age 16, “as my knowledge increased I was so pleased with the devine truth. that to injoy it with the more freenesse I desired not to marry” (18v). For other women, the need for self-defense is more obvious. To cite just three examples: Halkett explains how and why she became romantically involved with a married man, Anne Wentworth (c. 1630–fl. 1677) justifies her decision to leave her husband,40 and Alice Thornton (1626/27–1706/07) responds to the scandal that arose when she arranged for her daughter’s marriage at the young age of 14.41 But in the growing body of scholarship devoted to early modern Englishwomen’s 39 See, for example, Effie Botonaki, “Marching on the Catwalk and Marketing the Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Autobiography,” in which she argues that Cavendish attempts unsuccessfully to represent herself and her marriage as ideal in her True Relation; Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1600, in which they demonstrate Lady Grace Mildmay and others’ use of exemplarity (168–70); and Mary Morrissey, “Narrative Authority in Spiritual Life-Writing: The Example of Dionys Fitzherbert,” in which she examines Fitzherbert’s use of a “‘trial-offaith’ narrative,” itself “designed to be exemplary” by “demonstrat[ing] to others the ways in which the Spirit can operate on the soul and afford a comfortable example to other afflicted saints” (2). 40 She discusses this decision in both A True Account and The Vindication of Anne Wentworth. 41 See esp. Anselment, “‘My first Booke of my Life’: The Apology of a SeventeenthCentury Gentry Woman,” in which he argues that these events motivated Thornton to write in the first place; Anselment, “Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life”; and Charles Jackson, preface to The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, of East Newton, Co. York.

Introduction

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life writing, the self-defense motive has been attributed convincingly to numerous others, including Cavendish, Lady Grace Mildmay (c. 1552–1620), Sarah Cowper (1644–1720), Elizabeth Freke (1641/42–1714), Dionys Fitzherbert (c. 1580–after 1641), and Mrs. Briver (fl. 1641).42 Although many other motivations inform early modern Englishwomen’s life writing, they are all related in some way to these three primary motives: spiritual self-examination, establishment of exemplarity, and justification or defense of past behaviors. They include spiritual motives like confessing sin, recounting a conversion, relieving guilt,43 advising children,44 and testifying to the glory of God, as well as more secular motives like chronicling events, documenting family genealogy and history,45 coming to terms with one’s life,46 aiding observation and reflection,47 and immortalizing the self.48 But whatever the original impetus, writing the self also becomes a critical means of understanding the self. As Pamela Hammons says of Katherine Austen (1628/29–83), whose manuscript miscellany, Book M, is in part autobiographical, Briver, whose first name is unknown, was the wife of Francis Briver, the Mayor of Waterford during the 1641 rebellion at Waterford. 43 Douglas G. Greene, introduction to The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval: Written Between 1662 and 1671, notes that “[i]t was common during the seventeenth century to keep a religious journal as a method of disciplining the mind and perhaps also as a catharsis, a way of relieving guilt feelings by recording them” (18). 44 See, for example, the mother’s legacy of Elizabeth Grymeston, titled Miscellanea. Prayers. Meditations. Memoratives., in which she asserts “there is no mother can either more affectionately shew hir nature, or more naturally manifest hir affection, than in aduising hir children out of hir owne experience” (A2r, emphasis added). 45 Lady Anne Clifford provides the best example of this impulse, though Calthorpe’s family romance is another instructive example. 46 See Wilcox, “The Metamorphosis of Women? Autobiography from Margery Kempe to Martha Moulsworth,” esp. 211. Other kinds of motives that we might consider therapeutic are also operative on occasion, whether self-writing is used as an escapist outlet, as Sara Heller Mendelson claims of Cavendish in The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (27), or as a kind of “cure” for emotional problems, as Katherine Hodgkin argues of Fitzherbert in “Dionys Fitzherbert and the Anatomy of Madness” (86–7). 47 See, for example, Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern English Lives, in relation to men’s travel diaries (62). This function could also apply to women’s travel writing (though certainly there was less of this than men’s) and the genre of occasional meditations, which often used an autobiographical moment to make a spiritual point (Trill xxxv) and could be read in the future as an aide to memory and further reflection. 48 This motive may be driven by a desire for fame, as many have argued of Cavendish; see, for example, S. Smith, Poetics 111–32. Alternatively, as Wilcox, “Her Own Life,” argues, it may be driven by a need to give a shape and some permanence to the life one has lived. Indeed, as one critical assumption is “that one of the reasons behind any attempt at self-definition is the fear that one’s identity is under threat” (Botonaki 173), the autobiographical act is often understood as a way to safeguard that identity—although always inevitably only one version of an individual’s identity—against danger. 42

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Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

“[w]riting and reading her life are … ongoing organizational and analytical practices.” Indeed, Hammons continues, “Austen sees her compilation of texts in ‘Book M’ as representing her life” (5, emphasis added). Understood from this perspective of text-as-life, it is no surprise that Cavendish—the early modern Englishwoman who arguably engaged in the most self-fashioning—made nearly everything she wrote autobiographical in one way or another and produced quite early in her career what has been called “the first secular female autobiography published in England” (Botonaki 159) with her 1656 A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life. Not only was “writing … her survival strategy,” according to Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, but it was also a means of trying on new versions of self much as she is said to have tried on eccentric clothes: “[t]he theme of experimenting with multiple versions of herself crops up in all her writings” (Bowerbank and Mendelson 14, emphasis added). As this extraordinary variety of both motive and form makes clear, early modern Englishwomen’s life writing did not take shape as a monolithic, predominantly spiritual genre. At a historical moment when exploration (of self, others, and world) gripped the imagination, when notions of the self were undergoing radical transformations, when the institution of marriage was itself evolving in ways that directly affected women and their most important life roles as wife and mother, and when the world of print offered new vistas to a range of readers, women were not completely isolated and unaware. On the contrary, perhaps freed by the sense of privacy associated with life writing, women passionately embraced the many options available for self-expression. While it is impossible to know what degree of satisfaction such textual experimentation produced, the written record that has come down to us—partial and fragmentary as it is—tantalizingly suggests that women approached the task of textual self-creation with extraordinary energy and creativity. The Specter of Romance Despite the fluidity and complexity of auto/biographical expression in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England and the remarkable range of texts and forms that influenced this writing, early modern Englishwomen’s life writing has been categorized as “spiritual” to the near exclusion of other qualities. And yet, just as literate women were exposed to a variety of texts and, thus, a variety of models for living (at least a few of which seemed to contradict one another), so did they compose life narratives influenced and, indeed, characterized by this same variety. In other words, women’s life writing incorporated both spiritual and secular influences. In this book, I turn a much-needed spotlight on the latter, demonstrating that women read, absorbed, and perhaps even identified with the controversial romance genre and explicitly considering how their self-understanding and selfconstruction were influenced by this particular kind of forbidden reading.

Introduction

19

Indeed, although spiritual models offered a sanctioned, and thus safe, venue for life writing—one that offered, moreover, a means to an authoritative voice and an exemplary self-construction—romance had quite a lot to offer as well. Not least of these attractions was the fact that “[t]he romance, with its concern with love and adventure, was one of the few places where women could confidently expect to appear in works by men.” Thus “it is not surprising to find some early women turning to this genre themselves, when they came to write” (Hobby 88). And yet, I argue, women do not simply imitate or repeat what is found in the genre but instead put it to entirely new purposes when they incorporate romance motifs in life writing and manipulate romance strategies to articulate a self or, in some cases, multiple selves. This study thus significantly challenges several assumptions about early modern life writing, most importantly by demonstrating that spiritual autobiography, long considered the major—if not only—autobiographical form in seventeenth-century England, did not exist in a vacuum. Furthermore, given the romance genre’s controversial reception as an immoral, trivial genre—one likely to turn women’s assumed weaker brains to idleness and improper thoughts—the fact that women were not only reading romance but also employing romance-as-strategy in their own personal writings has the potential to completely alter our understanding of how early modern women understood themselves. Romance, with its unending tales of unrequited or unsatisfying love, spoke to something in early modern women’s experience and offered a model by which they could recount their own personal disappointments in a world where arranged marriage and often loveless matches ruled the day. Romance texts further helped women explain, in ways likely to invoke sympathy, how and why they may have ended up in situations that threatened their reputations. Evidence of the romance genre’s influence on these women and their sense of self includes women’s explicit mention or discussion of romance in a range of texts; auto/biographical works that bear varying degrees of resemblance to romance tropes, plots, and characterizations; and even texts in which the female life writers claim to reject romance, since—in these cases—romance becomes the very model against which women construct their identities. Therefore, whether constructing their texts as anti-romances or modeling their life stories on the fictional tales of maidens in distress, early modern women’s life writings undeniably bear the marks of romance’s influence. And yet, scholarly attention to how female life writers engaged with the romance genre has been piecemeal and incomplete, failing to consider multiple writers at the same time in order to discern patterns in women’s use of romance and failing to consider what women’s efforts to disown romance might also tell us about the genre’s power. Here I begin to rectify these lapses by providing a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the dynamic relationship by which life writing and romance informed one another, including rare instances in which women authored fictional romance (in contrast to romance-inflected life writing). I argue that, despite considerable efforts to trivialize it, romance provided women

20

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

with an imaginative and narrative landscape within which to explore and represent personal experience. For these women, romance was a genre to be manipulated and a discourse for self-construction—one with its own structures and assumptions that were particularly conducive to women’s point of view. Yet it was also—always and inevitably—the textual incarnation of an implied set of values by which women were consistently measured. Therefore, in both its negative and positive uses, romance’s haunting of women’s written lives reveals the powerful pressure it exerted over women and their early textual efforts. Indeed, while it is easiest to see romance’s influence in those texts that incorporate romance elements, I argue that the cases where romance is explicitly rejected are even more revealing. In these cases, women attempt to construct virtuous images of their selves in part by rejecting the stereotypical images of their sex that are frequently linked to the scandalous romance genre. But in the process, of course, they are measuring themselves by those very standards. Given the romance genre’s long-standing association with women, and given my own interest in women writers’ engagement with and participation in a diverse and rapidly evolving textual world, I focus primarily here on women’s writing. However, men were of course the primary readers, writers, and publishers of romance at this time, and they, too, understood the genre’s power for constructing particularly favorable versions of self.49 Furthermore, the men who published, edited, compiled, or wrote their wives’ life stories were as careful as the women who presented their own tales to clarify the female subject’s relationship to romance. Either she read it and still maintained her virtue (as Arnold Boate suggests of his wife), or she avoided it like the plague and was virtuous for doing so (as Anthony Walker suggests of his). Either she lived the life of the most respected, virtuous, and exemplary romance heroine, or she was anything but one of those immoral romance heroines. Nonetheless, although I certainly discuss some of these men’s representations of women, my primary interest here is in women’s use of romance motifs in their own life writing. Furthermore, in this book I give primary attention to predominantly secular life writing. However, as already noted, in drawing attention to a key secular influence on early modern lives and life writing, I am not suggesting that spiritual influences were non-existent or even less powerful than secular discourses like romance. On the contrary, I concur with the editors of Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, who note in their introduction that “the incessant pressure of spiritual beliefs on secular life means that access to ‘real’ selves is granted not through one pole (the spiritual) or the other (the secular and everyday) but rather through a complex personal, spiritual, and social interweaving of these perspectives” (Bedford, Davis, and Kelly 2). However, because the critical narrative about early modern life writing has until recently focused almost exclusively on the spiritual pole, this book exposes the evidence of secular discourses—especially 49 For analysis of just two examples, see Brown on Leonard Wheatcroft and Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Early Modern English Lives, esp. 137–43, on Richard Pike.

Introduction

21

romance—in the construction of the early modern self. Indeed, although spiritual discourses influenced women at this time in powerful and complex ways, offering a valuable and socially sanctioned means of self-exploration, they did not operate alone. Therefore, although this study inevitably gives greater attention to secular life writing than the spiritual variety, it also demonstrates that the two often coexisted, thus confirming the fact that generic hybridity was the rule rather than the exception in early modern England. A further disclaimer is necessary in regard to my primary form of evidence: women’s auto/biographical writings. As Frances E. Dolan succinctly acknowledges, “The diary as a form of evidence is skewed toward those privileged enough to have the leisure, skills, and self-importance to record and preserve their thoughts and activities” (118).50 In my case, the evidence is probably even more skewed by the fact that I am interested not only in female life writers (including genres beyond the diary) but also in female romance readers, also more likely to be among the literate and wealthy minority. Even though reading extended further down the social ladder—in part because it was deemed the easier, and thus first taught, literacy skill but also because “reading” could also mean “being read to”— evidence for such reading depends to a large extent on someone’s ability to record that reading in writing and thus is often unavailable. It cannot be denied, therefore, that written auto/biographical evidence illuminates one very particular group of people and leaves obscured several others. Even so, there is much yet to be learned about the literacy habits of early modern women, even those at the top of the social spectrum, and my inquiries into the ways romance spoke to and influenced early female readers must begin with those women who actually had the necessary reading and writing skills not only to engage the genre but also to leave some evidence of this engagement. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that during the two centuries considered in this book, England experienced extraordinary cultural change. Reading and translating in the 1570s, Margaret Tyler would have confronted very different attitudes about romance than Dorothy Osborne (1627–94/95), who filled her letters to her beloved with countless references to her romance reading with no apparent shame. Indeed, both Hackett and Newcomb point to the mid-seventeenth century as the point at which romance reading was becoming more acceptable for both men and women; not surprisingly, therefore, the evidence for female romance readers before 1650 is harder to come by than after mid-century. Similarly, the mid-seventeenth century is also pointed to as a heyday of sorts for romance as well as the moment at which auto/biographical writing, especially by women, became much more commonplace. There is no doubt, therefore, that the relationship between women’s romance reading and their life writing changed drastically over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even the less privileged individuals who left records “were probably an exceptionally gifted group,” as Spufford notes of the seventeenth-century autobiographers from whom she draws some of her evidence for how young peasant children learned to read and write (Small Books 42n43). 50

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Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

Nonetheless, I intentionally blur some of these time distinctions in order to document the basic fact that romance conventions influenced early modern Englishwomen’s life writing and that, in turn, women’s life experience influenced their writing of romance. Of course this was not the case in every instance, but it was often the case, and it can be seen in the written evidence from both centuries. Romancing the Self demonstrates the prevalent conjunction between the two genres by pointing to the extraordinary similarities in the way female life writers reference and incorporate romance in their life records, whether the life writer was a contemporary of Tyler or Osborne. Thus I often move rather seamlessly—and perhaps jarringly—between writers of different decades and, occasionally, centuries. Although I do attend to the particular historical moment in which each piece of writing originates, my primary goal is to document common rhetorical and narrative choices rather than trace women’s evolving relationship with romance over time.51 Fortunately, women’s creativity in finding and manipulating spaces for auto/ biographical discourse allows me to cast a wider net than one might originally suppose. From the margins of biographical works, which were often about the writers’ male relations; to daily meditations and diary entries, or “journals,” as they were often called in this period (de Welles 45); to prose autobiographies and memoirs, the forms most conducive to romance-inflected tale-telling, a wide range of women’s life writings deserves closer examination for the remnants and echoes of romance they contain. A woman’s particular material conditions—in addition to her access to literacy, literature, and leisure time—would determine the precise form or forms of life writing she would ultimately produce. But the reliance on similar romance motifs and techniques across genres is relatively consistent.52 Because most acts of writing begin with reading—and because my concern with women’s use of romance in particular depends on their familiarity with the genre—I begin in Chapter 1 with a survey of women’s relationship to romance as readers. Unfortunately, pedagogical texts that articulate how women were taught to read in this period are virtually non-existent, especially in contrast to the wealth of information we have about the education of young men. Nonetheless, I argue that the evidence is in the texts themselves: in the constructed texts (both romance and life writing) that I analyze in subsequent chapters and in the marginalia women produced in the course of their own romance reading. 51 The latter has been done with great skill by scholars like Hackett and Newcomb, among others. 52 The primary autobiographical genre with which I do not engage in depth here is the epistolary genre, although numerous female-authored letters survive from this period, and many—such as Osborne’s—support my argument. Nevertheless, the epistolary genre has its own conventions and is complicated to a great degree by the fact that letters are written to specific recipients under very specific rhetorical conditions. In short, it is an entirely different breed of life writing, and space considerations do not allow me to adequately address the genre here. For critical discussions of early modern Englishwomen’s letter writing, see James Daybell, “Recent Studies in Seventeenth-Century Letters” and Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700.

Introduction

23

One aspect of romance that certainly appealed to women is its extensive use of female-narrated, autobiographical embedded tales. Thus, in Chapter 2, I turn to the model of autobiographical narrative provided by romance itself. Through romance’s extensive use of the embedded narrative technique, which enables characters of both genders to narrate life histories, or what we might call “literary autobiographies,” romance offers a wealth of insight into the autobiographical impulse. In this chapter, I first delineate the functions, form, and content of romance’s embedded narratives and then explain specifically what these stories may have offered to female readers, such as valuable examples of the female voice in action, numerous models of auto/biographical authoring, and compelling evidence of the link between one’s identity and the narrative details used to convey that identity. Based on this foundation, I move in Chapter 3 to analysis of female-authored life writing that seems to be modeled after romance or contains some romance elements. Even though the writers of the many varied texts I consider here operate within the autobiographical tradition, it might be said that they also write within the romance tradition, since they adopt its discourse, give credence to its primary themes, and often support the happy-ever-after courtship narrative associated with the genre. Romance heroines may endure trial after trial, but the virtuous ones are rewarded in the end with happy marriages to equally deserving young men, a narrative trajectory that finds obvious sympathy with female readers within an arranged marriage system that provides them little to no choice in their future spouse. Numerous examples of women’s life writing suggest that writing romanceinflected narratives of their own thus enabled a kind of wish fulfillment. In contrast, in Chapter 4, I examine examples of life writing whose female authors claim either to have rejected romance or not to have been influenced by it at all. Although such texts and their writers may well contribute to the case against romance, the passion and energy the women devote to the cause belies their insistent self-defense. Whether familiar with the genre because of romance reading in their wayward youth or whether having simply accepted the negative propaganda that swirled around it, these women reveal the cultural power romance had and the numerous options available for responding to it. They further reveal how important it was for a woman seeking to establish a reputation as an exemplary Christian, wife, mother, daughter, or all of the above to distance herself as clearly as possible from the negative aura of romance. This would have been even more important since writing was itself an act capable of staining the purest of reputations. Finally, in Chapter 5, I examine the opposite relationship of that considered in the previous two chapters by attending to the auto/biographical elements in femaleauthored romance, arguing that—much like romance-inflected life writing—the autobiographical romances produced by some early modern Englishwomen reveal the power the romance genre held for an examination or articulation of the female self. Anna Weamys’s A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651), Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), and Calthorpe’s A

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Short History of the Life and Death of Sr Ceasor Dappefer, among others, all have something to teach us about the personal motives involved in the writing of romance in the seventeenth century and the ways in which life writing and romance informed one another. Romancing the Self thus tells a story that has not—to date—been fully rehearsed. This tale attempts to reconstruct what early modern Englishwomen found in the pages of romance and then analyzes their use of this material in the self-authoring that occurred in the pages of their life writing. In the process, a dynamic, complex, sometimes scandalous, but always illuminating relationship between romance and life writing can be firmly established.

Chapter 1

Women’s Literacy Practices and the Mechanics of Reading Romance Both critical and popular assumptions about early modern women’s relationship with the romance genre have often been misguided, if not patently false. Indeed, the defamation of romance and its construction as a feminine genre depended largely on negative and exaggerated characterizations of women’s reading skills and habits: “Elizabethan romance authors constructed women’s reading as trivial, credulous, oversexed, or even dangerous, pretending to find the genre pleasurable only to women, and profitless to anyone” (Newcomb, “Gendering” 127). However, just as romance really appealed to readers of both genders, so were female readers’ actual interactions with the genre sophisticated and complex. As will become clear in subsequent chapters, female readers of romance, whose numbers increased throughout the seventeenth century, often engaged romance as a useful, even instructive genre and manipulated it for an extraordinary variety of purposes. Indeed, rather than allow romance to lull them into lazy (or lazier) habits, female readers were often inspired by the genre into authorial productivity, for romance provided a useful language with which women could articulate a sense of self and literally bring themselves into being on the written page. Precisely how women transitioned from the reading of romance to the creation of the romance-inflected life writings that are the focus of this book is a murkier question, for early modern women left relatively few accounts of their reading habits. But understanding these habits is essential to constructing a more accurate history of women’s literacy than the one that has reduced them to vapid sponges easily seduced into immorality by the examples of wayward literary heroines. Therefore, in this chapter, I trace what we know of early modern women’s reading and literacy practices in regard to romance1 and draw from a variety of sources—anecdotal, archival, historical, and literary—in order to suggest precisely how women read romance and precisely which reading techniques may have enabled the innovative self-narration of so much women’s life writing. Although some of these claims must remain tentative, it is clear that women’s multi-faceted exposure to the romance genre enabled their own multi-faceted brand of life writing.

Important studies of early modern women’s reading of romance include Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance and “Gendering Prose Romance”; Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy; and Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction. 1

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Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing

The ABCs of Women’s Reading in Early Modern England Given the fact that “early modern England remained for a large majority an essentially oral culture” (Charlton 61) in which “literacy was economically determined” (Spufford, Small 21),2 attempts to reconstruct education and literacy practices have been difficult, to say the least.3 This is especially true for lower-class individuals and women, whose educational experiences are far less documented than those of men and aristocratic children.4 And yet, even in rural parts of the population, “illiteracy was everywhere face to face with literacy, and the oral with the printed word” (Spufford, Small 32), and individuals were consistently exposed to a range of literacy practices and texts, including frowned-upon material like romance. Such exposure involved reading in the most traditional sense but also hearing a text read, spoken, or performed; learning to read or to create letters, words, and images via needlework and other forms of textile production; and 2 Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education, explains the link between education and social status, noting that “[t]he whole drift and justification of prescription was encapsulated in the Primer of 1549, where the task of education was seen as a preparing of children for adult life that would be appropriate to their ‘station’” (27). Accordingly, with the exception of reading, girls’ education tended to focus on domestic rather than academic skills, “insofar as it would benefit their households” (S. Frye 227). But of course this was the theory rather than the practice, and Susan Frye, “Maternal Textualities,” notes numerous exceptions to this dictum. 3 Important studies of early modern English literacy include Brayman Hackel, Reading Material; David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England; Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740; and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. For educational practice in rural early modern England, see Margaret Spufford, “First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers” and Small Books and Pleasant Histories. And for women’s literacy and reading practices, see esp. Caroline Bowden, “The Notebooks of Rachael Fane: Education for Authorship?”; Charlton; Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading” and “Margaret Hoby’s Diary: Women’s Reading Practices and the Gendering of the Reformation Subject”; and David McKitterick, “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering.” 4 Problematic research methods sometimes compound the problem. For example, even though early modern children generally learned to read first and were thus much more likely to learn reading than writing, the primary indication of literacy has typically been an individual’s ability to sign his/her name. Yet, as has been well documented, this marker does not take into consideration many people, especially women, who learned to read but not write, and it disregards the reality that an individual’s ability to write his/her name did not necessarily mean that that person could write anything else. Given such assessment methods, Newcomb claims, “[t]he depressingly low ‘literacy’ rates for women are therefore a distortion in the historical record that makes women readers of romance more elusive, and the need to infer their existence more pressing” (“Gendering” 126). Thus, as others have noted, it is much more accurate and useful to approach literacy as a spectrum of practices and skills rather than as a finite skill set (“literacy”) and its opposite (“illiteracy”).

Women’s Literacy Practices and the Mechanics of Reading Romance

27

writing in and on a wide variety of surfaces, including walls.5 What it means—or meant—to be literate is thus deeply contextual and constantly under negotiation. Therefore, I consider here the range of literacy practices that enabled some early modern women and girls throughout the social spectrum to read (in the broadest sense of the term), to write, and in some cases to teach literacy skills to others. Learning to read was of course a critical component of the Humanist education available to aristocratic girls in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but girls of rural and lower-class families could also learn to read in a variety of settings, including the sixteenth-century dames’ schools that provided a basic twoyear education for both boys and girls. Remarkably, by the following century, “there is considerable evidence that literacy rates among women increased faster … than they did among men” (McKitterick 370). Yet for both genders, the primary goal of education throughout the early modern period was spiritual rather than academic. Therefore, when reading instruction occurred, it was most often administered through a spiritual lens. Ideally, Ian Green explains in The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740, children would learn reading and the catechism simultaneously, such that literacy was associated “with mastery of a catechism” (177). Similarly, the examples and texts used to teach elementary reading had “a distinctly religious content” (Charlton 79). Household education ideally combined these twin goals as well; it was recommended— according to one guide cited by Green—that in addition to learning the catechism, both “children and servants engaged in sermon repetition, listened to the reading of a chapter from both Old and New Testaments every day, and were taught to read” (212). Even across increasingly clear doctrinal divides, Kenneth Charlton argues in Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England, most families’ “preferred form of religious education was based on a remarkably similar set of curricular provisions—the Bible, the sermon, prayer and conference, catechising, and godly books” (242). Significantly, such spiritual instruction was often a community project, involving the participation of numerous adults depending on particular circumstances. These might include parents and teachers of both genders, as well as domestic chaplains and tutors. Indeed, since—in most households—women would be expected to take on the brunt of the spiritual instruction of their own children when they became mothers, a point to which I return below,6 the spiritual emphasis is especially critical to an For a fascinating example of wall-writing, see Brayman Hackel, Reading Material,

5

39–40.

6 Women’s role in “household education”—as Diane Willen, “Women and Religion in Early Modern England,” calls it—has been well documented. See esp. Charlton; Michelle M. Dowd, Women’s Work, esp. 133–72; Green, esp. 204–29; Edith Snook, “‘His open side our book’: Meditation and Education in Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives,” esp. 163–5; and Willen. Although women instructed children and servants in a wide range of material, and though their pedagogical responsibilities obviously varied greatly depending on class, religious orientation, and the precise historical moment, women’s greatest educational responsibility post-Reformation was generally in religious

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understanding of girls’ education. “[E]ven the eulogists,” Charlton says, “couched their justifications for the education of women as much in terms of the benefits for husband and child (she would be more tractable, more efficient) as in terms of her own benefit” (191). Thus “the over-riding aim” of elementary education for girls “was a religious one—the fostering of a God-fearing and deferential clientele” (153), and this goal determined the skills most likely to be taught. These included “[r]epeating the sermon to oneself” (157), taking notes on sermons and discussing them with other family members (when writing was also taught), “Bible-reading, psalm-singing, catechising and family prayer” (167). Women who had the skill, time, and means to devote to reading found a broad range of sanctioned material available to them: exemplary lives; appropriate didactic texts (such as housewifery guidebooks); their own writing, including diary entries, meditations, sermon notes, and journals; and—most obviously— spiritual texts.7 Indeed, women’s life writing is filled with references to the “good Book’s” (Delaval 54)8 that ideally formed the crux of a virtuous woman’s knowledge, from innumerable texts of “practical divinity” (Bury 17)9 to sermons,10 spiritual lives, prayers, religious poetry, and of course scripture; such “godly books” also dominate the surviving book lists, library inventories, and wills that further document early modern Englishwomen’s reading.11 Although vague references like “good books” appear most often in these records, many women do mention specific titles, including “Bishope Anedrews in his 5:th Sermon of the Resurection” (Delaval 49);12 Richard Baxter’s Crucifying of the World by the and moral education. As Betty S. Travitsky, “The New Mother of the English Renaissance: Her Writings on Motherhood,” notes, “[i]n England, due to the relatively late onset of humanism and the advent of religious reform, the new Renaissance theories resulted in the development of a ‘new mother’ who was learned and pious, responsible for raising her children and developing her own potential” (33). 7 Women’s spiritual reading is well documented. See, for example, Charlton and Willen. 8 This particular reference—which appears in so many texts as to be commonplace— is to the reading of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, whose grandmother taught her to read before she was eight. All references to Delaval’s meditations are to the Bodleian manuscript, Rawlinson D. 78. I have maintained Delaval’s punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. 9 This particular reference, also somewhat commonplace, is to the reading of Elizabeth Bury, whose diary is only available to us through the excerpts that her husband, the nonconformist minister Samuel Bury, included in his biographical Account. Elizabeth was apparently self-educated and devoted significant time to reading. 10 Women like Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, also read and re-read their own notes on sermons that they heard personally, as many of their diaries and meditations attest. 11 Given the emphasis of the present study, I have compiled the following evidence of early modern women’s reading almost exclusively from life writing by and about these women. For more on the writers and the auto/biographical texts in which these references appear, consult the index and bibliography. 12 Anne Sadleir makes a more general reference to reading “Andrewes sermons with his other devine meditations” (qtd. in Hunt 216).

Women’s Literacy Practices and the Mechanics of Reading Romance

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Cross of Christ;13 The Practice of Piety;14 John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, or “Institutions” (qtd. in Staunton 27);15 Stephen Charnock’s A Treatise of Divine Providence (Anon 221);16 Abraham Cowley’s religious verse epic, Davideis (Calthorpe 4v);17 John Flavel’s Divine Conduct;18 “a book of the trial of George Fox;”19 John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs;20 Matthew Henry’s Annotations upon the Scriptures (Bury 16); George Herbert’s poetry;21 Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity;22 George Swinnock’s The Christian Man’s Calling (Jackson 70); Jeremy Taylor’s Life and Death of the Holy Jesus;23 and James Ussher’s Body of Divinity (Mullan 360);24 among countless others. 13 Rich’s voluminous diaries contain frequent references to this text, which Charlton identifies as her “favourite book” (181). It was also among the items in Frances Wolfreston’s extensive book collection (Morgan 201). Among the Puritan Baxter’s other works are Reliquiae Baxterianae, which has been described as “a classic of the spiritual autobiographies” (Matthews 18), and a biographical account of his wife, Margaret, A Breviate. 14 This is likely Lewis Bayly’s highly influential book. It appears in Arnold Boate’s record of his wife’s reading (4) and in Elizabeth Wilkinson’s account of a conversion experience at age 12, according to Edmund Staunton’s funeral sermon for her, A sermon preacht … at the funeral of that eminent servant of Jesus Christ Mris. Elizabeth Wilkinson (26). 15 In addition to this reference to Wilkinson’s reading, Calvin’s text is also mentioned among the reading of Lady Brilliana Harley, who read widely, translated, and regularly shared books with her children (Charlton 66), and Elizabeth Cary, whose biographer reports in The Lady Falkland that she received the book from her father when she was just 12 years old (108). 16 This reference appears in the transcribed manuscript (British Library Additional MS 5858) of an anonymous life writer who was a relative of Oliver Cromwell and wrote primarily of the period 1687 to 1702. She says she was sent away to school in London as a young girl and that she had “a good Education” (213v). 17 Dorothy Calthorpe references this work in “Philander to Philismena,” one of the poems that is included in her original manuscript (Beinecke MS Osborne b421, v.1). 18 This reference appears in the memoir of Lilias Dunbar, Mrs. Campbell (160). As David George Mullan, Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c. 1670–c. 1730, usefully explains, “[i]n Scotland married women generally kept their own surnames, though this custom may have weakened in the later part of the seventeenth century” (39). I follow Mullan in preserving this choice where pertinent. 19 Quaker Elizabeth Andrews mentions this book, which David Booy, Autobiographical Writings by Early Quaker Women, identifies as Saul’s Errand to Damascus by Fox, James Naylor, and John Lawson (115). 20 This text was standard reading for Protestant girls and women (Charlton 66). It is specifically mentioned as among the reading of Harley (Charlton 66); Anne Jackson (88); Lady Grace Mildmay, who later willed the book to her daughter (Martin 33); Rich (BL Additional MS 27351, 38v and passim); Elizabeth Walker, who also recommended the book to her daughters (A. Walker 71); and Lady Margaret Hoby (24). 21 Herbert’s poetry was another favorite, read by Delaval (64) and Rich (21v), among others. 22 Both Cary (110–11) and Sadleir (Hunt 216) read this text. 23 This reference is to Lady Anne Halkett’s reading (Trill xxvii), but Taylor’s works were read by many other female life writers as well, including Sadleir (Hunt 216). 24 Mullan refers here to notes in the hand of Katherine Hamilton, Duchess of Atholl.

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As for sanctioned life writing, the spiritual lives of exemplary men and women from all points in early modern England’s devotional spectrum were especially popular. These texts both inspired and instructed their female readers and received frequent mention in the women’s own life writing. Lady Brilliana Harley (1598– 1643), for example, not only read Calvin’s Life of Luther but also “sent her son ‘Ned’ a translation of those parts … ‘that was not in the Book of Martyrs’” (Charlton 66), thus also instructing her child in the lessons contained in Luther’s biography. Margaret Downs (1600/03–82) was drawn to her own calling as a member of the Carmelite order “by reding our B[lessed] Mo[ther’s] life” (173). Similarly, Catherine Burton (1668–1714), who joined the Carmelite convent at Antwerp in 1693, read the lives of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa, as well as other autobiographies (Hallett, “‘as’” par. 4).25 Katherine Austen (1628/29–83) read Thomas Fuller’s account of Hildegarde of Bingen and dutifully recorded it—as was her habit—in her manuscript miscellany (Todd, “‘I’” 212). Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1624/25–78) read “The Life of Pious Mrs. Smith” (Memoir, 244).26 And Ann Hulton (1668–97) and her sister Sarah Savage (1664–1752) both enjoyed reading biography (Henry 260; Williams 58). Savage specifically mentions Samuel Bury’s An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury, which includes excerpts from Elizabeth’s diaries; Anthony Walker’s The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, which similarly includes excerpts from his wife’s diary; and The Life of Mrs Rowe (Williams 58). Female readers indulged in other forms of life writing as well, especially meditations, letters, and diaries. Lady Anne Halkett (1621/22–99), who wrote her own meditations in addition to an autobiographical narrative and numerous others writings, specifically mentions reading Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections and Bishop Joseph Hall’s Occasional Meditations (Trill xxvii).27 Elizabeth Bury (1644–1720) mentions “[r]eading the diary of one formerly appearing to himself and others in a state of conversion, but since apostatized” (S. Bury 158). And several women, including Scotswomen Elizabeth Blackadder, Mrs. Young (1659/60– 1732) (395), and Marion Veitch (1639–1722) (29), read Presbyterian minister Samuel Rutherford’s Letters. Rich, like many of the life writers considered in this study, also frequently read over her own diary entries and spiritual meditations.28 25 For more on convent women’s reading of saints’ lives and the genre’s influence on their own decisions to pursue holy orders, see Nicky Hallett, Lives of Spirit, and Heather Wolfe, introduction to Elizabeth Cary Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, esp. 45–54. 26 I have taken this particular reference from the published edition of extracts from Rich’s diaries: Memoir of Lady Warwick: Also Her Diary. As will become clear in Chapter 4, Rich was a particularly avid reader as well as writer and, in her Rules of Holy Living, advised her addressee to “every day set some time apart for reading good books and meditation” (qtd. in Palgrave 195). 27 Other examples of meditation readers include Alice Thornton, British Library Additional MS 88897/1, and Elizabeth Isham, Northamptonshire Record Office MS IL 3365, who specifically mention Hall (1; 26), and Margaret Boate (Boate 4). 28 See Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation,” esp. 131, for the value of this particular kind of re-reading. Women’s secular reading was also diverse, encompassing far more than the romances considered throughout this book. In the interest of space, however, I do not list these examples.

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These testimonials make clear that, for early modern women, reading was not only a critical component of their spiritual devotion but also closely linked to other devotional habits like writing, meditating, and praying. As such, there was also a wealth of advice available to women about how to interpret what they read. After all, “given the risks inherent in the reading process, readers needed to be guided to the safety of safe texts, safe reading strategies, and safe interpretations” (Brayman Hackel, Reading 78). Thus readers were advised that they must be in the right frame of mind (79) and particularly attentive to a text’s “true meaning” (82); that determining this meaning required reading the whole book (118–20) as well as any available textual apparatus (90); that “careful, repeated readings” were useful (120); and—of course—that they should avoid the wrong sort of text or read only those texts intended for readers of their skill, social status, and gender. Above all, it was emphasized, reading should be personally and spiritually productive. And yet, despite the emphasis on an ideal scenario in which all educational activities were linked to texts with moral value, controversial texts like romances nonetheless found their way into women’s purview and even—on occasion—into their lessons, exposing once again the deeply divided views about the genre as well as the potential problems it posed for traditional approaches to education. The case of Rachael Fane (1613–80), granddaughter of life writer Lady Grace Mildmay (c. 1552–1620),29 is particularly compelling, for—according to her notebooks— Fane’s translation practice involved not only acceptable “heathen writers” like Isocrates and Seneca (in French editions) but also the popular romance Amadis de Gaul (Bowden 167).30 This is not entirely shocking, since Amadis had been deemed since the mid-sixteenth century “useful for instructing the young French aristocracy in eloquence, grace, virtue and generosity” (170, emphasis added). Additionally, as noted in the Introduction, some English writers and theorists attributed pedagogical value to romance based on the Horatian ideal of a text’s ability to both delight and teach.31 So if Fane was indeed “combining improving 29 Fane was, happily, born into a family that valued women’s education and treasured the advice handed down through the generations. Her mother, Mary, for example, had “collected and copied her mother’s [Mildmay’s] books of prescriptions and recommendations” (Willen 151, emphasis added). 30 Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís of Gaul was a highly popular Spanish chivalric romance that appeared in a number of translations and adaptations throughout the early modern period and spawned numerous continuations, in addition to Miguel de Cervantes’s famous parody, Don Quixote. The original Amadís, published in 1508, was “itself a revision and continuation of a lost fourteenth-century text” (Fuchs 78). By 1617, it was identified as “cosmopolitan reading” by Fynes Moryson due to its “courtly speeches” (Newcomb, “Gendering” 130). The popular English translation by Anthony Munday was published in four volumes from 1618–19 (Roberts, Critical Introduction xvii). 31 For the possible role of romance in the education of medieval children of both genders, see Phillipa Hardman, “Domestic Learning and Teaching: Investigating Evidence for the Role of ‘Household Miscellanies’ in Late-Medieval England” and “Popular Romance and Young Readers,” and Nicole Clifton, “The Seven Sages of Rome, Children’s Literature, and the Auchinleck Manuscript.”

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translation skills with acquiring acceptable moral characteristics,” as Caroline Bowden argues of her translation lessons in general (167), then she was doing exactly the right thing: reading for moral instruction. Likely, this also involved practicing exemplary reading, an incredibly popular technique that encouraged individuals to read for the lessons in a particular text (especially in the behavior of an individual character or historical figure) and then to apply that lesson to one’s own life. However, as romance, Amadis would also be tainted simply by association, and exemplary reading, which works the same no matter the text, is not inevitably benign. Indeed, while this pedagogy would have reached many more boys than girls, it is a critical ingredient in understanding how women in some cases internalized the ideologies of their day and in other cases learned to resist these ideologies. After all, what an individual reader took from textual examples could be quite varied, especially when reading occurred outside of a formal classroom structure without a teacher to help determine the proper message or when reading involved genres unlikely to include didactic paratexts in the form of printed marginalia or lengthy prefaces. Thus a woman reading a spiritual life might learn to imitate valued devotional habits, and a woman reading the life story of a romance heroine—an aspect of romance I explore in-depth in Chapter 2—might learn positive female virtues32 or, alas, the vocabulary for resisting a father’s or husband’s unreasonable demands. In the end, we cannot be certain how Fane responded to Amadis as she converted its French language into English. But the evidence of her having worked with the text so intimately introduces the potential for subversive reading into the historical record, for reading and interpreting are almost always personal—and personalized—activities.33 Furthermore, most of the common reading techniques of the day that were likely to be used by female readers led women into similarly intimate engagements with texts. In addition to reading for exemplarity, meditating on a passage, selecting noteworthy excerpts to transfer into a commonplace book,34 and simply reading others’ lives all encouraged female readers to put their reading to use in their own lives. As Nancy Bradley Warren suggests in her discussion of women’s reading As early as 1489, William Caxton argued in his preface to a translation of the French romance Blanchardyn and Eglantine “that the young woman who reads romances does learn something of value. Like the male reader, she is encouraged to imitate the behavior of her favorite fictional models—not, of course, the male characters, but the loyal and longsuffering maiden Eglantine” (Goodman 27). 33 Fane’s case also raises intriguing questions about Mildmay’s position on romance, which is not otherwise clear in her written pedagogical advice, and her precise role in Fane’s educational curriculum. 34 For the commonplace book as a reading technique, see Brayman Hackel, Reading Material 142–9 and 175–95, and Victoria E. Burke, “Ann Bowyer’s Commonplace Book (Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 51): Reading and Writing Among the ‘Middling Sort.’” Intriguingly, Adam Smyth, “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits,” identifies “reading as an active, interventionist practice” as a key characteristic of commonplace book culture (94). 32

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of spiritual lives in monastic communities, “[k]nowledge gained textually and knowledge gained experientially may well not be distinguishable from each other, because through reading texts one can not just learn of but actually reexperience others’ experiences oneself” (74). The significance for women of such personal reading cannot be underestimated.35 Of course, numerous factors affected how any one woman engaged with a text, not least of which were the space and time available for the activity. Both factors tended to privilege the most elite women, who were more likely to have dedicated domestic settings like the closet for just such a thing. But desire was perhaps paramount. Indeed, women’s testimonials suggest that many not only found great pleasure in their reading and also, in some cases, actually read for pleasure as well as for moral edification but that they also occasionally defied authority in their quest to indulge in books. Elizabeth Isham (1609–54) explains in My Booke of Rememberance how her desire for knowledge became an all-consuming passion when she was still relatively young; indeed, she bought books whenever she earned extra money and perplexed her mother with her lack of desire for “worldly” goods (17v). Similarly, Lucy Hutchinson (1619/20–81) reports in “The Life of Mrs Lucy Hutchinson, Written by Herself,” that, as a young girl, my genius was quite averse from all but my book, and that I was so eager of that my mother, thinking it prejudiced my health, would moderate me in it; yet this rather animated me than kept me back, and every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find, when my own were locked up from me. After dinner and supper I still had an hour allowed me to play, and then I would steal into some hole or other to read. (14)36

Both Hutchinson and Isham’s testimony suggest how girls and women with enough motivation might find the time or means in otherwise busy days to seek a closet or other hidden space for reading and reflection. Yet they also reinforce the importance placed on determining whether one’s reading was productive or idle. In Isham’s case, the rejection of worldly things for intellectual and spiritual things seems positive, but the love for learning and the relationship with God that her reading allowed her to nurture arguably contributed to her problematic decision not to marry.37 Hutchinson’s experience, on the other hand, reminds us of the fuzzy line between productive reading and idle reading, 35 For more on the application of reading to one’s personal life, see Lamb, “Margaret Hoby’s Diary.” As has been duly noted, the increasingly popular habit of solitary, silent reading further contributed to the activity’s personalization and also helped to create a greater sense of interiority in readers. See also Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, esp. 17–68. 36 All references to the incomplete fragment of Hutchinson’s “Life” are to N.H. Keeble’s edition of The Life of John Hutchinson of Owthorpe, in the County of Nottingham, Esquire, which includes both texts in accordance with editorial tradition. The manuscript of the autobiographical fragment is no longer extant. 37 See Eckerle’s essay, “Coming to Knowledge.”

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as “any book I could find” implies alarmingly indiscriminate taste. And both girls’ narratives convey the mother’s concern about the daughter’s reading, especially when not easily controlled, that is a common thread in these kinds of narratives.38 Reading, in other words, was not always benign, and all of the habits discussed here combined to create a space within reading women that was not entirely subject to surveillance, despite ongoing efforts to govern women’s reading and interpretive habits and “to contain [reading’s] subversive possibilities” (Pearson 81). Thus Thomas Powell advises in Tom of All Trades (1631) that “in stead of reading Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia, let [women] read the grounds of good huswifery” (qtd. in Brayman Hackel, Reading 54).39 And Baxter, concerned that “young people … are quickly corrupted and ensnared by Tale-books, Romances, Play-books, and false or hurtful History,” asserts that “true and useful History is of great use to prevent such evils, and to many profitable ends” (A2r–A2v). He proceeds in his A Breviate of the Life of Margaret (1681), a life of his wife that includes excerpts from her diary, to suggest a more appropriate course of reading: “to young people it is very profitable to begin with the Scripture-History, and next the Lives of holy persons, and next to read the true Church-Historians, and the History of our Native Country” (A2v). As we have seen, many women took such advice to heart. But the prevalent concern about women’s interpretative freedom—the implications of which for a woman’s self-understanding and self-authoring will become increasingly clear through the course of this book—persisted. And it likely helps to explain another reason women were co-opted into the instructional role, especially within the home. For in this role and this space, they could reinforce in body and words the didactic messages conveyed with particular force and clarity by spiritual texts. Therefore, although women were certainly active as community educators,40 they were most active in their own homes, where a woman’s role in her children’s education—especially their religious and moral instruction—was one of a mother’s greatest responsibilities. All kinds of life writing by men and women make clear that women did their best to fulfill this instructional role. Indeed, they Perhaps not coincidentally, Hutchinson apparently developed into an excellent reader because of her father’s influence (Keeble, “Note” vii). 39 Sidney’s sixteenth-century Arcadia is arguably the best known of the early modern English romances. It also has one of the most complex textual histories, as Sidney first composed what is now known as the Old Arcadia and then partially revised it into what is now known as the New Arcadia; and yet an amalgamation of both versions, typically referred to as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, is the one most familiar to readers. For thorough accounts of these details, see Katherine Duncan-Jones’s introduction to The Old Arcadia and Maurice Evans’s introduction to his edition of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, esp. 10–14. 40 For example, Baxter notes that his exemplary wife, Margaret, set up a school for the poor (Breviate 57–8). And Spufford, Small Books, observes that “[s]chooldames teaching … readin[g] come up with suspicious frequency in the autobiographers’ accounts of their education, although they appear with suspicious infrequency in episcopal records” (35–6). 38

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had to, for “early modern mothers were taught that their own salvation depended on nurturing … children with educational and spiritual food” (Wayne 63). Whether they taught their children directly or sent them into the community to learn (to another home, an elementary school of some kind, or a parish church), women often arranged for and oversaw the necessary instruction. Thus Anthony Walker proudly memorializes his wife, Elizabeth (1623–90), for her religious education of their children: She would give them … Books, and often heard them read them, and would make a prudent choice of Books of Instruction, and Devotion, and sometimes usefull Histories; as the Book of Martyrs, and Abbreviations of our English Chronicles, and Lives of Holy, Exemplary Persons, … that she might doe several things at once; both perfect their Reading, and inform their Judgments, and inflame their Affections to an imitation of … Piety. (71)

Elizabeth focused specifically on teaching her two daughters to read aloud: “for a time a foreign master resided in the house, to instruct them in languages; and they received occasional lessons in singing and writing from other teachers. It was a special part of their mother’s care to make them good readers aloud” (Palgrave 129, emphasis added). Testimonial after testimonial makes similar claims. In fact, devoted women like Elizabeth often did not stop with their own families. Anthony reports that his wife frequently gave Bibles to poor people (142); Baxter claims that Margaret “read good books to” her servants (Breviate 79); and Rich apparently enacted a “plan … of ‘scattering books in all the common rooms and places of attendance, that those who waited might not lose their time, but well employ it, and have a bait laid of some practical useful book, and fitted to their capacity, which might catch and take them’” (qtd. in Palgrave 254). Such behaviors are exactly what we would expect of a godly woman who understood her culturally prescribed role as a spiritual instructor of those individuals, including children, servants, and poor neighbors, who fell within her realm of authority. Indeed, these particular women are lauded in public texts like funeral sermons and posthumous editions of their writing precisely because they were so obedient to their culture’s demands; their example could thus help to counteract the more dangerous potential in women’s reading and instructional practices, the latter of which inevitably encroached on a realm of authority typically reserved for men and divines. In other words, even though writers like Juan Luis Vives attempted to chart out a safe middle ground—to prescribe an educational program “that aided women to become well-informed and charming companions to their husbands, pious and good Christians, and individuals able to deal easily and sympathetically with Scripture and catechism” without enabling “them to delve into complex matters such as theology and philosophy” (H. Smith 16)—the reality was of course more complex: It is plain that the schooling of women and girls took place both in the parish church where the priest was their teacher, and round the dining table and in

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their closet (or some other “secret” place, indoors or out). In the latter case they were their own teachers, in between times acting in a quite direct way as agents in the religious education of their children and servants, in all of which we see a blurring of the boundaries between priest and lay-woman. (Charlton 241–2)

Again, subversive potential appears beneath the surface, or literally behind closed doors. But in the open—and especially on the open page—mothers’ advice to children about appropriate reading tended to support the status quo. Much like the advice directed by men to women, female-authored guidance generally took two forms. First, mothers advised children about what kinds of materials to read. And even though some women, like Mildmay in recommendations for her grandchildren, encouraged the reading of history and philosophical texts in addition to Scripture and “good books” (Travitsky 35–6), most mothers maintained the traditional emphasis on the latter. For example, Anne Jackson (fl. 1670s) used her hybrid mother’s legacy/spiritual autobiography to offer a great deal of advice about appropriate reading to the two young girls—her niece and her daughter—to whom she dedicated her book. She told them what to read generally (such as the Bible) and what to read for specific occasions (such as preparing for the Lord’s Supper). Second, mothers explained how to approach reading in order to achieve a right relationship with God. For example, Dorothy Leigh (d. c. 1616) explains in her mother’s legacy, The Mothers Blessing (1616), that meditation and prayer do not simply complement reading but are essential to it: you must meditate in the Word of God; for many reade it, and are neuer the better, for want of meditation. If yee heare the Word, and read it, without meditating theron, it doth the soule no more good then meate and drink doth the body, being seene and felt, and neuer fed vpon. (23)

Furthermore, she advises her sons, her primary readers,41 to “not onely reade, but gather some fruite out of it, and euer when you begin to read any part of the scripture, lift vp your harts, soules and mindes vnto God, and pray priuately or publikely; … and desire God … to inlighten your vnderstandings” (103–4). Significantly, Leigh insists that while a chaste woman “is alwaies either reading, meditating, or practising some good thing which she hath learned in the Scripture” (30–31), an unchaste woman “delights to heare the vaine words of men” (31). Although Leigh refers here to men’s vocalized flattery, especially in courtship, her concern applies equally well to men’s written words in secular texts like romance, a more suitable counterpoint to the words of Scripture and other “good bookes [that] worketh a mans heart to godliness” (93–4). In another example, Jackson explains to her dedicatees the importance of reading in the right frame of mind and for the right reasons: Although Leigh primarily addresses her three sons in this text, there is ample evidence that she imagines female readers as well: she makes clear that both girls and boys should be taught to read (24), she dedicates the text to the Princess Elizabeth (A3v), and she periodically implies a more general female readership. 41

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Do not read carelessly, or from custom, or to be seen of men that they may speak well of you, or the like, for God knows our hearts better than ourselves, and knows our thoughts before we think them; therefore labour for sincerity, be true to your own souls, read God’s word, and hear it with a true desire to better yourselves and inform your judgments. (64–5)

She even suggests how often to read: “I heartily wish that there may not be one day throughout your whole lives wherein you forget to read your bibles, beside the reading of other good books; and labour also for a right understanding of what you read” (64). Once again, the literal act of reading, of transferring words and meaning from the page to the brain, is only one piece of a much more complicated activity that should also involve meditation, prayer, and reflection both before and after. There were many ways for a godly woman to reinforce this kind of reading instruction. Elizabeth Walker, for example, “would strictly charge the Servants not to tell [the children] foolish Stories, … which might tincture their Fancies with vain or hurtfull Imaginations, and choak the good Seed of Pious Instruction, or draw them from it” (A. Walker, Holy Life 69). And the exemplary Lady Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1585–1636), took gender into consideration when sharing books with her children; for example, she “record[s] her daughter’s initials in a book of homilies, [and] pass[es] bibles and devotional works on to her daughters and a book for ‘Young Gentlemen Readers’ to her son” (Brayman Hackel, “Countess” 147). Given such maternal choices and models, in addition to the extensive advice on what, how, and when to read, an early modern woman would have had no doubt about why setting aside time for reading (whether individually or communally) was important, how meditating or writing about that reading could reinforce its value, and—most importantly—how reading was first and foremost a means of moral edification. So what are we to make of a woman like Margaret Boate (d. 1651), whose husband, Arnold, claims that she was an exemplary Christian wife and mother who taught her daughter “the beginnings of reading” (66) and also read romance? Arnold’s paean to Margaret, The Character of a Trulie Vertuous and Pious Woman (1651), is typical in the way it posthumously constructs its female subject as an exemplary Christian, but it is remarkable for the fact that it presents Margaret simultaneously as an ideal wife and an avid reader of romance: she bore also a greate love to all … productions of wit, especially to … elegant well contrived Romants, or fained histories, such as Sidney’s Arcadia, Astrea, Ariana, the Illustrious Bashaw, and above all those two late ones of Monsr de Calleprenette, … ; on the reading of which choice Romants she did with much contentment bestow some part of her time now and then: being wonderfullie pleased, as with the beautie of their language and conceptions, so with the

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characters off [sic] all kind of heroicall virtues, which therein are held forth most livelie in the persons of both sexes. (93–5)42

Arnold suggests here that his wife valued both the exemplary characters found in romance and the beautiful language with which they were depicted. But she was not, he insists, that much-maligned sort of romance reader who was seduced by immoral material. On the contrary, he continues, But as greate a lover as she was of wit, and of all the productions of it; the least mixture of prophanenes, obscenenes, or lasciviousnes, did so soure them unto her, as she did not onelie loose all pleasure in them, when so tainted, but she did perfectlie loath and detest them. (95–6)

For Arnold, in other words, there is nothing contradictory about Margaret’s literacy habits. Yet Margaret emerges from the historical record as an anomaly, for additional testimonials that would enable us to reconcile “romance reader” and “exemplary mother” within the same early modern woman simply do not exist. In part, this is due to the fact that women generally did not record evidence of their reading to the extent that their male counterparts did, as “[k]eeping a reading list was a habit of scholars” (Newcomb, “Gendering” 125). And if women were to record their reading, it would likely not be their “light reading” (Pearson 82).43 Furthermore, if women were hesitant to document their own romance reading, they were even more hesitant to document sharing it with their daughters, or even other women. Therefore, although we know that at least a few women received romance recommendations from male relatives—such as Rich getting a copy of the Arcadia from her father when she was a young girl; Isham reading the same text upon her brother’s recommendation (Booke 26r); and the young Anne Denton being advised by her otherwise traditionalist godfather, Sir Ralph Verney, that French romances, among other French materials, would be “fit” for her,44—we have almost no positive examples of romance gifts or suggestions from women, As a genre, the French heroic romance found an avid readership in seventeenthcentury England. Several of the most popular examples are mentioned in this passage: Honoré d’Urfe’s L’Astree, a popular pastoral romance; Ariana, a chivalric romance first published in 1636; Madeleine de Scudéry’s heroic romance Ibraham, ou i’illustre Bassa, published in 1641 and translated into English in 1652 (K. Parker 327n9); and Gaulthier de Coste de la Calprenède’s works, in this case probably Cassandra and Cléopatre, as they were among his most popular and were both published before 1651. 43 This is similar to the problem faced by Spufford in Small Books, her study of chapbook readership. As she speculates, the literate yeoman who would have been capable of reading this distinctively cheap form of print “did not read chapbooks, or at least he did not bother to say that he did. … the keepers of journals and diaries were either too welleducated to read the chapbooks, or, at least, to record doing so as a serious matter.” Instead, a literate yeoman is much more likely to cite more respectable reading choices (46). 44 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, discusses this fascinating example on 201–3. Intriguingly, Verney prefers that women read French romances over obtaining a classical education. 42

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and even fewer from women to other women. Furthermore, not one of the female romance-reading life writers I have studied either mentions or is mentioned as reading romance in the context of mothering.45 Female life writers and the men who eulogize them simply refuse to link mothers and romance.46 In the place of such a connection, many women (including Rich) repeat a conversion narrative of sorts—complete with “temptation, immersion, and renunciation” (Newcomb, “Gendering” 125)—by which a maturing woman’s intensified spiritual devotion leads to replacing “idle books” with “good books.”47 This process often accompanies a woman’s adoption of her new life roles as wife and mother that must supersede the ways of an easily influenced and unmarried girl. Furthermore, life writers often make quite clear that young maidens who do develop a passion for romance and other idle tales are frequently encouraged to do so by other women.48 In these cases, the virtuous mother’s instructional role is usurped by a maternal surrogate who feeds the child fanciful lore as a wetnurse might provide potentially contaminated surrogate milk.49 In other words, in recognition of a maternal figure’s pedagogical power and the nasty stereotypes that circulated considering women’s dangerous—or, at best, useless—textual influence, and in opposition to the potential danger posed by surrogate mothers, early modern women anxious to be “good” mothers seem to have worked hard to distinguish themselves from the nurses, midwives, and female servants of contemporary lore.50 Most often, they either acted—or represented themselves as This silence is particularly intriguing in Isham’s case, since—according to both her “diary” and prose narrative—communal reading with her mother, grandmother, and sister played a large role in her life. For the manuscript “diary,” which is actually “a vade mecum divided into one section for each of 32 years of Isham’s life” (Clarke et al.), see the Constructing Elizabeth Isham website. 46 An exception from the Spanish context is Teresa of Avila, who describes in her spiritual autobiography reading chivalric romances with her mother and without her father’s knowledge. See Jennifer R. Goodman, “‘That Wommen Holde in Ful Greet Reverence’: Mothers and Daughters Reading Chivalric Romances,” who discusses this and two more speculative English examples from the late medieval period. 47 I consider life accounts influenced by this formulaic conversion narrative in Chapter 4. 48 I discuss a particularly fascinating example of this sub-plot in my analysis of Delaval’s life writing in Chapter 4. 49 As has been well documented, there was a strong belief in early modern England that breast-milk conveyed virtues and vices as well as nutrition to the nursing baby. As Naomi J. Miller, “Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period,” notes, “[t]he participation of female caregivers in all areas of early modern life offered … a spectacle of caregiving powers, potentially life-threatening as well as lifegiving” (1); breastfeeding is an excellent example of this twofold power, especially given the increased danger to infants nursed by women other than their own mothers (Adelman 4). 50 Erasmus’s complaint in the following passage testifies to the real concern about the kinds of texts women might share with children: “A boy [may] learn a pretty story from the ancient poets, or a memorable tale from history, just as readily as the stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives’ fairy rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and serving women” (qtd. in Lamb, “Apologizing” 506). 45

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acting—on the other extreme, more in the mold of an Elizabeth Walker or Mary Rich than a Margaret Boate. Indeed, the collective evidence gleaned from life writing by and about early modern women suggests that their relationship with romance underwent a critical shift when they transitioned from maidenhood to motherhood. Even if they continued to read and appreciate romance, they seem to have accepted the pervasive cultural attitude against the genre when it came to conveying knowledge to their children. In formally documented claims, at least, they never allow it to be associated with motherhood or with their duties as mothers. It is in this way that early modern maternity can be seen as the death of romance. Yet women’s reading of romance was far from uncommon, as a wide range of material evidence—including the rare inventory of a woman’s library or the even rarer instance of marginalia in a book known to have been read or owned by a woman—makes clear. In addition to teaching us what books women actually read, such evidence also has the potential to teach us how they read. Marginalia in particular was understood as a pedagogical tool in early modern England and thus can provide “indications of the kinds of training that readers brought to bear on their encounters with texts, and the kinds of needs they could be made to serve” (Sherman 126). This is precisely the kind of information we need when thinking about how women approached reading in general and the reading of romance in particular. Tantalizing as it may be, however, material evidence in the form of marginalia, as well as wear on bindings, inscriptions of names on title pages, and even inscriptions that have been marked through and replaced by others, still leaves much unsaid about the history of a given book and its reader/s. Many issues contribute to these silences and create significant obstacles in our reconstruction of past readers’ interactions with their books. These include the disappearance of books over time and even the deterioration of some books due to overuse; the fact that many readers (especially the less learned) did not annotate while reading;51 the fact that an annotating reader would be more likely to mark a scholarly or devotional text as opposed to one considered more leisurely reading, like romance;52 the fact that so many individuals could read but not write, precluding even the choice to annotate or not to annotate; the fact that individuals sometimes inscribed books that they did not own or read; the dictation of annotations to a scribe rather than being recorded in the reader’s own hand; the unfortunate practices of later readers or booksellers, who often tried to destroy marginalia in order to create the clean copies desired by buyers; and the discouragement of women from annotating at all.53 Indeed, as is 51 On the other hand, Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, notes that even “semiliterate readers” could annotate with a wide range of marks (137n2). 52 Brayman Hackel notes that the Arcadia—the primary subject of her analysis of marking readers in Reading Material—“is a striking exception” to this general rule (157). 53 For more on obstacles to the study of early modern reading practices, see Robert G. Babcock, “A Book of Her Own: Introduction”; Brayman Hackel, Reading Material; William H. Sherman, “What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?”; and Alison Wiggins, “What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Printed Copies of Chaucer?”

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often the case, the silences are greater in the case of female readers, who were more likely to receive lower levels of education and different types of education when they did receive it, in addition to being discouraged from certain kinds of reading habits like annotation. Finally, interpreting the early modern marginalia that has survived the centuries carries its own challenges. Most significantly, marginalia is not necessarily linked to the words alongside which it appears or even to the book in which it is found. On the contrary, “[t]he blank spaces of Renaissance books were used not just to record comments on the text but penmanship exercises, prayers, recipes, popular poetry, drafts of letters, mathematical calculations, shopping lists, and other glimpses of the world in which they circulated” (Sherman 130). Though interesting and valuable in their own right, these markings—eloquently described by Heidi Brayman Hackel as the “material traces of the activities that surrounded and accompanied reading in the period” (Reading 148, emphasis added)—are also difficult to interpret. And yet, regardless of this line of inquiry’s flaws, it is often all we have. As Brayman Hackel laments, “[o]ur histories of early modern readers are predominantly stories of writing readers” (Reading 196), for “the historical record … only captures reading accompanied by writing” (200). Therefore, despite the numerous silences that remain in regard to women as romance readers and as both recipients and teachers of reading instruction—especially in regard to romance— manuscript markings like marginalia and inscriptions still have a valuable story to tell. This material evidence assures us that early modern women lived in spaces in which romances were read and owned; that they touched them, wrote their names in them, turned their pages, and perhaps inscribed them; that on occasion, they received them from friends or relatives; and that, on other occasions, they gave them as gifts or saved them for future generations. Romance, in other words, was part of the milieu in which many women lived, even if so many silences surround its role and its import in their daily lives. An intriguing example of this reality appears buried in the middle of an extensively and learnedly annotated copy of a 1593 Arcadia and takes the form of a four-word phrase reading simply, “By me Bridget Shepheard.”54 Worlds apart from the hand, style, and intellect of the Greek, Latin, and English comments that fill the book’s margins, these words nonetheless stand out. And though it is impossible to know if the girl or woman who wrote these words ever read Arcadia or why she chose this particular page and text in which to write this particular phrase (which may, after all, simply be an instance of penmanship practice), her pride in being able to write her own name is unmistakable and reminds us, if only in the vaguest of ways, of the literal and very tangible points of contact between women and romance. Brayman Hackel gives particular attention to the “prescribed forms of female readerly silence” that help to explain “women’s habitual silence in the margins of their books” (197). 54 This is Folger STC 22540, Copy 1; see esp. 163. It is a fascinating volume because it is inscribed with so many names, both male and female. Among them are Mary Wylde and Dorothy Wylde, the latter of whom also dated one of her inscriptions “her booke / 1645.”

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In the rest of this chapter, I explore the relationship between women and romance through these points of contact, considering what we know about women as dedicatees and patrons of romance, owners of romance, and—finally—readers of romance. In the end, evidence of women’s contact and interaction with romance within their homes and families erodes any lingering notion of an idealized feminine space untainted by the genre’s influence. On the contrary, evidence suggests that romance was pervasive, both in women’s lives and as one of the many textual forms that influenced their own textual output. Women as Romance Patrons, Dedicatees, and Addressees55 In the preface to her 1578 translation of Diego Ortuñez de Calahorra’s The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1555), Margaret Tyler argues that women’s “penning” of romance is a natural extension of women being addressed as dedicatees of romance: “it is all one,” she says, “for a woman to pen a story, as for a man to addresse his story to a woman” (Aiiijv). And though her contemporaries might have disagreed with her claim,56 no one could dispute the fact that many male authors who sought patronage or wished to demonstrate loyalty dedicated their romances to aristocratic women. Thus Sidney claimed in a dedicatory letter to have written his Old Arcadia for his sister, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the text eventually became identified with her name. Philip and Mary’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth, followed suit many years later by naming her two-part romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, for her friend Susan Herbert, Countess of Montgomery.57 Robert Greene dedicated “six of his thirty works of fiction,” including romance, to women (Cantar 27). Richard Beling dedicated his 1624 continuation of Sidney’s Arcadia, A Sixth Book to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, to Elizabeth Cary (1585/86–1639), and Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery and brother to Mary Rich and Robert Boyle, dedicated his Parthenissa (1654–76) to a number of women. As Kathleen M. Lynch writes, “Orrery rightly considered his feminine readers his most faithful patronesses. He dedicated the earlier volumes of his romance to Lady Northumberland and Lady Sunderland, the sixth and last volume to Princess Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, and the ‘six volumes compleat’ to Lady Northumberland” (188).58 Such dedications, in fact, became so common as to be almost unremarkable. For distinctions among these terms, see Brayman Hackel, Reading Material 102n131. Brayman Hackel notes, for example, that the printed marginalia accompanying

55

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Tyler’s argument seems to take issue with her position and “may well serve as a correction to Tyler’s defense” (Reading 129). 57 The First Part was published for a short time in 1621, and The Second Part remained in manuscript until 1999. See Josephine A. Roberts’s textual introduction to The First Part for details, esp. cv–cxii. 58 Parthenissa, now acclaimed as “the first modern English romance” (Principe, “Virtuous” 380), is a partially autobiographical but unfinished heroic romance based on the French model.

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Amazingly, their authors evince little concern in the texts themselves about what it might mean to offer a romance to a woman’s protection despite the fact that they frequently belittle the texts as “idle” or “trivial.” Of course, such language was itself tongue-in-cheek, part of a pose adopted by aristocratic men to excuse and justify the time they devoted to writing such texts. The printed Arcadia offers a case in point, since its early textual apparatus contained plenty of internal clues as to its worthiness; indeed, it was lauded “as a model of masculine style.” At the same time, however, as it is “[p]resented to a female audience in its title, preliminaries, and textual asides, the Arcadia is cast as an object for feminine diversion” (Brayman Hackel, Reading 150). Such contradictory authorial and dedicatory gestures contributed to Arcadia’s mixed reception as both “the object of excessive and unhealthy feminine attention” (153) and “a harmless frivolity suitable for gentlewomen” (154). Yet prefatory invocations of female dedicatees and readers also created a space for women’s reading, intentional or not. As Brayman Hackel notes, “[i]n a period in which men were far more likely to own books than women were, the relatively high proportion of female ownership of the Arcadia demonstrates that the folio volume circulated widely as a book appealing to the female audience to which it was addressed” (Reading 159). Furthermore, dedications to women frequently drew attention to their dedicatees’ virtue. In the case of George Chapman’s 1616 translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets, for example, Wroth is praised in a dedicatory sonnet as “the Happy Starre, Discouered in our Sydneian Asterisme; … [who] Makes all the virtuous glorifie your mind” (344).59 There is no indication here of the scandal that would occur just a few years later, when Wroth crossed the line from dedicatee to author and became suddenly “monstrous,” to use the language of one of her detractors.60 On the contrary, as long as a woman’s influence or associations were useful to an author, his invocation of her in dedicatory language was understood as positive rather than negative. And even though male writers who addressed female readers in their prefatory materials took advantage of the notion of romance as a woman’s text not to support women’s romance reading but to ease their own entrance into the controversial world of print publication, their comments generally favored the women so addressed.61 This sonnet appears in the text following the Iliad and before the Odyssey, the latter of which is, arguably, more romance than epic. 60 Sir Edward Denny was the harshest of Wroth’s critics when she first published Urania, writing in an oft-quoted letter that he hopes Wroth will “repent … of so many ill spent yeares of so vaine a booke and that you may redeeme the tym with writing as large a volume of heavenly layes and holy love as you have of lascivious tales and amorous toyes” (239). Such criticism helps to explain why Wroth’s text was quickly pulled from print and The Second Part never published at all. 61 For a wonderful analysis of these complex dynamics, especially in the prefatory gestures of early print culture, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. 59

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By the seventeenth century, even the imaginary female readers invoked by male romance writers had become more real than not, thus bringing Tyler’s claim one step closer to fruition. It only made sense, after all, that a woman who received a text, was asked to protect it, or was advised how to read it, would in turn actually do so. Indeed, Tyler asks, why could she not also be expected to write or even translate the same material? Women as Romance Owners That women could be dedicatees, patrons, and addressees of romance presupposes that they could be owners of romance. And while ownership is not in and of itself evidence of reading any more than being a dedicatee or addressee is, it certainly places romance solidly within a woman’s purview and introduces numerous possibilities for how women may have interacted with the genre. Indeed, although material evidence suggests that early modern women were much more likely to own, share, and give spiritual texts, many women (especially in the seventeenth century)62 owned romance as well. For example, in her study “The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library,” Brayman Hackel notes that the Countess had 241 volumes in her collection, including Wroth’s Vrania, John Barclay’s Argenis,63 Edmund Spenser’s The Fayery Queene,64 Thomas Gainsford’s History of Trebizond,65 Thomas Shelton’s English translation of Don Quixote, the second part of Honoré d’Urfe’s L’Astree, and Boccaccio’s Le Decameron,66 the last two books in French (“Countess” 147– 54). Women’s inscriptions and other material evidence of women’s ownership in surviving copies of printed romances also place romance texts in real women’s hands. For example, at the top of the verso of the title page of a 1627 edition of The Covntesse of Pembrokes Arcadia now in the Folger Shakespeare Library Early modern Englishwomen owned books in increasing numbers and genres and across increasingly diverse class divisions throughout the seventeenth century but especially in its second half. In the case of romance in particular, “[b]efore 1650, the readers of romance who left such traces as library inventories, commonplace books quoting romances, and signed and dated personal copies were, overwhelmingly, men” (Newcomb, “Gendering” 125). See also Elizabeth P. Archibald, “‘I Wright My Name’: SeventeenthCentury Women and Their Books.” 63 This political roman à clef romance was first published in 1621. 64 Although primarily understood as epic, Spenser’s unfinished poem (originally published in 1591 and 1596) is also deeply indebted to and plagued by romance elements. For a useful summary of Spenser’s “harnessing of romance to epic,” see Barbara Fuchs, Romance 75–8, esp. 75. 65 This 1616 work is “an Arcadian romance in four books” (Eccles 263). 66 Boccaccio’s popular fourteenth-century text, which contains numerous tales exchanged by men and women in hiding from the plague, incorporates romance in a number of ways. It was particularly popular for its courtly conversations and includes many femalenarrated stories like those I discuss in Chapter 2. 62

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collection,67 “Elizabeth Whitfeild” is neatly written, with the phrase “her Booke 1651” carefully inscribed below the name. Although this particular volume includes only minimal annotations, and though the presence of at least one male name means these annotations are not necessarily Whitfeild’s, her inscription nonetheless indicates her investment in recording her relationship to this book.68 Additional examples of women’s romance ownership culled from these sources as well as from women’s testimony in their life writing include the first part of a prose romance titled The Chronicle of Europe in a manuscript dedicated to Mary Oldisworth by her husband, Nicholas;69 Dorothy and Mary Wylde’s copy of the 1593 Arcadia, already mentioned above as being inscribed by Shepheard; Frances Whitinge’s copy of the Decameron in translation;70 Ann Gardner, Mary Baker, and Catherine Cotton’s copies of an English translation of The Rogue, or, The Life of Guzman de Alfarache (Archibald 42);71 Mary Plumbley’s copy of Urania;72 Elizabeth Puckering’s copies of Coralbo, Elise or Innocencie Guilty, The Grand 67 This is Folger STC 22547, Copy 2. I conducted most of my research into early modern Englishwomen’s annotations of print romance at the Folger in the summer of 2011. I am grateful to the Folger Institute for the short-term fellowship that allowed me to complete this research; to the individuals who provided such wonderful feedback during my work-inprogress presentation; and especially to Georgianna Ziegler, head of reference at the Folger, for sharing with me her invaluable list of all STC texts in the Folger Shakespeare Library that contain evidence of women’s ownership and for assisting me with my own research into women’s inscriptions of Folger texts during my visits. 68 Of course, like the marginalia discussed above, ownership marks are notoriously difficult to interpret. And just as a woman’s name might appear in a book that she did not own, so might an ownership mark be missing from a book that a woman did own or, at the very least, have access to. For example, “[a] book signed only by a man may well have been accessible to his sisters, daughters, mother, and wife,” not to mention the fact that “[t]here must be many more instances of jointly owned books where it was considered unnecessary to include the wife’s name” (Wiggins, “What” 30, 31). For these and other issues related to women’s book ownership, see esp. Babcock, “A Book of Her Own”; Brayman Hackel, “Countess”; Arnold Hunt, “The Books, Manuscripts and Literary Patronage of Mrs Anne Sadleir (1585–1670)”; McKitterick; and Paul Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston and ‘Hor Bouks’: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book Collector.” 69 For more on this manuscript, see C.B. Hardman, “The Book as Domestic Gift: Bodleian MS Don. C. 24.” 70 This volume, Folger STC 3172, Copy 1, is inscribed with the phrase “Frances Whitinge her Booke 1651” (1r); it also includes the inscriptions of at least two men and some marginalia. 71 This is a picaresque Spanish romance, originally written by Matheo Aleman. Both the copy bearing the signatures of Gardner and Baker and the copy inscribed by Cotton are now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The inscription in Cotton’s copy indicates that it was given to her by her father, Charles Cotton, in 1687 (Archibald 43–4). 72 Plumbley’s inscription is dated 1663. This copy of Urania, owned by the University of California, Los Angeles, is especially intriguing for the handwritten conclusion written into the text. See Susan Light, “Reading Romances: The Handwritten Ending of Mary Wroth’s Urania in the UCLA Library Copy,” esp. 66.

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Scipio, and the first parts of Cassandra (McKitterick 376);73 Mary Bisshope’s copy of Argenis;74 book collector Frances Wolfreston’s copies of Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd,75 Emanuel Ford’s Famous Historie of Montelyn,76 and Robert Greene’s Mamillia (Morgan 208);77 Elizabeth Freke’s (1641/42–1714) single volume of Cassandra;78 and Ann Morris’s copy of Urania.79 Women’s ownership of romance is also demonstrated by records of gift-giving, even though “the most appropriate gifts for women were devotional works and bibles” (Brayman Hackel, “Countess” 147). An inscription on the title page of a Folger copy of Richard Fanshawe’s Il Pastor Fido, for example, explains that a woman gave it to her grandson: “giuen to my [sic] by my grandmother 1692 [G]er Hamond [Iunio]r.”80 Additionally, Wolfreston likely shared her copy of Montelyn 73 Most of Puckering’s books, including the volumes mentioned here, are housed at Trinity College, Cambridge (McKitterick 359). Coralbo is an Italian romance by Giovanni Francesco Biondi, Elise or Innocencie Guilty is a French romance by Jean-Pierre Camus, and The Grand Scipio is a French romance by Pierre d’Ortigue de Vaumorière. 74 This volume, Folger STC 1392, Copy 3, is inscribed on the title page with “Mary Bisshope March ye 16th 1691.” The book was probably dually owned by a married couple, as a “Christ [Christian?] Bisshopp” has signed alongside Mary. 75 The English prose romance Rosalynd (1590) is perhaps best known today as a source for William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Wolfreston’s copy of the 1609 edition is Folger STC 16669 and is inscribed “frances wolfreston her bouk” (A4r). Although Wolfreston’s inscriptions—as in this case—are not often dated, she is one of the few seventeenth-century female book collectors about whom we know quite a lot; thus her ownership of the books, generally speaking, can be dated to the early seventeenth century. For more on Wolfreston, see Johan Gerritsen, “Venus Preserved: Some Notes on Frances Wolfreston”; Morgan; and Wiggins, “Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer.” 76 Ford wrote a number of Elizabethan romances. This 1618 edition of Montelyn is Folger STC 11167.2 and is inscribed “Frances wolfreston hor bowk” (A3r). It also contains an inscription by a male “Francis,” dated 1652, that Gerritsen believes belongs to Wolfreston’s eldest son (272). 77 This volume is now housed at the British Library (Morgan 208). 78 See Anselment’s edition of The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714, esp. 173–7, for the complete book inventories Freke compiled in 1711. Significantly, vague entries like “i6 small history books” and “severall other small books” (175, 176) allow the possibility for additional romances. 79 This volume, Folger STC 26051, Copy 1, is inscribed with the following verse on the front flyleaf: Ann Morris her Book: The Lord of Heaven vpon her Look But when her passing bell doth toul The Lord of heaven recive her soul Amen 1723 Although this inscription is a bit late for the time period that is my focus in this book, it is worth noting because Urania was in such limited circulation and because women’s ownership of female-authored romance was relatively uncommon. 80 This 1648 volume is Folger G2175, Copy 1. It is an original work rather than a translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful

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with her eldest son (Gerristen 272) and bequeathed most of her collection, including romances, to her children (Morgan 196). Another intriguing example of a woman giving a romance to her children is the case of the Oldisworth manuscript described above—a text that was eventually passed from Mary to her daughter Margaret. The manuscript’s primary content consists of poems written by Nicholas Oldisworth in the 1630s and later transcribed by him as A Recollection of Certaine Scattered Poems to be dedicated to his wife. The manuscript’s prose romance, which “has been described as an enigmatic roman à clef” and was to be succeeded by four more parts, appears after these poems (C.B. Hardman 165). Unfortunately, Margaret’s inscription, which reads “Margaret Man Her Book Given Me By My Dear Mother” (162), tells us only that the book was given to Margaret and not why, not whether the more valued content—for instance—was her father’s poems or the mysterious romance, which had been helpfully annotated to draw attention to exemplary passages (174). Therefore, although more questions than answers surround this manuscript, it offers the possibility that a woman intentionally gifted a romance to a daughter. As we have seen, such evidence of romance reading passing through the maternal line is unheard of, and, in the other examples of female gift-giving listed above, no evidence irrefutably indicates that the recipient was a daughter. Yet women certainly received romances as gifts. The inscription in a 1659 edition of Sir William Lower’s translation of the French pastoral tragicomedy The Noble Ingratitude by Philippe Quinault indicates that the translator himself gave it to his daughter: “For Mris Elizabeth Lower. 1659.”81 As Lower both translated and wrote dramatic romances (Kathman 588) and was clearly proud to share his work with his daughter immediately after publication, his example demonstrates that some women lived in homes where romance was not only read but also studied, appreciated, and written. Further evidence of women receiving gifts of romance at the very late end of the period include the inscription “Reb March Her Book giuen Her by RM 1701” (139) in a 1685 copy of Francis Philon’s translation of Jean de Préchac’s romance The True History of Cara Mustapha. Late Grand Visier82 and the inscription “Elizabeth Pride her Book of north woot[o]n wotton 1705” (A1v) in a 1621 edition of Arcadia.83 In each of these cases, the female owner wrote her name multiple times, solidifying her relationship to the book to the degree that, as one of Pride’s comments predicts, a reader would be sure to “when this you Shepherd), as Fanshawe intended it as an addition, or supplement, to his translation of Guarini’s play. Intriguingly, the phrase “Mrs Iohen Hamonds Boucke” also appears on the title page but has been crossed out. 81 This volume is Folger Q218, and the inscription appears on the first folio. 82 This inscription is written in four lines at the very end of the volume, Folger P3209.2. A separate inscription on one of the first pages provides the owner’s full name: “Rebekah March.” 83 This volume, Folger STC 22545, Copy 2, contains a fair number of manuscript markings, marginal comments, and inscriptions, including names of both men and women; yet only one inscription is dated besides Elizabeth’s, that of George Pride (1699) on the verso of the title page. Brayman Hackel (Reading Material 161–2) speculates on the relationship between the two Prides’ signatures and on what the inscriptions and other markings in this particular book might tell us.

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see remember me” (Zz5v).84 Pride’s volume, as we are clearly justified in calling it, is also fascinating for her vilification of the man from whom she received the book: “Elizabeth Pride her [B]ook giuen her [by the] Lord Lar[ra]nce a ugly Lord a rogue a folle of a Lord.” Lest her point be missed, Pride wrote the sentiment multiple times and on multiple pages.85 Such inscriptions often tell us more about the relationships between the individuals who shared the book than they do about the relationships between the inscribers and the books themselves. But of course there are exceptions, such as gift-related inscriptions that confirm a woman’s familiarity with romance where there is no other proof. Such is the case with Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80), who—in her romance-inflected autobiographical narrative—does not provide specific romance titles or even acknowledge that she has read romance. Yet not only did her sister, Elizabeth Puckering, own multiple romances, as noted above, but an inscription in a copy of Fanshawe’s husband’s translation of the Spanish dramatic romance To Love Only for Love Sake86 also indicates that she gave a copy of this book to their son and knew it intimately enough to make corrections to it. This inscription, which reads “for my Deare Sonn Sr Richard ffanshawe … No th18 1670,” is completely in keeping with her efforts in and through her autobiography to keep her husband’s memory alive for her son.87 Furthermore, the 1670 edition of To Love Only for Love Sake was for private circulation only and was published after translator Richard Fanshawe’s death (Davidson 23), thus precluding the possibility that he himself inscribed it for his son. Although examples like this one are individually illuminating, however, my research into women’s inscriptions in and annotations of print romance suggests that we cannot draw any firm conclusions about how women, as a category, read these texts that they owned and, in some cases, seemingly cherished. It is often impossible to link a specific annotation or marking to a specific woman, and it can be just as challenging to interpret a reader’s markings. But we can begin to understand the range of access women had to romance texts and what their interactions with the genre may have involved. We know, for example, that women inscribed romances that were deemed valuable enough to be kept within a family 84 Babcock, “A Book of Her Own,” speculates that multiple inscriptions of the same name “sugges[t] a degree of attachment to the volumes that might indicate a greater commitment to or familiarity with the contents” (13), yet these multiple iterations could just as easily indicate penmanship practice. 85 Another glimpse of a confident and assertive female reader-owner-annotator appears in the annotations of an “Elysabeth” in a 1550 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Works described by Wiggins, “What.” Among other things, “Elysabeth” speaks directly to Chaucer and attempts to “correct Chaucer’s version of [the Legend of Good Women]” (32). 86 This particular copy of Richard Fanshawe’s translation of Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza’s Querer Por Solo Querer (1623) is Folger H3789; the inscription appears on the verso of the title page. 87 Richard, who was only 10 months old when his father died, was the Fanshawes’ only surviving son. See Chapter 3 for my analysis of Ann’s life writing.

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for generations, as suggested by Mary Bisshope’s copy of Argenis, in which the following inscription was added to the others on the title page: “[Ha]rriet Anne Bisshopp writes her name [in] this Book June 18[th] 1798 107 yrs after C: & M: Bisshopp.” Harriet’s precise dating indicates her pride in inheriting this book. Similarly, a copy of Chaucer’s Works (William Thynne’s 1550 edition, Folger STC 5074, Copy 2) that was owned and inscribed by many women was a valued family possession, evidencing “a remarkable unbroken sequence of female ownership stretching over a century from before 1578 until 1677” (Wiggins, “What” 29). Therefore, even if the presence of romance and other similarly “light reading” in a woman’s collection meant that her books might be dismissed as “leisure reading … not considered important enough to be bound”—as was the fate of Wolfreston’s collection (Morgan 195, 196)—the romances themselves argue the opposite, definitively revealing the value that women once attributed to them. Women as Romance Readers Finally, early modern Englishwomen read romance. Limited but invaluable marginalia evidence testifies to this fact, especially in the cases of book collector and frequent annotator Frances Wolfreston and serial diarist Anne Clifford (1590– 1676). We know Clifford “read” Argenis, for example, because a secretary or reader wrote in the book that “I began to reade this booke to yor: Ladiship the xvjth of Jannuary 1625,”88 and we know that she read a 1605 edition of Arcadia because of a comment in her own hand that reads “This Booke did I beegine to Red over att Skipton in Craven aboutt the Latter=ende of Januarey and I made an ende of Reding itt all ower in Apellby Castell … Marche folloing, in 1651” (qtd. in Hackett, Women 7).89 For Clifford, annotation seems to have been an important aspect of the reading process no matter who did the actual reading: she “alternated between annotating books when she read ‘by herself’ and dictating marginalia as her servants read books aloud to her” (Brayman Hackel, Reading 49). She also recorded romance reading in her diaries and gave a number of specific romances, including Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, and Argenis, privileged positions in her famous pictorial representation of herself standing in front of her bookshelves.90 The “Great Picture,” as it has come to be known, may not be “a complete record of the books available to her,” David McKitterick observes. But “[i]t does 88 I am grateful to Heather Wolfe for bringing this book, Huntington Library 97024, to my attention. 89 In a different source—a diary entry for 1617—Clifford notes “hearing Moll Nevil read the Arcadia” (qtd. in Brayman Hackel, Reading 233). Such evidence suggests that Clifford engaged in “multiple readings of texts at different points in her life, from different vantage points” (234). 90 Scholars have devoted significant commentary to this triptych portrait. For its relationship to Clifford’s reading, see esp. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 222–40, and Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject.”

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establish, in the clearest possible fashion, those books or authors that, on looking back over her life, she considered to have been most important to her” (369). Indeed, Brayman Hackel’s analysis of Clifford’s Argenis annotations suggest “its resonance with Clifford’s life” and the particular appeal—for her—of its “spirited, well-educated princess negotiating a perilous, male-dominated political realm” (238). Thus marginalia—where it exists—provides valuable insights into women’s relationship with the romance genre. Romance, Clifford’s example demonstrates, could have a formative influence on early modern women. But in most cases, early modern Englishwomen seem to have been more willing to write their names in romances than to annotate them, thus leaving numerous unanswered questions like the ones posed by Brayman Hackel in her study of the non-annotating but book-owning Countess of Bridgewater: What are we to make of this absence? Did Lady Bridgewater merely possess her books as objects of status? Were they read aloud to her? Did she read them without marking in them? If so, another series of questions arises about why she did not mark her books as an active reader: did she not consider herself a serious reader? Did she not re-read her books? Or did she, like her daughter-in-law, read them and make notes elsewhere? (“Countess” 145–6)91

Indeed, there are many ways in which a woman could be a reader but leave no material traces. For instance, “women must have read many books that were owned by family members, friends, or neighbors” (Babcock 12) and in this way escaped the historical record altogether.92 In other cases, women were read to but no record kept. And in the case of the “aggressively” annotated Sidney text that was signed by Shepheard and two Wylde women, among others, Brayman Hackel’s speculation that it “was glossed by a more sophisticated, educated reader for someone else, perhaps Dorothy Wylde” (Reading 169) offers yet another possibility—that a woman might have read romance with the help of another’s annotations rather than her own. Fortunately, marginalia is “just one of the signs of active, engaged reading in the period” (146, emphasis added). In order to more fully understand women’s reading of romance, therefore, we must read in the margins of the margins, as it were, looking not to the romances themselves but to the textual artifacts inspired by and responding to them. The Countess of Pembroke, for example, was clearly an engaged romance reader; she read her brother’s Arcadia sheet by sheet as he sent the pages to her (Newcomb, “Gendering” 125) and later played an editorial role in its posthumous publication. In another example, Lady Katherine Manners (1603–49) “cop[ied] sections The daughter-in-law referred to here was Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, who “recorded her reading of the Bible in a manuscript book of meditations” (Brayman Hackel, “Countess” 159n39). 92 As Newcomb similarly observes of Greene’s Pandosto, “given early modern reading practices, we can imagine that a typical copy was read not just by its first buyer but also by the buyer’s friends and, as long as it lasted, descendants” (Reading 3). 91

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from [the Arcadia] into her commonplace book,” likely for handwriting practice (Brayman Hackel, Reading 156) but nonetheless creating a unique combination of materials as was the nature of commonplace book practice. But the life writing by and about early modern women offers one of the best sources of evidence for their romance reading, even if this evidence is not as extensive as it is for the more acceptable types of reading described above. Although I return to many of these examples throughout the book, I provide a thorough list of references to romance reading here in order to demonstrate just how widespread it was and to suggest the range of reasons for it. Passing time pleasantly seems to be one of the most common, as evidenced by Rich’s brother Robert Boyle “readeing playes & Romances” (“Postscript” 260) to the female company while visiting the Countess’s home in the summer of 164893 and the young Mary North entertaining her family with evening romance recitations. As Roger North describes the latter, Mary “diverted her sisters and all the female society at work together (as the use of that family was) with rehearsing by heart prolix romances, with the substance of speeches and letters as well as passages; and this with little or no hesitation but in a continual series of discourse” (qtd. in Thomas 3). Though Roger’s parenthetical pointedly reminds the reader that his family’s women put work before idle pleasure and his use of the word “prolix” acknowledges the common critique that romance’s never-ending narratives could be tedious, he nonetheless expresses nostalgia and admiration, claiming that the “memory … is to me … very wonderful” (3). Here we see romance playing an appreciated, even vital role in early modern domestic life. However, although references to romance reading consistently acknowledge pleasure, they not surprisingly emphasize moral, emotional, and intellectual engagement even more. As noted above, Arnold Boate tells us that his wife, Margaret, relished romances for their elegant style and morally exemplary characters. Isham similarly found moral value in romance but seems also to have read it as a cure for melancholy: my friends thinking that the Booke of Marters made me mallancoly though I found no harm it did my brother lent me Sir phillips sidnes Booke (and after Spencer) which I hard much comended by some. and others againe discomended the reading of such Bookes of love. but I found no such hurt. (26r) 93 It should be noted that this was pleasant for the ladies but not, it seems, for Robert, who writes of this “serious Idlenes” (Boyle, “Postscript” 260) that the [s]trainge unsesonableness of the weather, has made it selfe appeere a Comparative good; by produceing an effect soe much worse then the Cause, as is the Confyning our Ladyes to mine, by an Imprisonmt: of all other Companie, and this has kept me soe incessantly employ’d, either in waiteing on them abroade, or readeinge them at home. (259–60) Significantly, the presence of the famously pious Mary at this reading is unclear: “[i]t remains uncertain whether Mary absented herself from such diversions or piously misremembered the chronology of her conversion when writing of it twenty-three years later” (Principe, “Style” 254).

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Thus she proceeded to read “sir phillips sidny for the most part on evenings” (26r).94 Elizabeth Pepys’s desire to talk to her husband, the consummate diarist Samuel, about Madeleine de Scudéry’s The Grand Cyrus,95 a request that he notes in a 1666 diary entry (Zurcher, “Serious” 383), suggests some kind of intellectual engagement with romance, as does the eagerness with which Dorothy Osborne (1627–94/95) read and discussed romances with her friends. In her letters to her future husband, Sir William Temple, she specifically mentions Gaulthier de Coste de la Calprenède’s Cléopatre (57 and passim),96 Scudéry’s The Grand Cyrus (79 and passim)97 and Ibraham (131 and 180), Martin le Roy de Gomberville’s Polexandre (131),98 Le Mair’s La Prazimène,99 and Parthenissa (179–80). It seems that the multivolume French heroic romances that so captivated seventeenthcentury Englishwomen like Osborne100 engaged readers through both story and character: “[t]he romanciers offered stories concerning different characters, and invited their readers to ponder the merits of the decisions taken by different lovers. Dorothy Osborne was a perfectly pliant reader in this respect” (N. Smith 242). But of course not all writers explain their motivations for reading romance, and in these cases we must be content that they document romance reading at all. The poet Katherine Philips (1632–64) frequently mentions romance in her correspondence (Hobby 88), produced numerous poems that bear traces of the genre’s influence, and even named herself “The Matchless Orinda.”101 The young Lady Anne Hyde (1637–71) lists several romances—specifically Ibrahim, Le Grand Cyrus, and Cléopatre—among the books she hopes her father will buy her (7r). And Richard Baxter claims that his wife, Margaret, read romance (Breviate 4), though he does not identify titles. Both Rich and Lady Elizabeth Delaval 94 This claim appears in one of Isham’s many marginal annotations. Robert Boyle also claims that he was given romance to help him recover from melancholy (Account 8–9). 95 Artamène; où le Grand Cyrus (1645–53) was among the most popular of the seventeenth-century French heroic romances. 96 Osborne read this romance in the original (K. Parker 280n9). 97 Osborne also read The Grand Cyrus, one of her favorites, in the original (K. Parker 296n10). 98 This French romance, set in Mexico, was translated into English in 1647 but eventually was overshadowed by those of Scudéry and Calprenède, among others (Constans and van Roosbroeck 302). 99 Two texts with this character, La Prazimène and Suite de la Prazimène, were translated into English by Roger Boyle (K. Parker 327n10), but no name beyond “Le Mair” is available for the original author. Osborne says she “saw but 4 Tomes of her and was told the Gentleman that writt her Storry dyed when those were finnish’d” (131). 100 As Hero Chalmers, “‘The Person I Am,” notes, both “cavalier noblewomen and their exiled husbands became particularly avid readers” of the French heroic romance that began to appear in the 1640s (168, emphasis added). 101 According to Patrick Thomas, editor of Philips’s Poems, Philips likely founded “Orinda’s Society” while at boarding school in the early 1640s and took many of the girls’ coterie names from plays (3–4). Via these coterie names, many of her poems operate as roman à clef.

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(1648/49–1716) frequently lament their early romance reading, though Rich does not include titles and Delaval lists many, including Casander, The Grand Cyrus, Cleopatra, and Astrea (15). And An Collins (fl. 1653) says she was willing to hear “prophane Histories; which gave not that satisfactory contentment, before mencioned” (“To the Reader” 1) when the reading material she preferred was not available. Mary Hatton (later Helsby) (fl. 1653–1668) seems to have had similarly mixed feelings, which she expressed in a letter to her future husband, Randolph: I do not me thinks approue of stories of romaunce all so alike that they seem as if I had read ye same one hundred times, besides that how vain it was (for him which writt it) to make ye yong gentle woman run awaie wth a sweet hearte (her young[er] of many years) when all were agreed upon ye matche saue only his more sober unckle, tis all as olde as Helsby towre.102

Of course, Hatton’s complaint, which seems more about narrative choice than about moral value, reveals significant familiarity with the genre. Elizabeth Blackadder, in contrast, seems to have been inspired rather than frustrated by the romance narratives she knew, for she claims to have enjoyed telling romance-like stories as a young girl even though—as an adult—she describes this habit as “evil” (386). These are just the explicit references. When reading between the lines, especially in moments when women mention other controversial behaviors like going to plays, one can often assume that romance reading was indulged in as well. Therefore, despite the pedagogical and moral debates and the scholarly assumptions of a female readership focused almost exclusively on spiritual texts, romance had a firm place in early modern aristocratic life, offering an entertaining and pleasant way to pass the time, providing fodder for conversation, stimulating women’s intellect and creativity, and—perhaps most importantly, if somewhat paradoxically—contributing to the impression of good breeding among elite women, for whom the genre had powerful courtly associations. The Moral of the Story Reasons for reading romance of course changed over time, just as the changing nature of romance led to changes in reading methods. As I demonstrate in subsequent chapters, early modern women eventually took their engagement with the genre from the realm of private thought or conversation with others to the written page. And it is this evidence, even more than the references surveyed above, that most helps to fill in the narrative of women’s ever-changing and complex relationship with romance. Indeed, where the material evidence fails us or introduces too many interpretive gaps, women’s life writing reveals their intimate knowledge of the genre, which they often deployed to enhance their tales as well as to actually determine the selves created therein. 102 This comment appears in Hatton’s letter of March 27, 1655, which is Folger MS X.d.493 (6). I am grateful to Heather Wolfe for telling me about Hatton’s fascinating letters.

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The principle at work here—the idea that reading determines writing—is both familiar and historically appropriate, for “Humanist education and literary imitation placed reading at the center of early modern conceptions of writing” (Brayman Hackel, Reading 52). Indeed, this understanding of the relationship between reading and writing explains at least one aspect of the anti-romance contingent’s concern: that women’s reading of romance would “lead them away from devotion towards diversion or, perhaps worse, away from housewifery and into writing” (155). For the many cases in which this did, in fact, happen, the insights revealed on the page are invaluable, including revelations about “the particular way in which a woman writer traces the domestic and psychological record” (Wray, “Recovering” 37) and—more generally—about the “connection (one that is, of necessity, shifting and oblique) between the readings a woman conducts and the methods she utilises to inscribe herself on the writing page” (37–8).103 Thus we reach the final step in Tyler’s chain of logic: women’s writing of romance.104 A few wrote fictional romance, and these have been given more—if not enough—scholarly attention. But many produced romances of their own lives and a few others produced autobiographical romance. In both cases, I argue, their experimentation with romancing the self was a direct result of their romance reading.

I have been deeply influenced by Ramona Wray’s essay, “Recovering the Reading of Renaissance Englishwomen: Deployments of Autobiography,” which shares many methodologies and findings with my own work, especially in regard to fictional models for women’s life writing: the model for fictionalisation in the autobiographical form is very often a work belonging to a particular literary genre. If … self-imaginings and selfpresentations have a basis in a discrete generic bedrock, then it may be possible to resurrect a woman’s reading habits through a dissection of the interplay between fiction and the autobiographical statement. … An understanding of how fictional models inflect an individual self-presentation could, in this argument, provide a key to understanding how those fictional models have been absorbed and interpreted in the first place. The revelation of an autobiographer’s enlisting of particular generic motifs and conventions might thus help to reveal not only what she had read but also the ways in which she had been aided in her modes of textual understanding. (37–8) 104 Although, as Brayman Hackel notes, Tyler’s argument technically only permitted women who were dedicatees of romance to also become readers, translators, and authors of the genre (Reading 54), Tyler’s logic clearly has much greater applicability. 103

Chapter 2

The Woman’s Autobiographical Voice in Early Modern Romance “[H]eere this my story,” says Candiana as she begins to share her tale with her aunt Pamphilia in Lady Mary Wroth’s The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (357).1 Like many of her fellow female characters in this romance and others of the early modern period, she proceeds to author a tale and narrate life experience at one and the same time, thus offering a potentially powerful model of female authorship and autobiographical expression. Yet the authorial work of characters like Candiana is frequently overlooked, as female voices in romance take a back seat to female beauty and vulnerability. Next to the knight on his quest, the romance’s female heroine performs one of the genre’s most important roles. According to the character formula for most early modern romance, this heroine is a beautiful, highly sought-after woman of noble blood who endures unimaginable hardships before finally being united in love to a man of equally good character, beauty, and name.2 She acts with varying degrees of resourcefulness but is almost always dependent upon men, especially her beloved, for her salvation from any number of trials, most often involving fierce beasts, wicked men and women, deceptive sorcerers, and even her own parents or guardians—who typically try to force her to marry a man she does not love. She is adored; she is served by countless suitors; and, in return, she sighs … a lot. But what is much less remarked-upon in this familiar scenario is that, like Candiana, she also speaks. Indeed, the women of early modern romance are exceptionally talented storytellers, capable of vocalizing much more than a simple rhetoric of sighs.3 They tell their own life stories, others’ life stories, and entertaining fictions that not only advance the plot but also often enable selfknowledge and self-preservation. In the pages that follow, I examine the full range of tales and rhetorical methods employed by these fictional storytelling women. Since so many of the narratives they share are their own life stories, I argue that these female characters may have modeled, for female readers, the act of autobiographical representation 1 All references to Wroth’s two-volume Urania are to Josephine A. Roberts’s editions (The Second Part co-edited with Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller); unless noted otherwise, references are to The First Part. 2 At least, this is the general trajectory. But of course many romances resist closure. 3 I allude here to Irish poet Eavan Boland’s “What Language Did,” in which her speaker hears the lament of three traditional female characters in the Western poetic canon—a shepherdess, the woman-turned-constellation Cassiopeia, and a mermaid— who claim to have been trapped and victimized by language such that they “languish in a grammar of sighs” (line 40).

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that became increasingly common among women through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In other words, romance’s female characters modeled self-narration for female readers who were also—or who became—life writers. Furthermore, the tales these romance characters tell demonstrate a critical link between identity and the narrative/s one constructs to convey that identity, suggesting that—in many ways—one’s story is one’s self. Like their storytelling counterparts, therefore, life writers engage in serious work when they begin to narrate their life stories, no matter the motive or intended audience. In subsequent chapters, I analyze several examples of romance-inflected life writing by early modern Englishwomen in order to demonstrate the frequency with which such women mined and manipulated romance material, as well as the many reasons why the romance genre offered a powerful discourse with which individuals (especially women) could articulate their own life stories. But here I focus primarily on the embedded narrative technique that enabled the female voice and women’s stories to figure so prominently on the printed page. The embedded narrative technique itself is relatively straightforward, involving the placement of one story within another story—either the primary (i.e. frame) narrative or another embedded story.4 Such tales are almost always “complete Many other terms refer to the same technique. For “interpolated tale/story/history,” see Merrilee Cunningham, “The Interpolated Tale in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I”; Rodney Delasanta, The Epic Voice; Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen; and Elizabeth A. Spiller, “Speaking for the Dead: King Charles, Anna Weamys, and the Commemorations of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.” For “retrospective narrative,” see Arthur Amos, Time, Space, and Value: The Narrative Structure of the New Arcadia; Nancy Rothwax Lindheim, “Sidney’s ‘Arcadia,’ Book II: Retrospective Narrative”; Michael McCanles, “The Rhetoric of Character Portrayal in Sidney’s New ‘Arcadia’” and The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World; and Roberts, Architectonic Knowledge in the “New Arcadia” (1590): Sidney’s Use of the Heroic Journey. For “retrospective ‘récit,’” see Gabriele Rippl, “‘The Conflict Betwixt Love and Honor,’” and Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction. For “delegated narration,” see Amos, Cunningham, and Delasanta. For “inset tale/fiction,” see Jennifer Lee Carrell, “A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance”; Alex Davis, “‘The Web of His Story’: Narrating Miso’s Poem and Mopsa’s Tale in Book 2 of the New Arcadia”; and Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “Gendering Prose Romance.” For “subsidiary history” and “retrospective history,” see Salzman. And for “restricted story/ narration,” see Cunningham and Delasanta. The French term, pertinent because of the great popularity of French romances in seventeenth-century England, is “le récit.” In all cases, the authors generally refer to narrative moments that are clearly framed and set off from their primary texts. However, it should be noted that it is not always easy to determine if a passage is an embedded story or simply an extended speech by a single character; in the world of early modern narrative, narration is a messy blend of voices for which “story” is only one means of organization. It should also be noted that the embedded narrative technique is related to, but not the same as, entrelacement, the interweaving of multiple themes and storylines characteristic of medieval cyclic romances. For the history of interweaving, as well as its eventual replacement by self-contained embedded stories, see Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance, esp. 68–98. 4

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stories in their own right … with beginnings, middles, and ends” (Delasanta 123), and they have their own narrators, characters who speak with their own voices and their own agendas that are often quite distinct from—and sometimes at odds with—the primary narrator’s. Furthermore, both male and female characters can and do take on the narrative role. The embedded narrative technique works particularly effectively in the romance genre because of two key functions. First, and most obviously, it enables flashbacks for texts that begin in medias res, as do most romances, epics, and romance-epic hybrids.5 Second, it contributes to the digressive plot structure for which romances are known—and often condemned—by bringing the primary narrative to a halt each time a character begins a new tale and thus redirecting the reader’s attention to that story instead.6 Although this function is clearly related to the first, it is much more than simply a tool of plot,7 for it effectively undermines the authority of the primary narrative as the reader’s focus shifts not only to individual tales and their tellers but also to the nature of storytelling itself. As Harry Berger, Jr. asks of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 and 96): [t]he question is, does it make a difference if, instead of merely reading the poem as a piece of storytelling, we approach it as a poem that represents storytelling, and does so in a manner that isn’t innocent, a manner that interrogates the values and motives, the politics and ideology, embedded in the structure of storytelling? (3)

Traditional distinctions between romance and epic are to a large extent artificial and over-stated. Thus the three primary texts I discuss in this chapter are better understood as hybrids of the two forms: Wroth’s Urania is a prose romance of epic proportions; Sir Philip Sidney’s revised but unfinished Arcadia forever lingers between romance (the Old Arcadia) and epic (the revised New Arcadia); and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene continually vacillates between epic and romance. 6 For the cultural anxiety about textual dilation, which finds one manifestation in romance’s never-ending and digressive plots, see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. As Spenser’s Faerie Queene frequently makes clear, wandering too far and too often from the primary plot inevitably means getting lost in the narrative and moral intricacies of Error’s Wood. Error herself is not only huge, “lothsom,” and “[p]ointed with mortall sting” (I.i.14.9, 15.4) but also exceedingly textual, “[h]er vomit full of bookes and papers” (20.6). 7 Unfortunately, perhaps because the embedded narrative technique’s plot function is so obvious and seemingly straightforward, critical discussion of this key romance element is relatively limited. Salzman, English Prose Fiction, discusses the role of the récit generally in French heroic romance, Delasanta deals directly with the embedded narrative as such in his consideration of delegated narration in the in medias res epic, and a few other scholars consider the use of embedded narrative in a single text. These include Carrell, who addresses storytelling as part of her larger discussion of the blending of fact and fiction in Urania; Cunningham, who considers five interpolated tales in Book I of The Faerie Queene; and Mary Ellen Lamb, who discusses two of the Arcadia’s embedded tales in “Exhibiting Class and Displaying the Body in Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.” 5

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If we answer Berger’s question with a resounding “yes,” as I do,8 then numerous avenues of inquiry into the rich metanarrative possibilities of the embedded narrative technique in story-laden texts like The Faerie Queene become available. Indeed, my research into the stories narrated specifically by female characters points to a sophisticated approach on the part of romance authors to narrative and rhetorical technique, as well as a thorough understanding of the complexities and nuances of female speech, both good and bad; at the same time, my research demonstrates that, regardless of an author or primary narrator’s ultimate attitude toward a female storyteller, her voice cannot be totally silenced once introduced into the text. On the contrary, her voice and her tale continue to do their work. This chapter relates in large part what such female storytellers, collectively, have to say. However, in order to do justice to the complexity of the embedded narrative technique that enables these voices, I first thoroughly explicate how the technique works for characters of both genders; then describe the basic formula according to which autobiographical embedded narratives work in romance; next examine female-narrated tales in particular; and finally explain what female readers may have found (and—in at least one case—did find) in these tales. Romance’s Embedded Narratives There are many ways in which the multiplicity of voices created by the embedded narrative technique works to destabilize narrative and the privileged position of author. First, storytelling scenes tend to reveal power structures by highlighting the dynamics at work in any given exchange. Second, on a related note, they encourage readers to distrust narrative and to recognize the fictionality inherent in all tales, even those that appear to be true. This is particularly the case with romances in which the storytelling structure is several layers deep, as stories embedded within other stories create a complex web of narrative threads. In such cases, the primary narrative becomes temporarily secondary to the embedded narratives that comprise it, and the reader is led further and further into an increasingly fictional and unstable world in which a character’s true account of his/her life is given equal time with stories of varying degrees of truth. These range from slightly fictionalized tales, such as the noble Musidorus’s idealized autobiography in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,9 to completely false ones, such as the deceptive tales of a female spirit in The Second Part of Urania. Third, as the 8 Although Berger’s argument in “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene” primarily addresses the storytelling done by Spenser’s primary narrator, its implications for embedded story are obvious; Berger himself uses the embedded story told by Phedon in Book II as the central example on which he builds his case. 9 In contrast to the Old Arcadia, which has a relatively straightforward narrative structure, Sidney’s revised text often incorporates several layers of embedded stories, leading the reader into extended narratives of past events for several pages at a time. I have counted 26 embedded narratives in this version, as opposed to nine in its precursor.

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reader begins to empathize or identify with multiple distinct voices rather than a single authoritative narrator, the primary narrator loses significance, exclusive control, and even a certain amount of credibility. In the process, the characters’ conversations reach beyond the page, entering into larger cultural conversations as well as conversation with the reader, which in turn authorizes that reader to ponder the same ideas.10 The devaluation of the primary author’s voice and increased validation of the reader’s is further reinforced by the fact that so many romance authors resist closure and instead invite readers to continue the stories in their own work. The conversations begun by Sidney thus continue in the works of Wroth, Anna Weamys, and others who revive Sidney’s characters and stories and whose versions of these characters introduce new voices and perspectives. Beyond these destabilizing effects and the most obvious function of conveying significant information about characters and past events, embedded narratives perform many other functions for both readers and characters, including providing a range of educational moments;11 detailing the personal experience, or proof, necessary for a character to justify a particular argument or decision; and gaining or maintaining reader interest by creating the captivating world of story time, usually in the voice of a participant in the tale or an eyewitness to the action. In nearly all of these cases, a tale lends greater complexity to the text in which it appears, in part because it mimics the act of narration itself. Indeed, the range, complexity, and frequent use of embedded stories in all kinds of early modern texts suggest a heightened awareness of fictionality itself and a new sense of the rhetorical in all narrative moments. However, since early modern attitudes about all uses of rhetoric, but especially storytelling, were highly conflicted, the embedded narrative technique also occupies a tension-fraught space within the development of narrative and the authorial voice

For the cultural conversations to which fictional characters contribute, see Dale Bauer, Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community. Although Bauer’s work specifically addresses the novel, her theory resonates for early modern romance and epic-romance, themselves precursors of the novel. Indeed, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories— which Bauer revises in Feminist Dialogics—have been frequently and usefully applied to medieval and early modern literature. 11 As noted in the Introduction, stories were seen by writers like Sidney as a particularly effective means of conveying lessons or moral truths. Thus, embedded narratives might be instructive for readers as well as for other characters. An example of the latter appears in The Second Part of Urania, when Pamphilia, who requests and then hears the miserable nymph Leutissia’s story about her beloved’s sad fate, is better able to see her own faults as a result of the tale: Pamphilia, who till then thought her self the onely patterne of love, found she was heerin surpassed, … she found [a] flawe in her owne misfortunes and yettcontinued love, though just, as made her chide her self onely, blush att her pretty falacies, and extoll the Nimphe, who in chastetie of love might seeme sacred. (313) 10

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in general.12 This explains how a character like Musidorus, one of the two primary heroes of Arcadia, is simultaneously a manipulative storyteller. All is not right in Arcadia, and the reader’s confusion about how to read Musidorus and the world that produced him is matched only by that of the characters themselves. Most embedded tales within the richly layered narrative world of romance follow a familiar pattern that involves first some kind of pre-tale negotiation (such as a request or a decision to share stories), then the story itself, and finally a response (such as a decision about whether to act on a storyteller’s request, the identification of “best tale” in a storytelling competition, or a request for a followup story). Because of the complex rhetorical moments in which these narratives often occur, a tale’s reception depends on several factors. These include the speaker’s skill; the social status, gender, and political allegiances of both speaker and auditor/s; the particular time and setting in which a tale is told; and the degree of truth assigned to the story by all the parties involved. Since so many of romance’s embedded narratives are the narrators’ life stories, and therefore ostensibly true, storytelling moments often involve unspoken implications for a character’s fate as well. If a female character reveals an immoral act in her past, for example, she must rely on the good will of her auditor/s to avoid being punished or ostracized. If an auditor does not believe her tale, either she or her reputation may be put in danger. And if she takes liberties with her account, then she becomes a kind of villain because of her willingness to take advantage of her auditor/s. The possible scenarios are endless—as I demonstrate below—and effectively illustrate the extraordinary pitfalls and dangers as well as advantages that a culture anxious about rhetorical power assigned to the written and spoken word. What is particularly striking about the prevalence of female storytellers in early modern romance is that they confront such risks—most of which involve threats to their reputations—head-on in the “public” narration of their own selves as texts. Numerous aspects of early modern England’s gendered ideology made taletelling particularly risky for women, beginning with the idealized concept of female silence. The prohibitions around women’s speech in early modern England have been well rehearsed.13 Among other things, we now understand that, while 12 The early modern period’s conflicted and anxious attitude toward rhetoric is a critical commonplace and can be traced to similar attitudes in classical texts like Plato’s Phaedrus. On the one hand, skillful and ethical rhetoric was valued for its extraordinary persuasive power, especially in a political context. On the other hand, it was understood that rhetorical power could be manipulated in deceptive ways. In the case of storytelling, in particular, the pleasure and directness that were thought to inculcate a certain passivity or even enchanted state within a story’s auditors or readers were in part blamed for its ideological power. In the case of female storytellers, of course, this concern was only heightened. See also Lamb, “Old Wives’ Tales, George Peele, and Narrative Abjection,” and Berger. 13 For the most important of these works, which tend to also address women’s authorial efforts in the face of such prohibitions, see Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance; Margaret Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–88; Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent & Obedient;

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the biblical ideal of female silence was theoretically lauded and disseminated as one of the cardinal female virtues, the reality was likely quite different, or at least more complicated, especially for aristocratic women who were trained in the art of courtly conversation.14 Different rules also obtained for domestic settings as opposed to more public ones. Nonetheless, a woman’s reputation often depended on how closely her behavior aligned with the ideal model of womanhood that emphasized silence, chastity, obedience, and humility. Indeed, the interlinked nature of these virtues often meant that violating one implicitly meant violation of the others; to speak in inappropriate settings or tones was, for example, to risk appearing disobedient, immodest, and bold. To make matters worse, storytelling’s traditional association with negative female types, such as enchantresses, nurses, gossips, and bawds, meant that when a woman played the storyteller, she would inevitably arouse concerns, however subconscious or unspoken, about how long she would speak, how honestly,15 and to what purpose. Indeed, the rhetorical and narrative emphasis on controlling copia, or textual expansion, was at this time implicitly related to the need to control wayward women, as Patricia Parker convincingly argues in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, a study of dilation in both its textual and physical manifestations: The supposed copiousness of the female tongue has its textual counterpart in the danger of losing the thread of a discourse and never being able to finish what was begun, the specter of endlessness or inability to come to a point which Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance; Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle; Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England; Parker, Literary Fat Ladies; and Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700. 14 Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, notes that “the great art most essential to the lady is … the art of speech: discourse with every sort of people … on every sort of subject … on every sort of occasion” (264). This point is illustrated in Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier when the Magnifico Julian includes skillful conversation in the perfect court lady’s repertoire: “for her that liveth in Court, me thinke there beelongeth unto her above all other thinges, a certein sweetnesse in language that may delite, wherby she may gentlie entertein all kinde of men with talke woorth the person she communeth withal” (217). For further discussion of the unique freedoms and dangers associated with a court lady’s speech, see Krontiris, esp. 14–15. 15 This stereotypical suspicion is also well documented and clearly linked to and reinforced by traditional readings of Eve. An excellent example of male distrust of female speech—even when spoken by the purest of female types—appears in Father Thomas Hunter’s compilation of the Life of Catherine Burton, an English nun in a Carmelite convent in Antwerp. As Hunter explains, I had several times, on set purpose, put her upon recounting some particular passage wch happened many years before and allways found her as exactly precise to every minute circumstance, as if she had seen it then translated before her eyes, a convinceing proof to me, yt it was not a fiction of her own head, made at random by ye force of imagination and fancy. (139)

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hovers around the edges of all these characterizations of a female speech as “penelopes webb.” (26)16

Therefore, it is not at all surprising that romance’s most respected and successful female storytellers generally exhibit humility, show awareness of audience, carefully control and organize their material, and maintain a clear sense of purpose throughout their narrations, often conveying noble, culturally appropriate motivations even when their material is somewhat problematic.17 Even a few of the most conventional aspects of embedded tale-telling, such as narratives focused on courtship, marriage, and some kind of pain or betrayal in love and the tales’ frequently autobiographical perspective, carry greater risk for female tellers than for their male counterparts. Tales that begin with the narrator’s birth or childhood and conclude with the situation that prompted the narration ostensibly support the plot by providing crucial information about how events have reached their current state. But through such lengthy, autobiographical digressions, these tales also inject strikingly private, or personal, narratives into what were understood as relatively public domains (such as a mixed audience of men and women or an entire royal court) and into the larger public realm of literature and its ever-expanding reading audience. Putting such tales into the mouths of female characters is, therefore, especially complex. In addition to traditional concerns about female garrulity and women’s use of speech to seduce or deceive, embedded narratives’ tendency toward autobiography renders a female character’s speech act even more problematic, since—in speaking publicly—she makes public her life story. The female speaker thus makes her very person into a text, one that is aurally absorbed, perused, and “read” by her fellow characters, as well as literally As Parker further argues, the fact that numerous manifestations of dilation are associated with the female body—the open mouth of the gossip, the expanded body of the expectant mother, and the dilated genitalia of the woman during sex and labor—also helps to equate the feminine with expansion of all sorts, including the textual. For storytelling’s negative association with women, see also Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, esp. 12–16; Lamb, “Old Wives’ Tales” and “Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School”; Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers; and Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, who argues that assigning women to the role of storyteller—usually an unthreatening, uneducated one— actually distanced them from more powerful roles like writing or collecting tales (51). For the gendered nature of the early modern oral tradition in general, see the essays collected in Lamb and Karen Bamford, Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. 17 Eckerle examines this successful model in “Urania’s Example: The Female Storyteller in Early Modern English Romance,” arguing that the lesson conveyed by this type of character to her female readers was that successful storytelling on the part of a woman meant exhibiting a combination of virtuous woman, rhetor, storyteller, and author. It follows that romance’s unsuccessful female storytellers (of which there are also plenty) are malicious and deceptive; siren-like seductresses; or simply inept, unaware of when to stop talking, how to attend to their auditors’ needs, or how to organize a tale effectively. 16

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read by early modern readers. According to the chaste-silent-obedient trap, she is perceived as naming herself as “whore” as she offers herself—in the form of her story—to her auditors. One must consider, therefore, why the risk is worth it for some female characters, just as we must ask why the few early modern female life writers who actually published their work in print chose to go public in that way.18 Certainly, some venues for autobiographical narration are safer than others, such as storytelling exclusively among women19 and recording personal meditations in a private notebook. But even such safe zones can be breached, as when Arcadia’s Pyrocles and Basilius intrude on a female storytelling circle or when a real-life husband or spiritual advisor publishes a woman’s private writings after her death. In other cases, urgency overrides safety, as when a romance character must tell her story in order to secure assistance of some kind or when a woman like Anne Wentworth (c. 1630–fl. 1677), a self-proclaimed prophet, thought that publicly sharing her story was essential to her divinely ordained mission. But the fact that individuals did take the risk suggests both the power and self-satisfaction involved in the autobiographical act. In other words, taking charge of one’s own narrative meets a need, or perhaps multiple needs, that can often be traced in the rhetorical choices revealed in the narratives themselves. Indeed, the many risks of women’s self-narration in romance are matched by a fair number of benefits, both for characters and real-life authors and readers. As noted above, many of romance’s female storytellers demonstrate a basic awareness and mastery of rhetorical strategy, thus making available methods that are equally important to the early modern female writer and might be imitated in a range of writing by women who read romance. But more importantly, and perhaps preliminary to this point, the subversive space created by many of romance’s embedded tales opens these texts and their readers to a new awareness of female speech and narrative power. The effect of the typically silent female voice introducing information about typically personal female experience into the more public sphere of fictional texts and their readers is especially powerful, for the female voice gains increased authority as a conveyor of certain types of knowledge, specifically those based in personal experience and the domestic sphere. This seeming benefit certainly has the negative potential to reinforce misogynist stereotypes, as is demonstrated all

18 I distinguish here between print publication and manuscript publication, the latter of which often entailed a more controlled readership. 19 In her fascinating “‘For Worth, Not Weakness, Makes in Use but One’: Literary Dialogues in an English Renaissance Family,” Marion Wynne-Davies describes one such gathering of exceptional women at Penshurst in the summer of 1617. Here, in “a place where noble women could find pleasure in one another’s company without the darker and more dangerous intrigues of the … court,” we find Wroth, Elizabeth Manners, Lady Anne Clifford, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, among others. That these women would have had interesting and provocative stories to share is virtually assured by the fact that all except Manners “were, had been or would be excluded from the court” because of their personal scandals (170–71).

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too clearly in the Wife of Bath’s notorious performance of female knowledge.20 But in kinder circles than a male-authored, male-dominated medieval pilgrimage, respect is often accorded to fictional storytelling women who offer expertise in matters of love; real early modern women who turn domestic knowledge into an advantage, especially in advice genres like the mother’s legacy in which personal experience both justifies and legitimizes the writer’s authority; and other female speakers in both fictional and real-world texts who indirectly challenge the kinds of knowledge deemed appropriate for women. Without a doubt, these female storytellers offer many stories that can be read as a critique of early modern England’s patriarchal culture, particularly its marriage system in which women were objects to be traded rather than subjects to love and be loved. Taken collectively, these tales point to numerous problems with the arranged marriage system and with traditional approaches to love and courtship. In some cases, the storytellers even suggest alternatives to the traditional system, as in the oft-cited scene when Wroth’s Urania speaks in defense of second love. Rather than continue to live according to an “opinion, which in time will prove flat heresie” (470), Urania advises Pamphilia—and, indirectly, women readers— to reject extreme allegiance to constancy. Wroth’s text seems to reward Urania for this heretical belief with happiness in both marriage and motherhood, and— though less satisfying—even marries Pamphilia to another man when her beloved Amphilanthus continues his infidelities in The Second Part. Although on some level, the literary enactment of such alternatives must be understood as a kind of wish fulfillment (Hackett 131), their representation on the written page and specifically in stories passed from one character to another and from text to reader also introduced them into a new realm of consciousness and possibility.21 For all of the reasons outlined here, embedded narratives spoken by female characters would have offered powerful models of both the female voice and women’s life stories to the female readers of romance. Even without subversive content, female-narrated embedded tales provided numerous examples of how a woman might voice her own tale, as well as evidence of which rhetorical and narrative methods were likely to earn a positive reception from her auditors/readers and which were not. In other words, romances offered a veritable repository of object lessons for their female readers, instructive examples that were manipulated in untold ways as readers became narrators and began to experiment with authorial choice. In order to provide a better sense of what these romance examples held for their readers, I detail in the following sections first the full range of embedded tales that appear in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century romance and second the tales specific to female characters. Fictional autobiographical storytelling, it 20 Chaucer’s Wife, of course, attempts to rely entirely on experience, proudly asserting that “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynough for me / to speke of wo that is in mariage” (lines 1–3). 21 Although Urania does not offer this advice in an embedded tale, it can be argued that the authority she gains in part through her storytelling in other episodes enables this kind of controversial speech.

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will be seen, demonstrated in comprehensive terms the flexibility, pleasure, and empowerment of self-construction through life-narration. Autobiographical Narration in the World of Romance Although romance’s embedded narratives are occasionally about others (rather than about the storyteller him/herself) or about completely fictive events (rather than about past events in the narrator’s own backstory), my focus here is how often they become mini-versions of autobiography and thus can inform us about the autobiographical act as it was understood in early modern England. First and foremost, such tales remind us how critical an understanding of the past is to one’s understanding of self and of the present moment. As Gabriele Rippl explains, “The retrospective ‘récit’ told by a character about himself or another implies that the present can only be understood or explained by a detailed description of the past, whereby present events continue” (21).22 This notion is critical when we think about why so many early modern men and women engaged in life writing, typically relaying past events through the interpretive moment of the present. Even writing in a diary, the most immediate autobiographical form, involves interpretation of a past that is suitable to a particular moment in the present. In all cases, the accumulation of events over time—events as they were lived and as they were recorded—create one very specific version of the person who experienced and narrated them. Romance’s embedded narratives allow us to see this fundamental autobiographical mechanism with perhaps greater clarity because we are less attached to the so-called “truth” of a tale when reading romance than we are when hearing or reading a “real” person’s story. As noted above, most early modern romances make use of the embedded narrative technique. But Wroth’s two-volume Urania employs embedded narratives to what some might see as an excessive degree. This is a world in which knowledge is conveyed primarily through stories: 101 in The First Part and 33 in The Second Part, to be exact. Urania thus brilliantly illustrates the embedded narrative technique’s basic form, range, and tendency toward the autobiographical, starting with its very first tale. This appears a mere four pages into the story, when the seeming shepherdess Urania finds a strange man in a cave lamenting his lost love. Urania offers her assistance by asking the stranger to share the cause of his grief: “favour me with the knowledge of your griefe; which heard, it may be I shall give you some counsell, and comfort in your sorrow” (4). This offer, based on a commonplace belief that sharing one’s troubles is in and of itself a kind of relief,23 is one of the most common precursors to an autobiographical tale in early modern romance. See also Salzman, English Prose Fiction, esp. 187. The counter-argument—that speaking of one’s pain only makes it worse—is

22 23

also commonplace, as exemplified by the words of another Urania character, clearly in mourning, whom King Ollorandus repeatedly urges to tell his tale: “‘Sir,’ said hee, ‘what offence have I given you, that you should seeke this revenge on mee, to make mee wound

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The stranger’s response is also familiar, as he not only says he will tell the tale but also claims that it is unique in some way, in this case because it is “the saddest storie that ever was rehearsed by dying man to living woman” (5). But first he must identify himself: “Then faire Shepherdesse, heare my selfe say my name is Perissus, Nephew I am to the King of Sicilie” (5). The story itself quite typically recounts the narrator’s troubled romance, in this case with Limena, a woman whose father has married her to a jealous man whom she does not love and who ultimately threatens to murder her. It also includes a letter from Limena that Perissus shares with Urania and the recounting of an encounter between Limena and her husband, Philargus, that had been told second-hand to Perissus by a servant. Finally, it concludes “[w]ith flouds of teares, and stormes of sighes” (14). As already suggested, this embedded narrative is typical in every way. The pre-story exchange, romantic content, convoluted plot complete with embedded dialogue, incorporation of other kinds of texts (such as letters or poems), brief conversation between teller and auditor during the tale, passionate narration, and post-story conversation are repeated over and over again throughout this romance and countless others. Frequently, one story leads to the next, or several stories— spread out over time and sometimes spoken by different narrators—continue the same narrative thread. In between, characters continue the pursuits typical of romance and of the embedded tales contained within it: they fight battles, they court beloveds, and they struggle with questions of identity. Furthermore, as is the case here, the preliminaries frequently establish the power dynamic between the teller and auditor/s. Perissus certainly does not volunteer his tale but must first be found (in a cave, no less!) and then asked for his story. Additionally, Urania’s harsh condemnation of Perissus, who—she argues—idly wallows in self-pity rather than ascertain that his beloved has in fact been murdered before succumbing to self-pity, significantly positions her as a “Counsellor” (16) to the forlorn stranger, thus endowing the romance’s titular character with credibility and wisdom at the outset and simultaneously establishing a relationship in which the auditor has the greater power. In this kind of scenario, the auditor—whose ability to judge and hold accountable is linguistically embedded in the term itself24—can ask for a tale or refuse to hear it, interrupt with questions, or reject the request for assistance that often follows a tale’s narration. The often-vulnerable storyteller, by contrast, is dependent on the auditor’s goodwill, and although s/he can certainly my selfe with my owne miseries relation?’” (444). The pilgrim Pelarina addresses her auditor with a similar complaint: “Alas Madam,” cryd shee, “what torture doe you put me, a poore vassell to your authority, and love, to rehearse that, which every word strickes to my heart like daggers; hath my first sight given you such dislike as you purpose to molest me? Or my little conversation such distaste, as you resolve to afflict me?” (528) These are just two examples of a constant tug-of-war between potential storytellers and auditors over the rights to a tale, a battle that these particular characters lose when they succumb to pressure and tell their stories. 24 I am grateful to Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane for helping me to consider the full range of meaning inherent in the rich term “auditor.”

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refuse to tell a desired or requested story, this is relatively rare. For example, a married prince named Curardinus who is in love with another woman stops his first attempt at his story with “but—” (557). Although he refuses to finish the tale amid much protest from his auditors, he attempts again the next day, only to stop once more with a promise to conclude the tale when the fate of his relationship becomes clear (558–9). In each of these instances, he tries to tell these soon-aborted tales only because of the pressure of his auditors. The inverse relationship, which I discuss below, usually takes the form of a manipulative and often deceptive storyteller who uses his/her rhetorical skill to control a weaker auditor. In both versions of the storyteller-auditor relationship, however, power dynamics play a significant role and make clear that in the act of storytelling, something—a reputation or even a life—is generally at stake. Fortunately, in the case at hand, the compassionate Urania uses her power over the highly vulnerable Perissus for good: her response to his tale ultimately jolts him into the kind of action expected of a knight and thus also moves the plot forward. Despite his initial annoyance with Urania, whom he labels a “divelish spirit” for interrupting his lament (4), Perissus soon claims that “so much doe I reverence your wisedome, as next unto Limena, I will still most honor you: and therefore, faire Urania, … I vow before heaven and you, that I will never leave off my Armes, untill I have found Philargus, and on him reveng’d my Ladies death” (16). At this point, Urania’s primary narrative splits into two: one plot that follows Urania on her quest for her true parents and one that follows Perissus’s search for Limena. As these characters meet other characters and continue to request and hear tales, the number of plots proliferates ad infinitum in true romance fashion. Furthermore, like this first representative tale, a striking number of embedded narratives are autobiographical. In Book 1 alone of Urania’s The First Part, Perissus tells his tragic tale; Urania tells her own life story; Prince Parselius recounts his and Amphilanthus’s search for the latter’s lost sister; the King of Albania describes his recent misfortunes; the pirate Sandringal relates his betrayal of the princess Antissia; the page Allimarlus recounts his search for the same Antissia; a duke-turned-hermit tells of his misfortunes at the hands of a young man he loved; Prince Leandrus explains how he came to be assumed dead; a starcrossed lover recounts his relationship with a princess whose father married her to someone else; Prince Steriamus tells of how his unrequited love for Princess Pamphilia made him determined to live a life of solitude; Prince Ollorandus recounts how he fell in love with Queen Melasinda and rescued her from rebels; Perissus’s Limena (who is, in fact, alive) tells how she was tortured by Philargus; Amphilanthus’s squire describes his search for Parselius; the knight Lansaritano explains why he and his beloved asked a third party to choose her spouse; Prince Rosindy narrates his adventures since leaving Morea; the King of Negroponte tells of his daughter’s evil behavior after he gave her his kingdom; the old dwarf Nainio explains how the Lord of Strombolli came to threaten his life; Pamphilia recounts how she came to inherit the Pamphilian throne; Parselius shares his life story; and Pamphilia explains how she came to test the enchantment at the Throne of Love.

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The fact that so many characters relate self-stories demonstrates just how driven romance plots are by the autobiographical impulse but also tantalizingly points to the constructed nature of identity, at least within the world of romance. After all, many of these characters are unknown to their auditors until they name and identify themselves through their stories. It is, in other words, the accumulation of narrative details that seems to bring them into being as distinct characters. Consequently, any shift in the narrative details can result in a shift in identity and—potentially—an identity crisis. This is certainly the plight of Urania at the beginning of the romance, when she is capable of sharing with Perissus only a few sentences of her history despite 16 years of life: For my selfe I can say nothing, but that my name is Urania, an old man and his wife having bred me up as their owne, till within these few daies they told me that, which now more afflicts me, then the povertie of my estate did before trouble me, making me so ignorant of my selfe as I know no parents. For they told me, that I was by them found. (22, emphasis added)

According to this way of thinking, it is not lived experience that grants one an identity but a coherent narrative: Urania has a name but no story to go with it, and what lived experience she does have no longer matches the fact of her name25 (which was found with her as an infant) or the truth of her birth. A shepherdess’ story, after all, is hardly suitable for a girl who was discovered in “rich clothes” with “a purse of gold” (22). Furthermore, in contrast to Perissus and countless others she will meet, Urania is unable to reveal her parentage with her name, thus providing few clues to the kind of person she might be in a culture that assumes character follows from status. Therefore, although she says she plans to tell her “story” to anyone she meets in the hope of finding clues to her real parentage (22), her failure to offer anything beyond a few sentences about her foster-parents’ revelation indicates that what she really has is a non-story. Self-narration, in other words, requires a self prior to the narration, and romance auditors thus routinely demand to know this self before hearing the tale. As if fully aware of this expectation, the distraught Perissus does not respond to Urania’s concerned inquiries with a simple, “I’m really upset because I think my girlfriend has been murdered by her husband” but instead begins with himself (“my name is Perissus”) and his family (“Nephew I am to the King of Sicilie”) and his home (“a place fruitfull and plentifull of all things”) (5). These details seem to grant authority and a measure of stability to the narrative that will follow. Similarly, when Urania confronts the next male stranger in her adventure, he requests her tale by saying, “I desire to know what this place is, but most what you are” (22). This discrepancy is further heightened by seventeenth-century associations for the name “Urania,” which—according to the literary tradition as Wroth knew it—could refer to the Muse of Astronomy, the Muse of Christian Poetry, or Venus Urania, a symbol of heavenly love. Wroth’s Uncle Sidney’s Arcadia also featured a shepherdess named “Urania” who—at least in the Old Arcadia—was revealed to have a noble heritage. See Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Sidney’s Urania,” and Eckerle’s “Urania’s Example.” 25

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When it’s his turn to introduce himself (via a story, of course), he says, “you shall know both who I am, and the cause of my comming hither” (22) and then proceeds with the obligatory “My name … is Parselius, Prince of Morea, being eldest Sonne unto the King thereof” (23).26 Since most of these examples occur when characters have just met one another, the fact that they introduce themselves is not necessarily surprising. As another character reasonably explains, “I doe never use to tell a story to any, but I first know to whom I discourse” (401). Yet this rationale also underscores the importance attached to one’s story, as if it is a piece of oneself that must be handled with care and not lightly given over to strangers. Certainly there is a transfer of control with the narration of a life story, reminiscent of the traditional closing formula for fairy tales: “This is my story, I’ve told it, and in your hands I leave it” (Warner xxv). Therefore, even in moments of urgency (often of life-or-death import), a character typically begins a story by announcing his/her name and providing a few details of his/her childhood or background. When, for example, a “distressed Lady” in need of “assistance, and revenge, for a murdered Knight” (274) finds Amphilanthus, the very hero she has been searching for, she first asks him to promise his assistance and then begins her tale—“the saddest storie, that ever love, and lovers end hath produced”—by formally explaining who she is: “I am that miserable unfortunate woman Sydelia, passionately loving, and being beloved of the excellent and vertuous Antonarus” (275). In other words, storytelling is not a frivolous act, in large part because one’s story and one’s identity are deeply linked. Significantly, when King Rosindy asks attendants at a castle where he has newly arrived who their mistress is, “[t]her answere was that ther lady ever told her owne story, and beeing, her self, and therefore they must bee excused” (2: 167, emphasis added). Similarly, when the dwarf Duardo tells a brief story of his life, the primary narrator notes that it is “as short as him self” (2: 238). And in a parallel non-fictional example, Samuel Bury explains why his wife, Elizabeth (1644–1720), valued her personal writing so much: “[s]he … would often say that, were it not for her diary, she should neither know what she was, or what she did, or what she had” (25–6). Given this link, storytellers risk numerous consequences when they transfer control of a story (henceforth available in the form of a self-contained narrative) to others. These potential risks are made strikingly clear in Book V of The Faerie Queene when Artegall, as Justice, consistently demands and receives the stories of criminals, their victims, and witnesses. Much like the role of a monarch presiding over his/her court, Artegall’s authoritative role gives him the power to demand, hear, and act on the words and experiences of others. It is an extraordinary power, one that the more criminally minded might abuse simply by taking over another’s story, as occurs when the father-and-son captors of Urania’s knight Dolorindus use the details of his story to commit further crimes: “This Story the wicked man made his owne, and his Sonne tooke the name of brave Dolorindus” (144). Similarly, biographical conventions dating back to the classical period suggested “that the writer begin with the subject’s realm, shire, town, parents, and ancestors, since this information increases and amplifies his subject’s honor” (Wolfe 64). 26

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This early modern version of identity theft depends not on social security or bank account numbers but simply the knowledge of another’s personal history. Indeed, since telling a tale is essentially to give it away, preventing the kind of identity theft experienced by Dolorindus required not only owning one’s story but also maintaining ownership with as much vigilance as possible, much as Sydelia does when she obtains assurance of support before exposing her self through story. Indeed, the risky business of self-narration posed particular risks for women given their vulnerability in a patriarchal culture to physical violence and easily maligned reputations. On the least worrisome end of the scale, a woman who shares her life story might find herself uncomfortably exposed or embarrassed, as when Urania’s Antissia—the third wheel in an awkward love triangle including Pamphilia and Amphilanthus—unsuccessfully attempts to present her own tale as fiction. Unfortunately, the over-long story she tells to these friends only accentuates her love for Amphilanthus when she slips up the pronouns in her story and thus reveals the miserable heroine to be herself (324).27 But more likely a female teller risked damaging her reputation, a much greater concern. For example, since Wroth’s married Duchess Lisia is well aware of the fact that her story about being in love with another man does not reflect positively on her, she directly pleads with Princess Veralinda to “be confident I am chast, and untoucht of ill action” and to forgive “my liberall discourse, your freedome having invited me to it” (561). At the end of her tale, she also invites her auditors to actually meet her husband so that they can see first-hand why she has “not too much cause to be fond of him” (562). In another case in Urania, a sad lady who loves Prince Andromarko attempts twice to censor her own tale of love because she fears it appears vain to her courtly auditors (2: 413–14). Although both this sad lady and Lisia earn their listeners’ respect in the end, more troubling outcomes often await women who engage in autobiographical tale-telling. Such is the case for a maiden who is in love with the married Prince Philarchos when he asks her to tell her story to him after they have spent a chaste night together. The maiden’s vulnerability in this moment is obvious, as they are sitting on her bed as she tries to begin her tale, and she fears that he may take advantage of her. Her words only reinforce this vulnerability, as she says, “Since you, most brave prince, commaund, I your humblest vassale must obaye and tell my story” (2: 127, emphasis added). Yet her story never truly gets underway, since Philarchos, who has just spent the night kissing and embracing her, suddenly turns on her and lectures her for unchaste thoughts and behaviors. Among his contradictory remarks, he says her “longe preamble … makes mee beeleeve onely words will prove your troubles” (128) and that her “trembling and bodys motion proceeded from over-much plenty of desire and … inward flames” (129), ultimately scolding her for loving a married man and advising her to return to her Antissia consistently exemplifies many early modern concerns about female speech, especially garrulity. See Clare R. Kinney, “‘Beleeve this butt a fiction’: Female Authorship, Narrative Undoing, and the Limits of Romance in The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” for Antissia’s role as “negative exemplar” (158). 27

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father’s house. Although Philarchos is clearly out of line with this self-righteous lecture, the episode effectively demonstrates the perceived link between sexual and verbal transgressions in the Renaissance imagination, the danger a young woman with an open mouth or body might face, and the inevitable suspicion with which women’s tales are often heard. Indeed, when the over-heated Philarchos “assert[s] that her tale of chaste love merely masks a story of transgressive desire,” he “in effect ‘deauthorizes’ her history” (Kinney, “‘Beleeve’” 156), and so the young woman—who did not take enough care with her story/self—loses her auditor’s respect as well as her narrative authority. Fortunately, the benefits of autobiographical expression are also ample, ranging from assistance if in a crisis to psychological healing if in a state of emotional torment. Indeed, some characters find relief simply from confessing their sins in an autobiographical tale, as does a dying man who had impersonated Ollorandus (359). Others receive unexpected boons, as when Urania—after separately hearing the tales of estranged lovers Liana and Alanius—is able to reunite them to everyone’s happiness.28 And still others entertain with their autobiographical tales and thus enjoy accolades for their narrative performance. Indeed, one of the more surprising elements of much tale-telling in Urania is just how much narrative skill matters. For example, when Sydelia completes her tragic story of her husband’s murder by her brother and repeats her request for Amphilanthus’s help in avenging this wrong, the noble Amphilanthus and his companion, King Ollorandus, of course agree. As the narrator explains, “The King, and Amphilanthus much pittied, and admired the Lady, who had related this story, with as much passion, and fine expression of witty sorrow as could be; Amphilanthus moved so much with it, as he presently consented, and gave his promise to assist her” (283). The wording here makes one wonder whether Amphilanthus would have helped Sydelia if her tale had not been told so effectively and sympathetically. This suspicion is confirmed by the experience of Sidney’s Mopsa, a foolish peasant woman on the opposite end of the spectrum from Sydelia and Urania. Mopsa is the butt of many jokes in the Arcadia and—according to Kalander, one of the more respected voices in the text—known for the wide open “O” of her mouth. Therefore, when Mopsa wipes her mouth before beginning her tale during a storytelling circle, no one has high expectations for what she will say. Indeed, Mopsa’s rambling, incoherent story is deemed so bad that one of the Princesses actually interrupts her before she is done, and both she and her mother are severely ridiculed and eventually dismissed by the narrator and the other characters. While their treatment is unfortunate and clearly smacks of elitism, it is not entirely unjust, for both women—but especially Mopsa—demonstrate exactly what not to do when it comes to rhetorical technique. All of these lessons are pertinent for early modern women’s life writing. Despite the fact that much of this autobiographical material was never intended to be seen by others, life writers show remarkable attention to genre, structure, tone, and authorial persona, as I detail in subsequent chapters. They take particular Urania narrates this entire episode in a story of her own (245–58).

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care with generic conventions and gendered etiquette no matter what the content such details introduce and contain because, quite simply, packaging matters. And, like romance’s storytelling women, they act precisely at the intersection of autobiographical expression and authorship when they present their identities in the form of tales. Yet it is important to remember that neither the identity nor the story that conveys it is necessarily stable or fixed, just as we can assume that the narrative Urania would have told before her foster-parents’ revelation is very different from the weakly developed story she tells in its aftermath. Indeed, one of the most suggestive aspects of romance’s culture of autobiographical expression is the frequency with which storytellers play with the details of the identities they present in often dramatic narrative form. Again, just as early modern female life writers construct their textual identities according to purpose, form (or genre), and any number of other factors, so do the storytellers of the romances some of these women were reading present the version of self that is most suitable to the moment at hand. Within romance, there are many reasons why a narrator might fictionalize all or some of his/her life story. When Urania’s Limena leaves out details about her torture at the hands of Philargus, for example, she does so to spare Perissus additional pain (88). When The Faerie Queene’s Redcrosse Knight fails to include his experiences with the evil Duessa in an account of his adventures to Una’s father, he is clearly attempting to give his future father-in-law the best possible image of himself.29 And when Arcadia’s Musidorus exaggerates his heroic past, he does so to better woo Princess Pamela. The rhetorical context for this particular tale is unusually complex, even by romance standards, since Musidorus is at this moment pretending to be a shepherd named Dorus who is courting Mopsa. But Musidorus’s ultimate goal is to woo Pamela, so the story he (as Dorus) tells about Prince Musidorus is calculated to entertain Mopsa and simultaneously pique Pamela’s interest, ideally clueing her in to his real identity. The gap between Musidorus’s true identity and the one he presents to the individuals at King Basilius’s court means that he cannot speak of himself in the first-person, so he narrates his own heroic life story in the third-person voice.30 Although these tales are all deceptive to varying degrees, many fictionalized autobiographical tales are more intentionally evil. For instance, in another Urania plot, the King of Negroponte’s story of a daughter’s betrayal is designed to distract the Morean court while some of his knights kidnap Pamphilia. Similarly, Fidessa’s 29 It should be noted that Redcrosse’s story is not actually narrated (i.e. embedded) in the text. Nonetheless, Spenser’s narrator suggests the general content of the tale when he says that Redcrosse “From point to point, as is before exprest, / Discourst his voyage long” (I.xii.15.8–9). In turn, Adam, Una’s father, reveals what was not narrated when—after receiving additional information about Redcrosse from another source—he exclaims, “What heavens? What altars? What enraged heates[?]” (30.3). See also Jacqueline T. Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story: Narrative Inconsistencies in The Faerie Queene.” 30 As noted above, this performance underscores Arcadia’s less-than-idyllic underbelly, since, in telling a duplicitous and self-serving tale, Musidorus ultimately puts Pamela and Arcadia itself at risk.

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tale of being captured by one of Spenser’s many “proud Sarazin[s]” (I.ii.25.1) is intended to distract Redcrosse from her true identity as Duessa.31 And yet, it is not just the storyteller’s evil intent that is worrisome in these cases; rather, it is the fact that both the evil king and the evil Duessa are such talented rhetors that they can inspire pity in their auditors. And pity, as the storyladen Faerie Queene makes abundantly clear, makes auditor/s vulnerable to manipulation and deception. Spenser emphasizes this aspect of Redcrosse’s first conversation with “Fidessa”: Her humblesse low In so ritch weedes and seeming glorious show, Did much enmoue his stout heroïcke heart, And said, Deare dame, your suddein ouerthrow Much rueth me; but now put feare apart, And tell, both who ye be, and who that tooke your part. (I.ii.21.4–9, emphasis added)

The pity that Redcrosse admits to feeling here makes him particularly susceptible to the skillful storytelling performance that ensues, as Duessa/Fidessa, “[m]elting in teares, then gan [to] lament” (I.ii.22.1). As she tells her tale of innocence betrayed, [Redcrosse] in great passion all this while did dwell, More busying his quicke eyes, her face to view, then his dull eares, to heare what she did tell; and said, Faire Lady hart of flint would rew the vndeserued woes and sorrowes, which ye shew. (I.ii.26.5–9, emphasis added)

By the end of the tale, of course, Duessa has made Redcrosse Knight her captive. And though it is clear he is just as seduced by her beauty as her story, her appearance alone—without the tale to back it up—would have been much less effective. Spenser’s concern that pity creates the ideal environment for rhetorical deception plays out in countless scenarios in his poem, as well as in other romances and epics of this period. And it complicates the auditor’s response to the narrative skill of even a virtuous character like Sydelia. One of the best examples of the role of pity in narrative deception occurs in The Second Part of Urania, when a devilish female spirit claiming to be the Princess of Tartaria tells Selarinus, King of Epirus, a false tale of troubled marriage. Selarinus is already in a vulnerable state, as he has only recently arrived on the desolate island of Lesbos in order to grieve for his dead wife. He is first seduced by the lady’s “most rare voice,” which “called him to attention” and prods him to look for its source (6). When he sees her singing and playing a lute through a window, he is further seduced by her beauty: “Hee pleased his eyes with beeholding her, his eares with heering her, and att last thes good guests made his hart cleane, sweeping away the grossest reliques of bootles grieving, and dressing itt up with All references to The Faerie Queene are to A.C. Hamilton’s edition.

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new ornaments of love, and hope” (6–7). When he eventually meets the woman behind the voice, he literally begs to hear her tale: If you vouchsafe mee your story and your vowes, I will waite upon you with the relation of mine. When you will speake, I will with devosion attend your words. I will nott speake butt when you permitt mee, and will bee silent when you commaund mee. I will sigh if you like that, and unfainedly, I will weepe if that will content you. I will never offend you, butt approve my self your humblest vassell. (8)

Based on the pattern discussed above, it is immediately apparent to the reader that Selarinus, in his position as auditor, is giving up far too much power here. As a man grieving the loss of one part of himself, his wife, he here gives up the rest of himself, including his critical thinking skills and his control over his own life. Indeed, in offering to “nott speake” if the mysterious lady so commands him, Selarinus loses his voice, and—at least temporarily—his narrative, which is subsequently controlled by this spirit through most of the rest of the text. But it is the spirit’s pitiable tale that solidifies her hold on Selarinus, as it relates the murder of her husband by one of his brothers, her ill treatment at that brother’s hands, the danger in which her children were placed, and the loss of her relatives’ affection. Strikingly, her conclusion contains hints of her tale’s falsehoods that the bewitched Selarinus is absolutely oblivious to: I ame a woefull sufferer. Thus I have related my story to you. I beeseech you, onely pitty mee and forgett all this, deeming itt a dreame, unles I shall demaund your ayde. … serve mee onely this: to beeleeve this butt a fiction, and dunn to please and pass the time away with, and many of thes shall you see and bee beeguiled with beefor you part hence. Therfor credett noe thing butt the grave Lady, who is often times deluded by us vaine spiritts heere, who delight in our selves onely in abusing mortalls. (10)

Neither the words of warning in this passage nor the advice of the aforesaid “grave Lady” to “noe more … follow vaine phantesies ther, for itt was a place wholy for delusions” (10) can entirely sway Selarinus’s vulnerability to this creature. When, nearly 300 pages later, “the same develish spiritt” (305) seeks him out, she easily enchants him again, holds him captive for years, bears two children by him, and eventually leaves him to die in a desert. These examples demonstrate not only that stories and storytellers in the world of romance are potentially dangerous but also that one must be an astute auditor in order to note the clues that such tales often contain and thus avoid the vulnerability and subsequent near-death experiences of characters like Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight and Wroth’s Selarinus. At the same time, however, it is consistently clear that reading so astutely and carefully is extremely difficult. Even Urania’s reader has a hard time with Selarinus’s evil spirit, since it is unclear for several pages whether what the grieving King has experienced is real or imagined; whether the rare-voiced beauty is a real woman or some kind of spirit; and even whether “the grave Lady”—who is also new to Urania’s cast of characters in The Second

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Part—is trustworthy or not. Although the reader eventually learns that the wise woman is indeed to be trusted, he/she must, in the meantime, flounder and learn alongside Selarinus. Thus we see that romance’s storytelling episodes offer lessons in reading as well as instructive models for narration. However, despite these alarming instances of a storyteller’s power put to ill use, many other cases of fictionalized autobiographical tales are more sympathetic. In one compelling instance, Urania’s Pamphilia (the other primary heroine next to Urania herself) tells a story to her friend Dorolina, who is eager to relieve some of Pamphilia’s melancholy. Accordingly, “Pamphilia sate downe and told her this tale, faigning it to be written in a French story” (499, emphasis added).32 Throughout the two-volume romance, Pamphilia is intensely private about her love for her cousin and frequent two-timer, Amphilanthus, so it is not out of character for her to feign, as she does in this instance. But there is no doubt—as the narrator has already hinted—that many elements of her tale are indeed autobiographical. The story tells of a woman named Lindamira who “loved onely one, and that one she had loved many years before any mistrusted it, or himselfe knew it” (499). Although “Lindamira that constant woman” (499) eventually confesses her love to her beloved and receives love from him in return, their long-term happiness is impeded by his inconstancy, in response to which Lindamira turns to writing sonnets to voice her complaint. Although other details are different, these in particular all describe Pamphilia’s experience, as she acknowledges when she says that she “found [Lindamira’s] estate so neere agree with mine” (502). Nonetheless, she refuses to concede the full truth of the tale and instead refers to “the Booke” (i.e. the aforementioned “French story”) in which she claims Lindamira’s tale appears (502). Dorolina, in turn, despite suspecting that the tale “was some thing more exactly related then a fixion” (505), politely accepts her friend’s claims. This episode, far from expressing anxieties about the dangers of rhetorical power in the hands of a skilled storyteller, quite differently acknowledges the psychological relief attendant on self-expression. Though Pamphilia seems unable (or perhaps simply unwilling) to acknowledge her tale as autobiographical, she nonetheless creates a story that effectively conveys her emotional plight, and she constructs herself (through her heroine) as the very image of constancy.33 In this instance, deceptive storytelling is not condemned so much as understood and even empathized with, and Pamphilia is allowed to keep her self-sustaining fictions. This survey of embedded autobiographical narrative in early modern romance demonstrates several key points. First, the constructed nature of identity is apparent in many of these tales; indeed, a direct link between identity and the tale in which it is articulated is frequently clear, as is the way in which a character’s identity shifts with the narrative details.34 Second, there are both advantages and In addition to this tale, Pamphilia narrates three others in The First Part (145, 168, and 366–71) and one in The Second Part (258–9). 33 This is in fact Pamphilia’s claim to fame throughout the romance, as she insistently claims that constancy in love is superior to happiness. 34 The real-life Mary Carleton’s experience further illustrates this point, since the notorious trickster specialized in creating new identities for herself and, each time, “created 32

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disadvantages to narrating one’s life story, though the disadvantages are greater for women, who inevitably confront the cultural construction of a virtuous woman as simultaneously chaste, silent, and obedient whenever they speak publicly or attempt authorship. Third, the risks of sharing one’s life story are sometimes outweighed by circumstances, whether real or imagined, physical or psychological; indeed, in some cases, telling one’s tale may be the only means to self-preservation. Fourth, the storytelling act involves both a teller and her/his auditors, thus calling into play complex power dynamics that help determine the success of the tale and the way in which the teller is perceived. Fifth, technique matters. In other words, those who share their life stories and those who hear them are not simply focused on the details of a narrative but also on how those details are constructed, how well they cohere, and how effectively the narrative itself is conveyed. We should expect that female readers and auditors of romance noted the same details and that female life writers understood the importance attached to how they packaged and presented the life stories they felt so compelled to put into writing. As demonstrated in the following section, the fact that most women’s tales focused on love meant that they required particular finesse. The Female Storyteller’s Tale Given the rampant storytelling so common to romance, the fact that Wroth’s Candiana also shares a tale is hardly surprising or—at first glance—noteworthy. For her narrative is yet another adventurous and tragic love story. It recounts how she was captured by a giant and eventually rescued by Amphilanthus only to be lost in a strange land once again. She adopts a shepherdess’ habit and then a nymph’s in an effort to maintain her chastity amid untold dangers. As a shepherdess, she falls in love with Prince Floristello, who confesses to loving her in return despite the fact that he believes her to be a shepherdess and thus “might bee assured many obsticles might be betweene [them]” (2: 358). But Candiana plays the scornful mistress, Floristello leaves in despair, and she eventually travels in her new nymph disguise in search of him. Although they find one another on occasion, one or the other is always plagued by an enchantment that drives them apart again, leaving her in a desperate state. “I feare never more to injoye him,” she concludes (2: 358). Though the details may vary, most female-narrated embedded autobiographical narratives in early modern romance share with Candiana’s tale a focus on matters of the heart, or—as Clare Kinney puts it—“the vicissitudes of female desire” (“‘Beleeve’” 156). Storyteller after storyteller recounts her experience with love (usually troubled love) and the particular difficulties that stem from an arranged marriage system. For Candiana, this is her beloved’s fear about their incompatibility due to status. For numerous other characters, their problems resulted from marrying men their families chose for them or from resisting their families’ choices and picking their own spouses instead. And still others tell of … a new life-story backed up with suitable clothing and supporting documents” (Todd and Spearing xxx).

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love affairs that persist despite one of the lovers being married. The ultimate impression this pattern creates for the reader is that courtship is a minefield and marriage quite capable of becoming perpetual misery and often psychologically or physically confining. For those characters who do find happiness or compatibility in marriage, they typically do so only after overcoming countless obstacles while maintaining constancy to the men they truly love. To discuss many of these tales in detail would quickly become repetitive, but a few examples are necessary to establish the basic patterns, one of which is the woman-rewarded plot. In Urania, Limena’s “tragicall historie” (87) of torture at her husband’s hands is followed by a second marriage to her true beloved, Perissus, whom she had loved before obediently marrying her father’s choice. Similarly, Orilena’s distressing tale of her attempts to avoid a “loathed match” to a man “of all hellish properties” (201) is followed by love and marriage to her defender, Ollorandus. Dalinea’s tale begins more positively with love and marriage to a man of her own choosing but takes a tragic turn when he leaves her to return to a former love. Dalinea’s precarious plight becomes clear when she appears with a baby at the court of Morea to seek redress and acknowledges to the King that “I am dishonoured if you helpe not” (241), but she, too, is eventually rewarded with her husband’s return. Whether obediently joining in an arranged marriage or following one’s own choice, the female characters’ tales of love and marriage make potential heartbreak a central motif. But of course, not all are as fortunate as Limena, Orilena, and Dalinea. A less hopeful plot pattern is exemplified by the much-respected Pamphilia, whose on-again, off-again relationship with Amphilanthus dominates both volumes of Wroth’s romance.35 Pamphilia’s primary mistake is to fall for an inveterate philanderer, and though she eventually marries another man, she does so against her better judgment and continues to pine for her first love. A less respectable but more instructive example of unhappy romance is Princess Nereana, whose tale of frustrated love reveals the pride that led her to actively pursue the object of her desire. Such scandalous material earns only the scorn of her auditors, and, significantly, when she next tells a tale, it is filled with the miseries and “tempest[s]” (334) she has endured in the course of her “Knight-like … search” (194).36 Ultimately, punished by the text, Nereana wishes only to return home, even without the original object of her quest. Indeed, it is common for characters to choose single or chaste lives after experiencing painful bouts of unrequited love, whereas others whose love was reciprocated are tragically left to mourn their beloveds. Sydelia’s urgent tale, for instance, earns Amphilanthus’s pledge to help her get revenge but cannot bring her husband back to life. And still other female characters are left sad and despairing, suspended in the narrative with no resolution to their love troubles. Such is the case for Candiana, As has been duly noted, Pamphilia and Amphilanthus’s relationship in part represents Wroth’s own complicated romantic relationship with her cousin, William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke. 36 Significantly, this phrase is spoken by Pamphilia, who is extremely judgmental about Nereana’s behavior. Nereana tells the first tale on 193 and the second on 334–5. 35

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whose tale earns sympathetic and reassuring words from her auditors but whose plight is never mentioned again,37 and for an unnamed woman who shares her tale of adulterous love and is rewarded with reconciliation with her brother but not with her lover. As this narrator explains, despite hoping for “affection or continuance of his love, hee also left mee, and in such case as I have no money or meanes, but to sterve for want, my estate being againe seased on by my husband and yeelded him by censure” (409). Even though adultery is easily condemned by both characters and readers, this case makes clear that, in an arranged marriage system, it can be read more sympathetically. Significantly, the same Philarchos who is described above as unkindly lecturing his adoring overnight companion in this instance agrees to help reconcile the storytelling woman to her brother, in part because “hee pittied her” (409). After all, the primary reason for all her misery did not originate with her but with the men in her life, thus bringing us full circle, back to the most typical autobiographical plot told by the women of romance: “I am,” saide she, “Wife to a Knight married against my will unto him by my brothers command, whom I obayed having no father; he was a man of great estate, but no way handsome: neither was he deformed but in his disposition which was crooked, with him I lived an unpleasing and discontented life, suffering his jealousie and all other froward humours which tooke away the litle show of love I bare him. I fell then into the way that discontented, (and so unfortunate) women often doe.” (408)

The rest of the story hardly needs to be rehearsed. And yet, I argue in this book not only that such formulaic material is noteworthy but also that it is noteworthy in part because it is formulaic. Indeed, although it is impossible to access the thoughts of actual early modern women as they read texts like Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, and Urania, it is quite likely that they would have found the repetitive stories of tragic love and courtship crises appealing, sympathetic, and strikingly familiar. In other words, even if captivity and physical torture were not part of their or their friends’ experience (though on occasion they were),38 the psychological trauma of courtship and numerous others This may be an intentional choice on Wroth’s part, or it may be a consequence of the seemingly unfinished condition of The Second Part, which ends mid-sentence. For theories about this ending, see Gossett and Mueller’s Textual Introduction to The Second Part. 38 Wentworth recounts long-term abuse by her husband in her published accounts; Lady Anne Halkett writes in her autobiography of being closely guarded, severely spoken to, and generally ignored by her mother for 14 months after entertaining a particular suitor’s courtship against her mother’s wishes (even her young nephew is commissioned into guarding her on one occasion, crying out to Halkett’s mother when Anne tries to leave the house); and Alice Thornton divulges in her autobiographical writings her fear of kidnapping by two different rejected suitors. Non-elite women also experienced violence and trauma, as Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, reminds us when she says that Pandosto’s “lowborn heroine threatened by sexual violence, was indeed relevant to young women in service” (18). For a few noteworthy instances of fathers’ violence against resistant daughters, see Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education, esp. 33. For a useful discussion of the complexities of the Western patriarchal system that relies on the father’s negotiation of his 37

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kinds of hardships would have been. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England were not only a period of great popularity for the romance genre but also for sweeping changes in attitudes toward marriage as the dominant model slowly changed from arranged to companionate.39 Therefore, such extensive use of femalenarrated embedded stories in romances offered not only an implicit authorization of female self-expression but also a muted critique of patriarchy (especially of arranged marriage)40 and an incredibly useful discourse for expressing trauma in matters of the heart.41 daughter’s exchange, see Lynda E. Boose, “The Father’s House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture’s Daughter-Father Relationship.” And for an insightful examination of the violence inherent in early modern marriage, see Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. 39 Simplistic narratives of this process, such as the one that figures prominently in Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, have long been debunked. Instead of a steady, linear progression from one system, deemed callous and devoid of love, to another, deemed harmonious and superior, the reality was that such a massive cultural change was complex and often inconsistent, varying from family to family. Factors long considered ideal, such as affection and free choice, still had to be balanced with a range of other factors, including the wealth, rank, age, religion, and place in the family hierarchy of each of the parties involved. Most arrangements tried to balance the interests of both parties. For a thorough, nuanced approach to courtship and marriage in this period, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. For a useful summary of companionate marriage, including the important qualification that seventeenth-century companionate marriage still meant male-dominated marriage, see Anne Shaver, “Agency and Marriage in the Fictions of Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,” esp. 183–4. And for an early study of the influence of the romance genre on both men and women’s attitudes toward marriage, see Sara Heller Mendelson, “The Weightiest Business: Marriage in an UpperGentry Family in Seventeenth-Century England,” esp. 129–30. 40 I use the word “muted” because, even though the romance genre is quite capable of doing subversive work (such as the political work discussed by Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation), romance is in many ways a conservative genre, with a long-standing association with the aristocratic, or ruling, class and a tendency to support the status quo by returning everything (gender and class included) to its right order in the typical romance conclusion. Wroth’s Urania is a case in point. As Roberts, “‘The Knott Never to Bee Untide’: The Controversy Regarding Marriage in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” and others have argued, the romance provides numerous variations on both good and bad marriages, focusing in particular on the dangers facing women in the extreme cases of de praesenti marriage (when the couple would become married via their own spoken words) and enforced marriages. And yet, even though Wroth “stresses the importance of a woman’s quest for a truly companionate relationship,” she does not “question the economic rationale that allowed arranged marriage to continue for centuries more” (128). Wroth’s commentary on gender issues has been well documented in recent years. 41 Based on her study of 23 Stuart women’s diaries, occasional memoirs, and other personal memoranda, Mendelson, “Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs,” tentatively concludes that “marriage could represent a major trauma for women” (192) and that the most successful unions were those about which “children were offered a reasonable chance to express their own inclinations” (194).

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This inevitably conflicted discourse, which I discuss at length in Chapter 3, clearly suggests the nascent cultural revolution at work, as individuals and their fictional counterparts negotiate their way through shifting attitudes toward marriage and “what we now call romantic love” (Charlton 33). Characters like Wroth’s Urania propose radical theories like second love (obviously countering the notion of constancy to one man as long as he lives and sometimes even after he dies), while Weamys’s Urania (in A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia [1651]) reveals her lack of interest in marriage itself through both verbalization and telling silences (Eckerle, “Urania’s” 32–4). Early modern female life writers, meanwhile, convey similarly unorthodox ideas. Elizabeth Isham (1609–54), for example, argues on behalf of the single life. Mary Penington (1625–82) describes the unique wedding ceremony she and her first husband used in 1642, “without a ring: and, … many of the usual, dark, formal words” (78). And many diarists’ generally reserved rhetoric and passive sentence construction frequently raise questions about their real attitudes toward the marriage institution. As Joanna Moody, the most recent editor of the diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1570/71–1633), remarks, “Lady Hoby comes across in her diary as utterly loyal to her husband. We cannot help but ask, however, whether she really liked him” (xxix). Certainly there is room, even within the often reticent autobiographical tradition of this period, for revealing tenderness and love for a marriage partner, especially when that partner plays a role of any significance within the text. Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80), for example, speaks at length of her love for her husband in her life writing. But this is not the case with Hoby and numerous others. In fact, the word choices, rhetorical techniques, plot patterns, and manipulation of genre in many early modern Englishwomen’s auto/biographical texts reveal several consistent points that complicate the women’s ostensible support for the marriage institution. These include the following: that women felt especially vulnerable when unmarried; that marriage often did not appeal to them; that the rhetoric of obedience, duty, and obligation was more useful for describing their entrance into marriage than the rhetoric of love, passion, or even a minimal element of interest; and that passive language further structured the way they thought about and articulated their experiences as wives. The result is an ambivalent and passive rhetoric—at times frustrated and confused, at others self-critical—that is always bound up in a complex system of allegiances into which the marriageable daughter or wife must fit. No wonder that the romance heroine who also experiences these anxieties and dilemmas so often appears exasperated, frightened, and not a little confused. And no wonder that insistence on virtue takes up so much space in early modern women’s stories, whether fictional or autobiographical. Katherine Austen (1628/29–83) speaks to this issue when she writes in her private notebook that “[it] hath a reflection of disrepute when women’s inclinations are steered all by love” (qtd. in Todd, “‘I’” 220). Whether arranged or companionate, based in financial considerations or mutual affection, marriage was a minefield for women. And their own words make clear that they knew this all too well.

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This explains the appeal and transferable power of at least one aspect of the romance genre—female-narrated embedded stories. When a kidnapped maiden in a literary romance stumbles upon a willing helper and spills out her tale, she may not provide a completely realistic account of an early modern woman’s experience, but she speaks a language that an early modern woman could understand and gives voice to the anxieties that likely accompanied her in the days before and perhaps even after she was married. In other words, romance’s embedded stories collectively tell the tale of a woman’s experience in the arranged marriage system, and early modern Englishwomen’s life writing tells much the same tale via a similar discourse. But of course similarity is the least important aspect of the relationship between the fictional tales and the real-life ones. Much more significant is the fact that—through recourse to romance and manipulation of the plots and authorial techniques found there—women could write their life stories with greater poignancy and personal relevance than they could with other autobiographical models heretofore provided them. In romance, they read of others’ adventures, and in their life writing, they narrated their own. The Moral of the Story As I have argued throughout this chapter, the fact alone of the fictional female storyteller’s narration of her own life story held a power that cannot be underestimated. Therefore, before I move on in Chapter 3 to a detailed examination of the numerous and varied traces of romance in early modern Englishwomen’s life writing, I would like to pause briefly here to demonstrate how the stories considered in this chapter did indeed draw the attention of at least one female reader: Dorothy Osborne (1627–94/95).42 Significantly, Osborne was not only an avid romance reader, as noted in Chapter 1, but also a woman who was frustrated for many years in her choice of husband. Whereas she wished to marry William Temple, her brothers had other plans for her. Whereas she believed compatibility and mutual respect were the most important characteristics in marriage partners, her brothers found compatible fortunes to be much more convincing. And whereas she valued dialogue about such matters, her brothers used manipulation and interrogation, experiences described by Osborne as both “[t]orment” (81) and “persecution” (85).43 In other words, Osborne lived the same romantic struggle as many of the romance characters who lament their fate via stories, 44 and though she conveys her experiences primarily in the form of letters to Temple, rather than Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, has found fascinating marginalia evidence of readers’ attempts to follow the complicated narratives of romances like Arcadia, though these are likely the markings of male readers (171–2). 43 All references to Osborne’s letters are to Kenneth Parker’s edition, Letters to Sir William Temple. 44 Osborne and Temple eventually married in 1654, after several years of opposition on the part of both families and Osborne’s attempt to end their relationship just a year before. 42

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via oral storytelling or autobiographical narrative, she reveals a keen awareness of the power of story. Osborne’s comments about romance thus have particular resonance for my argument. For here was an intelligent and respectable woman, one who refused to marry without her family’s consent but who also refused to marry without love. Furthermore, she clearly found romance discourse a useful means for selfexpression. At times her use of romance language is comic and playful, as when she refers to her various suitors as “my Servants” (45) or “my Knigh[t]” (48) and when she gossips about various ladies and their “Gallant[s]” (76). At others it is entirely sincere: when wee meet let us designe one day to remember old story’s in, to aske one another by what degree’s our friendship grew to this height tis at, in Earnest I am Lost somtimes with thinking on’t, and though I can never repent the share you have in my heart, I know not whither I gave it you willingly or not at first, noe, to speak ingenuously I think you gott an interest there a good while before I thought you had any, and it grew soe insensibly and yet soe fast that all the Traverses it has mett with since, has served rather to discover it to mee, then at all to hinder it. By this confession you will see I am past all disguise with you, and that you have reason to bee sattisfyed with knowing as much of my heart as I doe my self. (114)

In addition to the comic, playful, and heartfelt, Osborne uses romance discourse as a means of communicating with Temple about a common topic, including the specific romance texts that they shared with one another.45 In one reference to Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamènes, or The Grand Cyrus,46 for example, Osborne quips, When you have read what Every one say’s for himself, perhaps you will not thinke it soe Easy to decide which is the most unhappy as you may think by the Titles theire Storry’s bear, only let mee desyre you not to Pitty the Jelous one, for I remember I could doe nothing but Laugh at him, as one that sought his owne vexation. (124)

Such comments indicate that Osborne gave a great deal of credence to stories: she and Temple know each other’s hearts because they know each other’s stories, just as one cannot judge a fictional character until hearing his story, or “what Every one say’s for himself.” Although my primary interest here is in women’s use of romance, Temple also enjoyed and appreciated the genre. In fact, he wrote a collection of romance stories that are largely based on a French work by François de Rosset (Moore Smith 208) but in which “the passions depicted were drawn solely from Temple’s remembrances of the lady of his love” (xvii). 46 Significantly, this text, like so many of the French romances imported into English society in the seventeenth century, made significant use of “the autobiographical device of le récit” (N. Smith 11). 45

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As Osborne seemed to realize and as Urania discovered before her, self-narration is a critical means to self-knowledge. And narrate she does, for Osborne’s letters are as packed with stories as the romances she loved. Among numerous other tales, she and Temple exchange their own stories in their letters, frequently beginning with a line like her “I will give you an accounte of my self, and begin my story as you did yours” (42) and ending with something like “[t]hus you have all my late adventur’s” (44). Osborne describes their relationship in narrative terms when she writes, “You confesse ‘tis such an Age since our Story began” (116). And she continually references the knowledge of self and others that narration produces. For example, Osborne says she could tell Temple “such a Story … as would make you see (what I never discovered in my selfe before) that I am a Valiant Lady” (93). And when their courtship has taken a turn for the worse, she claims, “I hear from all people that I know part of my unhappy Story and that from some that I doe not know. A Lady whose face I never saw sent it mee as news she had out of Ireland” (160). Osborne’s dry sense of humor may indicate some amusement here, but it does not detract from her acute awareness of how the most intimate details of a person’s experience can travel even over long distances via story. As a result, she tends those details with care. Osborne’s appreciation for the value of stories, as well as the entertaining and narratively sophisticated letters she produced, relate directly to the material she spent so much of her time reading. For her and other seventeenth-century women who were taking up both book and pen in increasing numbers,47 romance’s embedded tales testified to the power of self-construction through self-narration and, more specifically, enabled “the idea of romance heroine as author” (Chalmers 168). Indeed, “where romances were read, they could become the dominant way in which an individual understood him or herself—at least as far as the private or domestic sphere was concerned” (243), argues Nigel Smith. And Josephine Donovan concurs, positing that prose fiction not only evoked “readers’ sympathy for characters” but could also “encourage their identification with them” (Women 11).48 Thus Osborne writes of Cyrus’s Doralize as if she knew her personally, saying that “I am of her opinion in most things that she say’s” (146). And yet, Osborne’s identification with romance characters and plots is not simplistic or ill-informed. On the contrary, she speaks with great sophistication of specific romances’ relative merits and flaws,49 on one occasion using the epistolary 47 This group included Osborne’s sister-in-law, Martha, Lady Giffard, who lived most of her life with Dorothy and William; created a verse translation of Jorge de Montemayor’s romance Diana (Moore Smith xvi); wrote a biography of her brother, later titled The Life of Sir William Temple; and also made frequent use of the language of “story.” 48 This was especially true, suggests Spencer, for female readers of seventeenthcentury French romance: “The salon society that formed the background to the French romances fostered identification of these writing heroines with real-life women, for the characters in romance were often idealized pictures of the author’s friends” (23). 49 She is particularly critical of Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa, claiming that it contains “hansome Language” but no originality, as “all the Story’s have too neer a resemblance with those of Other Romances” (179).

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comments of one romance author to interpret the primary content of another (180), and her adaption of romance vocabulary is frequently tongue-in-cheek. She is, in other words, a critical reader, capable of distinguishing herself from the characters she reads about while also appreciating the moments in which she recognizes a kindred spirit among them. But she is also human, desperate to believe that the kind of love she hopes for—and, indeed, believes she shares with Temple—is possible despite the fact that others mock it as a fiction. “[F]or my life,” she complains to Temple, “I cannot beat into theire head’s a passion that must bee subject to noe decay[,] an Even Perfect Kindnesse that must last perpetualy without the least intermission” (208). Osborne does not forgo reasonable behavior and run off with Temple, as romance’s detractors claimed would happen if women read romance, but she does indulge in a fantasy about an ideal marriage based on love while at the same time maintaining chastity, constancy, and filial obedience. Osborne’s example brings into sharp focus the many benefits of romance’s embedded tales for female readers and writers like her. In addition to conveying the value of autobiographical narration, numerous techniques for such narration, and the legitimacy of personal experience as a means of both self-knowledge and authoritative expression, they also spoke to female readers in a particularly powerful way, in the worst cases portraying the same horror experienced in the women’s own lives but in the best enabling them to imagine happier outcomes. Furthermore, fictional storytellers and what Smith calls “the personalising power of the récit” (246) helped to renegotiate the terms of the marriage debate and women’s role within it by presenting numerous variations on the same plot and, on occasion, a radical resolution like Urania’s theory of second love. As Donovan argues for the framed-novelle and the novel, “[p]resenting the details of a woman’s case (or, in fiction, her story) allowed for a fuller understanding of her situation, thus preventing reifying abstractions from obscuring her truth. It allowed her story, told from her viewpoint, to be heard” (Women xi).50 The next step, narrated in the following chapters, would be for female readers to begin their own journeys of textual self-narration.

50 As Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726, argues that the women’s framed-novelle is an overlooked link in the development of prose fiction, so I believe that the sustained first-person embedded narrative so common to romance also contributed to the oft-told tale of “the rise of the novel.” See also Spencer, esp. 23, who specifically links the French romance’s interpolated tales to “the short epistolary novels which began appearing in the late 1600s.” For an example of how an autobiographical text can be linked to the development of the novel, see Rippl.

Chapter 3

Becoming the Heroine Although the experiences of the romance heroines described in Chapter 2 are in many ways worlds apart from the lives of early modern Englishwomen, who ideally spent most of their time within the confines of approved domestic settings under the watchful eye of a husband or male guardian, women’s life writing during this period suggests that the genre made a deep impression. Even if these women had no experience with evil sorcerers or magic potions, romance’s psychological resonances were powerful. And the extensive female-voiced narration that granted its speaker the ability to imagine new alternatives to personal, political, and social problems was appealing. Indeed, romancing the self offered a means of problemsolving with the added bonus of wish fulfillment. As Nigel Smith writes in reference to seventeenth-century England’s political crisis, “Imagining ourselves as more than we are—amplified into the glory of a romance character—may have been the only means of resolving those greater issues of power, authority and allegiance which confronted individuals” (235). In this chapter, I argue that the desire to script oneself as “more” or different than the real version appealed especially to women, and I provide evidence of romance’s influence on a wide range of women’s personal writing: secular and spiritual, private and public, fragmentary and continuous, political and non-political. Evidence of this influence is equally varied, including women’s increasing use of the first-person voice to tell stories of the self, marriage plots strikingly reminiscent of romance, a conflicted discourse that attempts to negotiate the pros and cons of arranged marriage without damaging the speakers’ reputations, and adventurous plots in which the writers themselves often play the heroines. In all cases, the life writers considered here manipulate romance strategies in order to achieve very specific rhetorical agendas. They do not carelessly pour thoughts onto a page—as is often assumed of personal writing—but instead make careful narrative choices. Certainly, specific time periods and subgenres of life writing better accommodated romance tropes than others. The Civil War crisis of the 1640s and 1650s proved especially conducive to romance-like auto/biographical content, and prose narratives and retrospective accounts enabled a writer to more thoroughly fashion a heroic self and a romance-like plot than more fragmentary forms like the diary.1 But numerous examples beyond these historical moments and auto/ 1 According to Josephine Donovan, “‘That All the World May Know,’” the seventeenth-century novelesque “women’s defense-narrative” similarly enabled heroic selfpresentations. However, it is much more complicated because of its blatant fictionalizing: the works by Mary Frith, Mary Carleton, Elizabeth Cellier, and Delarivier Manley … are based on verifiable historical events that actually happened (and

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biographical categories testify to the romance genre’s immense flexibility for a woman’s construction of self. Indeed, romance had something to offer even the most spiritual of writers, as demonstrated by the fact that John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–82), a thoroughly spiritual text, contains hints of its author’s more secular reading, perhaps as a ploy to entice readers.2 For most female authors, however, who had no intention of publishing their life writing to a wide readership, if any at all, romance seems to have offered something more personally and narratively useful. Early Modern Englishwomen’s Romance-Inflected Life Writing The numerous traces of romance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishwomen’s life writing include both structural and non-structural elements. First and foremost, life writers use autobiographical narration in the first-person voice (and occasionally the third-person voice) to construct a version or even multiple versions of self. Like the female narrators of romance’s embedded tales, they use their life stories to insert themselves into a rhetorically complex world, thus taking control of the self-image they wish to project and creating powerfully voiced accounts of character, behavior, and motive. Furthermore, they often adopt the formulaic introduction of background so common to romance’s embedded narratives, as does Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) when she begins her self-story, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656), with the phrase “My Father was a Gentleman” (41).3 Romance’s basic plot structure of the quest also lends itself well to tales of the self, especially tales based in troubled times (like the Civil Wars) or in dramatic personal conflicts (such as a traumatic marriage). As Judith Kearns observes in “Fashioning Innocence: Rhetorical Construction of Character in the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett,”4 the fact that romance’s “essential plot element in this respect are nonfiction) but … also rely heavily on fictional models. … 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. (170) Debates about the authorship of these texts further complicate interpretive efforts and make for a much different kind of category. 2 See Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, esp. 7–8, for Bunyan’s use of texts that would have been familiar to his readers, including popular literature like the medieval chivalric romance Bevis of Southampton. 3 All references to Cavendish’s True Relation are to Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson’s edition in Paper Bodies. 4 Although Kearns and others refer to Halkett’s prose life narrative as her Memoirs, Suzanne Trill notes in the introduction to her edition of Halkett’s work that the actual manuscript volume in which this text appears “is titled and catalogued as ‘The Autobiography of Lady Anne Halkett’” (xviin3) and that Halkett herself refers to the narrative as “a True accountt of my life” (xxxvii). See Trill, xxxvi–xxxvii, for a discussion of the various titles; I refer to Halkett’s self-narrative as her Autobiography.

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is adventure” means that it is well suited to “turbulence.” Furthermore, “a number of its conventions would have been familiar to seventeenth-century readers and writers from their own experiences: dislocation and disguise, false accusations and honorable behavior tested by tribulations, the state of topsy-turvydom” (346). Indeed, as Nigel Smith speculates, seventeenth-century individuals who experienced and witnessed the “extraordinary events” of their time may well have thought that “life had in any case become a romance” (235).5 Yet even in calmer times, the romance genre’s steady “narrative movement … towards the discovery of true identity and a resolution of complicated love affairs” (Kearns 347) offered a plot trajectory that could be adapted to life writers’ purposes. As Mary Beth Rose noted as early as 1986, one “narrative strategy which female autobiographers commonly use involves the creation of a conventional linear quest motif out of the author’s romantic adventures, which culminate in her destiny-as-marriage” (“Gender” 256).6 The Autobiography composed by Halkett (1621/22–99) offers an excellent example of just how flexible and valuable these universal aspects of romance could be. As Kearns demonstrates in her analysis of this text, the movement of Halkett’s narrative toward a happy marriage that triumphs over dodgy suitors and threats to her reputation matches reader expectations of romance, but it also— as a result—“cast[s] her relationships with her three suitors in a favorable light and offer[s] a reassuring anticipation of the narrative’s movement towards her securely married state” (347). Halkett’s memorable role in the Duke of York’s escape from England7 and her tendency to find ingenious means of reconciling her own interests with others’ demands also directly echo the adventures of many independent-thinking romance heroines.8 However, as Kearns convincingly argues, it is Halkett’s manipulation of the romance genre to her own rhetorical purpose that is most striking. If, as many readers of Halkett’s narrative have claimed, her primary purpose was to defend her virtue, then romance enabled her to “evok[e] a sympathetic reader” (345). If she needed “to fashion an acceptable self” despite the fact that she made many controversial choices in her maiden days (such as spending time alone with the married Colonel Joseph Bampfield), then romance accommodated just such “an unconventional life” (341). If she had to reconcile contradictions within her self and within her life, then romance could “contain competing lines of plot development” and “frank” confessions of nontraditional female behavior (351). And if she needed a framework that could trace For women’s Civil War life writing, see N.H. Keeble, “Obedient Subjects?” and “‘The Colonel’s Shadow’: Lucy Hutchinson, Women’s Writing and the Civil War”; Helen Wilcox and Sheila Ottway, “Women’s Histories”; and Susan Wiseman, “‘The Most Considerable of My Troubles’: Anne Halkett and the Writing of Civil War Conspiracy.” 6 This quote also appears with slightly different wording in Rose, Gender and Heroism, 67. 7 Halkett famously disguised the Duke as a woman in this incident (69–73). 8 In one example, Halkett blindfolds herself when she meets an insistent suitor so as to comply with her mother’s demand that she not see him anymore (63). 5

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her life’s journey, her struggles, and her eventual triumph with marriage to a good man, then romance’s archetypal structure was just right.9 There is no doubt that romance suits Halkett perfectly (indeed, I return to her Autobiography numerous times in this study).10 But Kearns’s explication of this fact in narrative and generic terms also makes a compelling case for autobiography-as-romance more generally, whether the goal for specific writers was to figure themselves sympathetically, “glorify [their] own experience” (Wilcox, “Her” 114),11 honor the life of a loved one, record personal struggles, or simply explain—through recourse to familiar ideologies and tropes—how they came to live their lives in the ways that they did. Simply put, when dealing with difficult subjects, especially personal ones, early modern life writers found romance to be a particularly useful mode. Indeed, romance’s extraordinary flexibility and value for a range of genres becomes especially clear when approached (as Barbara Fuchs and others have done) as a “strategy” rather than a “genre.” Read this way, Fuchs argues, “romance involves not only strategies of form” (36) like those at work in Halkett’s narrative but also “the privileging of a certain content” that is consistent from romance’s “classical manifestations” onward. This standard content includes “occluded and subsequently revealed identities, idealized protagonists, marvels … tasks and tests” (36), among other elements. Most significantly for my purposes, “understanding romance as a strategy might yield a different corpus, cutting across traditional generic categories” (38). This is definitely the case with early modern Englishwomen’s life writing, in which so many writers harness romance’s power for their own use. Therefore, as noted in the Introduction, I view romance as a powerful genre that women confronted through reading and cultural references but also as an equally powerful strategy that they could deploy when authoring their own work. Women’s manipulation of romance-as-mode is creative and varied, and in many ways their narration of self echoes the authorial choices made by their storytelling counterparts in romance. Indeed, I build on the patterns established in For further structural echoes of romance, see Keeble, “Obedient Subjects?” and Gabriele Rippl, “‘The Conflict Betwixt Love and Honor.’” Rippl argues that Halkett’s “flashbacks and previews” (17) and the way that “[t]he incidents blend into each other in such a way that they comment on each other and temporality develops” (18) indicate that “Halkett takes on the structure and the character stock of the romance to a great degree” (19). 10 Although Trill argues convincingly that Halkett’s extensive corpus is primarily spiritual and that the scholarly focus to date on her Autobiography has distorted our understanding of her and her work, this important point does not change the fact that in the Autobiography—the text within Halkett’s corpus that is most conducive to narrative—she relies on secular as well as spiritual generic models. Among the former, romance reigns supreme. See also Mary Ellen Lamb, “Merging the Secular and the Spiritual,” and Kim Walker, “‘Divine Chymistry’ and Dramatic Character,” an analysis of romantic drama as the primary framework for Halkett’s self-story. 11 Wilcox refers here to Mary Carleton’s use of romance. 9

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Chapter 2 in the explication of female life writers’ most commonly used romance elements: marriage plots that follow two familiar romance trajectories (one that traces the hardships and heartbreak frequently attendant on arranged marriage in the early modern period and one that celebrates the triumph of love after great struggle), a highly conflicted discourse for expressing matters of the heart, and adventurous plots in which the writers themselves figure as heroines. Although there is significant overlap between these elements, I address each separately in order to better accomplish two primary goals: first, to demonstrate romance’s pervasive influence on women’s life writing, and second, to analyze how several specific uses of romance actually work in the texts and in the writers’ construction of self. Marriage Plots Romantic plots are the heart and soul of romance and also often take center stage in women’s life writing. Of the two primary variations—triumphant and tragic— most women adopt the latter, as they explain the problems they faced during courtship, marriage, and widowhood and often attempt to defend their behavior in response to these problems. Examples include Elizabeth Freke (1641/42– 1714), whose love-based marriage to her cousin Percy was nonetheless plagued by long periods of separation and disagreement; Halkett, whose reputation was tarnished because of her intimate relationship with Bampfield; and Alice Thornton (1626/27–1706/7), who only reluctantly submitted to a marriage arranged by her family. Collectively, such tales poignantly articulate women’s vulnerability in an arranged marriage system. Yet female life writers had to be careful with such plots, since direct critique of the patriarchal attitudes and systems that were largely responsible for many of their problems was hardly acceptable. Women had to somehow convey the details necessary to meet their narrative needs without overstepping the bounds of proper female decorum. Thus diarist Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), who experienced two miserable marriages,12 refers only vaguely to “falling outs” with her husbands, rarely makes negative comments about either, and instead treats her trials as a married woman in rather matter-of-fact terms. Even those writers who employ less stoic tones make use of a conflicted rhetoric (explained further below) that buries blame and accusation beneath self-defense and self-expression. More important than direct critique of others, it seems, was the opportunity to claim the narrative space to tell their tales in their own words, often in the midst or aftermath of personal crisis. Of course, this is exactly what romance’s storytelling women do as well. Clifford’s first spouse, Richard Sackville, spent much of his time away from her at court, sided with King James in legal battles over her inheritance, temporarily took away their daughter when she refused to give in on said legal battles, and even entertained his mistress near their home. Her second husband, the “chollerick” (105) Philip Herbert, also lived apart from Clifford after only a few years of marriage. 12

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As scholars have duly noted, Clifford made it her life’s work, especially in widowhood, to repetitively narrate and record her life’s trials and successes.13 Thornton embarked on a similar narrative project, if not as long or extensive, in which she attempts to explain in four manuscript volumes her life choices, especially in regard to her 14-year-old daughter’s marriage. “[A]t issue,” Raymond A. Anselment explains, were “the reputation and social standing of a family allegedly compelled to bolster its diminished fortunes through the marriage of the elder daughter to the local minister, Thomas Comber” (“Seventeenth-Century” 136). Although this, in and of itself, does not appear scandalous, Anselment says that the worst “[a]llegations … accuse the mother of manipulating her daughter into a marriage of convenience, conspiring with Comber to defraud her husband, and even designing herself to marry the minister as soon as her husband died” (“My” 2). Therefore, although Thornton claims to have been in the habit of regular textual self-examination, these circumstances clearly spurred her into more energetic, and more public, composition. She began her narrative defense “[w]ithin three months of the private wedding, which occurred soon after the funeral of Thornton’s husband” (136), and then circulated the narrative among her friends (136). Over and over, life experience combined with the narrative impulse to propel women like Thornton and Clifford to record their versions of their lives, no matter how public or private they ultimately intended the accounts to be. In the process, they made several points quite clear. One is that marriage was often lonely. For example, despite Clifford’s reticent style, she effectively conveys the isolation she experienced. Referring to the toll of numerous marital and legal struggles, Clifford notes in one diary entry “how much I was condemned in the World” (48) and in another that “I am like an Owl in the Desert” (33).14 This image of a solitary creature either alone in or alone against the world (a world, it is implied, that consists of philandering husbands, scheming male relatives, and domineering kings) applies to many female life writers, whose experiences at all stages of the marriage process left them emotionally or physically isolated. When Lady Grace Mildmay (c. 1552–1620), for instance, finds herself frequently home alone as a newly married 15-year-old bride, she obediently asserts that “God had placed me in this house, & yf I found no comfort here, I would neuer seeke it out of this house” (45).15 Cut off from the world in this 13 See Elizabeth V. Chew, “Si(gh)ting the Mistress of the House: Anne Clifford and Architectural Space”; Megan Matchinske, “Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford”; Anne M. Myers, “Construction Sites: The Architecture of Anne Clifford’s Diaries”; Mihoko Suzuki, “Anne Clifford and the Gendering of History”; Helen Wilcox, “‘A Wife and Lady Oneself’: Maturity and Memory in the Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford”; and Nancy E. Wright, “Accounting for a Life: The Household Accounts of Lady Anne Clifford.” 14 All references to Clifford’s texts are to D.J.H. Clifford’s edition of her Diaries. 15 Mildmay’s husband, Anthony, was frequently away on court business. All references to Mildmay’s text are to microfilm MI362, a copy of the original manuscript, NPL 3024, currently housed at the Northamptonshire Record Office. Randall Martin provides a useful, if incomplete, edition in “The Autobiography of Grace, Lady Mildmay.”

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way, it is no surprise that writing became a kind of companion in her solitude. As she herself says, “[t]his book of my Meditation is the consolation of my soule, the joye of my hart & the stabilitie of my mynde” (30). And yet, for some women, marriage may have been a relief, for these life writers also make abundantly clear that an early modern woman’s courtship years were particularly dangerous. For Halkett, the adventure that was early modern courtship involved negotiating conflicting demands from her mother and suitors, enduring her mother’s drastic efforts to control her interactions with those suitors, and somehow maintaining her integrity in the face of her suitors’ manipulations and lies. Thomas Howard, the first man to get sustained narrative attention in the Autobiography, is represented in traditional romance terms as the courtly lover who insists he will die without her. In a classic moment, Halkett explains that “[W]hat hee Said was handsome & short, butt much disordered for hee Looked pale as death & his hand trembled when hee tooke mine to lead mee and with a great Sigh Said[, i]f I Loued you lese I could say more” (57). But this near caricature of the tortured lover, which reveals Howard’s familiarity with romance as well as Halkett’s, turns more sinister as Howard shifts from imploring her favor to bitterly blaming her for his misery.16 Indeed, he consistently forces her into awkward situations that he is quick to capitalize on, as when he appears to faint under the pressure of his romantic desperation: wch I must Confese did so much moue mee yt[, l]aying aside all former distance I had kept him att, I satt downe vpon his knee & Laying my head neere his I Suffred him to kisse mee[,] wch was a Liberty I neuer gave before nor had nott then had I nott Seene him so ouercome with greefe. (60)

Such behavior indicates that Halkett has read her romance carefully, for she responds with the compassion and pity that the scene—if fiction—would require. Yet in real life, this response creates just one more in a series of behaviors that she will have to defend. In this case, therefore, playing the romance beloved makes Halkett sympathetic on the page but extraordinarily vulnerable as a young woman. Whether forcing from her a kiss or a reluctant promise, Howard makes filial obedience extremely difficult for Halkett and ultimately turns her first romantic experience into heartbreak when he marries someone else. Bampfield, the second leading man in Halkett’s narrative, offers a quite different example of how vulnerable an unmarried woman was. According to Halkett’s account, he initially impressed her with his “Serious” and pious “discourse” (68) and much romanticized life in the King’s service. But with his lies about his wife’s death, their relationship became “the story of my beeing vnhapely deceaued” (131) Although it is difficult to tell for certain whether Halkett was interested in marrying Howard, her mother adamantly opposed the idea. She was especially concerned that, since she would not be able to provide a sufficient dowry, Howard’s father would have to overcompensate and thus have less money for Howard’s siblings, ultimately creating bad blood between the two families. And yet, even when Howard’s father consented to the match, Halkett reports that her mother continued to refuse and to scold Anne for the kind of talk the affair might bring on the family. 16

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and the biggest scandal of Halkett’s life. The two eventually became engaged, and Halkett further risked her virtue and reputation by making private visits to him: The eanest desire I had to Serue the King made mee omitt noe opertunity wherin I could bee vsefull and the zeale I had for his Mats made mee not See what I exposed my Selfe to, for my intentions beeing Iust & inocentt made mee nott reflect what Conclusions might bee made for the priuate visitts which I could nott butt nesesarily make to him in order to the Kings Seruice. (73)

As seen here, Halkett’s defense is her political zeal, and her version of events in the Autobiography even rewards her in appropriate romance fashion with marriage to the noblest man in her tale, Sir James Halkett, but not before her reputation and health suffer. Whether Halkett allowed herself to be deceived, really was deceived, or intentionally misrepresents the details in her narrative,17 her tale makes clear that courtship could be a minefield for an early modern woman.18 And yet, it could be worse, for Thornton describes in her life narrative, generally referred to as A Book of Remembrances, what was perhaps the rockiest entrance into life as a marriageable maiden. She first describes her fear of being kidnapped by a rebel captain, “soe vild a bloody looked man,” whose offer for her hand in marriage had been refused (294) and then, remarkably, reports her “great deliverance” from yet another vicious-minded man, in this case the “debauched” Jerimy Smithson who “hired some of his owne company to haue stolen me away” (299), again after a more traditional marriage proposal failed.19 The process of spouse selection, such narratives suggest, was dangerous indeed. Therefore, even though these writers usually refrain from direct critique of their (more respectable) suitors, their parents, and their eventual husbands, their stories 17 Intriguingly, pages are missing from the manuscript at critical junctures in the narrative, including immediately after Halkett recounts receiving news about Bampfield’s wife being alive. When the manuscript resumes mid-sentence, it reads, “vnworthy. [A]nd in what apeared so, none Liuing Could Condemne mee more then I did my Selfe” (126). 18 Halkett’s vulnerability only increases over time, as the following summary of her early life makes clear: Divorced from parental protection and authority by the death of her father in 1623 (when she was only three months old) and then the death of her mother (who died in 1647), separated from kin and unmarried until her early thirties, lacking either money or land other than as promissory bond or debt, in the midst of civil war with all the disorder of social relations which that occasioned, Halkett is placed in a highly insecure position with regard to her rank and her femininity. (Walker 136) 19 In this case, Thornton specifically feared being raped (299). Unless noted otherwise, all references to Thornton’s text are to British Library Additional MS 88897/1, the first of a three-volume series that Thornton seemingly created from a shorter, initial version. For a complete textual history, see Anselment, “Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources.” Happily, the two manuscripts that he describes as “in the possession of a private collector” (135) are now at the British Library. The only published version of Thornton’s writings is Charles Jackson’s unsatisfactory edition of 1875, The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, which awkwardly and often unclearly combines material from all four manuscript volumes.

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echo the same concerns about a woman’s plight in a patriarchal marriage that take center stage in romance. In some cases, women actually allude to romance in order to most effectively express their misery. For instance, when Clifford writes that “the marble pillars of Knole and Wilton [her husbands’ family homes] were to mee oftentimes but the gay Arbours of Anguish” (qtd. in Brayman Hackel, Reading 233), she invokes “a passage from a song in the Arcadia … : ‘Come from marble bowers, many times the gay harbour of anguish’” (233). A smirk may underlie this reference, since Clifford specifically adopts Sidney’s “romance to comment upon the state of her disappointing marriage to Sidney’s nephew”20 (234). But more important here than Clifford’s expression of the bitter ironies of her second marriage is her use of romance to point out, much in the style of a fictional embedded narrative’s didactic function, the misery that often awaits a woman under the guise of matrimonial happiness. In this way, stories like Clifford’s also provide exempla, or object lessons, for potential readers or even themselves as they work to make sense of their lives. But of course the lessons are not always as clear-cut as the often good-andevil plots of romance. One of the unhappiest marriage stories in early modern Englishwomen’s life writing comes from the pen of a woman who married for love and yet still found herself miserable and often alone as a married woman, thus demonstrating the equal danger of marrying for love.21 This particular moral runs counter to many of the narratives found in romance, narratives that tend to support the woman and her chosen beloved against her domineering father and his often undesirable choice of spouse for his daughter. But marrying for love seems the only explanation that life writer Freke can find for the unsatisfactory path her life took after she married Percy; left the home of her “indullgentt” father (B: 214); and found herself the subject of mistreatment, disrespect, and general neglect by her husband. Within a year of marrying, Freke explains in her narrative,22 she began to Herbert was the son of Philip’s sister Mary. Dorothy Osborne’s letters also provide a useful glimpse into an early modern

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woman’s concerns about marrying for love. 22 Freke’s “Some few remembrances of my misfortuns have attended me in my unhappy life since I were marryed” (37) appears in two different versions in two different commonplace books, though there is much overlap between the two accounts. The first, which Freke likely started in 1702 when she was 60 years old, begins with an entry about her secret marriage in 1671 and is likely based “on an earlier form of diary notations” (Anselment, Introduction to Remembrances 2). This narrative ends in the year of her death with an entry for February 15, 1714. Freke likely began her second version of her Remembrances ten years later in 1712. Clearly working from her first account, she “both retells and revises the earlier version, adding and deleting material to gain a tighter chronological continuity” (20). This text begins with the same date as the first version, adds a few significant episodes and details, and ends a tad earlier, with an entry for May 5, 1713. Anselment’s edition, to which all my citations refer, usefully includes both versions (referring to the former as manuscript “W” and the latter as manuscript “B”) and includes in the introduction an analysis of the differences between the two narrative accounts. For Anselment’s theory that growing up with “[a]n overprotective father” may have contributed to Freke’s dissatisfaction in adulthood, see esp. 20–22.

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experience the difficulties that she retrospectively attributes to “my disobedience in marrying as I did withoutt my deer fathers knowledg” (B: 212), “I being only governed by my affections in this my marrying and withoutt the consentt of any of my frinds” (W: 39). As she records her marital misadventures with the benefits of hindsight, Freke interprets even the gloomy weather on her two wedding days (one for her private marriage and a second in her father’s presence) as “true prognostications of whatt I have undergone since” (B: 212). Although Freke’s narrative includes a loving father rather than a brutal, controlling one and begins rather than ends with marriage, it nonetheless incorporates numerous other elements typical of romance plots. These include the disobedient daughter who marries for love; a self-presentation that “emphasizes years of personal struggle and resistance” against “domestic constraint” (Anselment, Introduction, Remembrances 1, 3); a sympathetic, if not always likeable, heroine; and melodramatic deathbed scenes. It is no surprise, given these details, that Freke’s personal book collection included at least one romance.23 The most complicated character in Freke’s Remembrances is her husband, who does not fit neatly into either the tyrant husband or savior husband mold. Certainly, he is represented as an unsatisfactory husband, and yet, the seemingly conflicted Elizabeth was not content to leave this image for posterity, instead rewriting key aspects of her depiction to salvage some element of the heroic in her husband’s character. Therefore, although a second narrative of her marriage and widowhood repeats her first version’s theme that she has been ill served by life, and carefully, even repetitively, details Percy’s often troubling financial decisions and numerous, lengthy absences, she also makes several positive revisions.24 For example, she deletes the worst comments about Percy—that “he never in his life took any care for me or whatt I did” (W: 53), that he “barbarously” left her for two years (W: 73), and that once, in the heat of argument, he wished “thatt he might never se my face more” (W: 49)25—and adds two scenes that are, if a stretch, nevertheless worthy of romance billing. The first depicts Percy on his deathbed, when he is hardly capable of heroic action. Freke recounts being approached in her exhausted, worried condition by two men, “both of them drunke, and like two beast called mee crassy [i.e. crazy] woman. And Life [one of the men] said hee [had] two pisstolls in his pockett redy charged would soon rid me outt of the way.” Freke assumed Percy was sleeping during this incident, but she says she later learned otherwise: As noted in Chapter 1, this was Cassandra. A striking number of the life writers considered here reread and rewrote their

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narratives, confirming the idea that these texts were typically carefully crafted. See Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing, esp. 24, for his comparison of “Freke’s differing accounts of her marriage and her husband” to those of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, whom I discuss in Chapter 4. 25 Significantly, all three of these references are marked out in manuscript W but removed altogether from manuscript B, indicating many stages of revision.

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[The next day] Mr Freke cal’d his servants and the people of the house to know whatt the matter was his wife was soe abused and thatt before his son and my cosin Crosby, whom he made sett up all night with him, and locked me outt of his chamber hee might send a challeng by him to them by sun riseing to fightt them both. And after he would have the law against them. … nextt day they came both on ther knees to mee and offered me whatt sattisfacttion I required of them. Soe tender was my deer husband of my honour, tho too true, for my grife had made me very little better then crassed with seeing him lye fowre monthes in that misery and my own legg broke in two holes full of pains. (B: 251)

Although this episode borders on absurdity, it is significant because it does not appear at all in Freke’s first version of her husband’s last days. Indeed, “manuscript W” (Anselment’s label for the first version) includes no entries at all for May 1, 2, and 3, the dates Freke assigns to this reassuring memory in “manuscript B” (the second version). The second episode significantly expanded by Freke—her account of Percy’s death—similarly incorporates more melodramatic details. Although her first version indicates that she was alone with him at the time and “frightned outt of my life, his soe suden leaveing of me and I nott able to hold him” (W: 86), her revised version goes much further: They being all att church, noe mortall was with him butt my wretched selfe; [dying] in my armes, which quite distracted me, [he] bid me nott stirr from him. Butt my amased condition was such as my crying outt soon fill’d the house outt of the church to be a wittness of my unhappy and deplorable fatte. (B: 251)

This pitiable and overwhelming sorrow, which Freke describes as her “distractions for Mr Freke” (B: 255), further becomes in manuscript B the very reason she is able to be so manipulated and deceived by nearly everyone around her, including tenants, relatives, and servants, in her widowed years. Freke’s revised account of her husband’s death thus serves at least two purposes: it rehabilitates his image and helps to explain how she came to be so abused and maligned in her widowhood.26 These textual improvements in turn produce a better image of her “as the unstinting nurse who tended her husband through long days and nights at her own considerable emotional and physical expense” (Anselment, Introduction, Remembrances 15). In short, she scripts herself as the martyr, the most sympathetic of victims. And she achieves this end not through the spiritual route but through the domestic one, as a self-sacrificing mother, sister, landlady, and—most significantly—wife.27 Apparently, Freke was so disliked as to become legendary: “Children who played round [her old coach, years later] could be frightened away with the cry, ‘Take care, Madam Freke will have you,’ and many legends of her tyranny survived” (Ponsonby, Scottish 126). 27 Arthur Ponsonby comments on Freke’s “pose as a martyr” in both Scottish and Irish Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (120) and British Diarists (55). 26

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Not surprisingly, the self-sacrificing wife or daughter appears in numerous life writers’ tales, including those that follow the more satisfying marriage plot of triumphant love. Examples of this version include Dorothy Osborne (1627–94/5), whose stubborn resistance of her family’s wishes for several years was finally rewarded with marriage to the man she most loved; Lucy Hutchinson (1619/20– 81), who idealized her mutually loving marriage to the republican Colonel John Hutchinson in The Life of John Hutchinson;28 and Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80), who recounted numerous harrowing experiences traveling the world with her much-beloved spouse during the upheaval of the Civil Wars. Writing in order to give her son a thorough account of “ye most remarkable actions and accidents of your family, as well as those of more eminent ones of your Father and my life” (1),29 Fanshawe constructs a tale filled with noble adventures and heroic characters, starting with an impeccable image of the man to whom she was happily married for precisely “23 years and 29 days” (13). From her very first words about Sir Richard Fanshawe, she paints an idealized portrait: “He was of ye highest sise of men, strong, and of the best proportion, his complexion sanguin, his skinne exceeding fair, his hair dark brown, and very curling, but not very long his Eyes gray, and penetrating, his nose high, his countenance gracious, and wise” (3). In similarly hyperbolic terms, Fanshawe describes his character: He was very obliging to all, and forward to serve his Mr his Country and friend … He would never be drawn to ye faction of any Party, saying he found it sufficient, honestly to preforme [sic] yt imployment he was in. … His conversation was so honest, yt I neuer heard him speake a word in my life, that tended to Gods dishonour or incouragement of any kind of debauchery or sin. He was ever much esteemed by his two Masters Charles ye first, and Charles the second, both for great parts and honesty, as for his Conversation, in which they took great delight he being so free from passion, that made him beloved of all that knew him; nor did i ever see him moved but with his Mrs concerns, in which he would hotly pursue his intrest through ye greatest difficultys. (3, 4)

Fanshawe’s portrait leaves no room for her son to doubt his father’s essential nobility.

28 Although editors since the first published edition in 1806 have called Hutchinson’s text Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, I use the abbreviated version of her own heading, “The Life of John Hutchinson of Owthorpe in the County of Nottingham, Esquire.” For details on the manuscript, see James Sutherland’s “Note on the Text” in his 1973 edition. 29 All references to Fanshawe’s text are to my transcription of British Library Additional MS 41161. As explained by John Loftis, one of Fanshawe’s editors, the manuscript is not in her hand but several corrections are (“Note” 91). With the exception of lineation, I have not modernized or altered the text, nor have I given it a title; although most editors through the text’s publication history have called it her Memoirs, the manuscript itself is not titled.

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Yet, as Fanshawe herself notes in the introductory lines quoted above, this story of the hero whose political employments30 define her life from age 19 is also the story of herself, the young woman who accompanies this man on nearly all of his adventures, no matter the risk. This heroine is thoroughly energetic and brave, even in her youth when she claims to have been “wild”: “for I loued riding in ye first place and running and all Acteiue pastimes and in fine I was yt that which we graver people call a Hoyting girle” (21). But her mother’s death (21) and later her own marriage granted a solemnity to this adventurous spirit, such that she writes the following: Now we appeared upon ye stage to act what part God desined us and as faith is ye evidence of things not seen so we upon so righteous a cause cheerfully resolvd to suffer what yt would drive us to which afflictions were neither few nor finall as you will find. (28)

Fanshawe’s words poignantly transition her tale from one of distinct individuals (she has, by this point, traced each of her son’s genetic lines) to one of a married couple. Indeed, although Fanshawe’s case is typical of many early modern women’s narratives of their husbands in the way that it blends into autobiography and in its depiction of the woman’s role as subsidiary or—at best—complementary to the husband’s, Fanshawe’s tale is unique because it reads more like the story of a marriage than anything else.31 The Fanshawes’ relationship is the thread that ties the whole narrative together, just as most romance plots are built around a central couple.32 Fanshawe’s depiction of her marriage also resembles romance’s idealized couples with its emphasis on their adventurous life and deep, mutual love. For example, Fanshawe claims that, for all Richard’s worldliness and political importance, his “most delight was to goe only with me in a Coach some miles, and there discourse of those things which then mo[st] pleased him of what 30 Among his many positions, Richard Fanshawe was a diplomat, ambassador to Portugal and Spain, and Secretary of War to the Prince of Wales. 31 Thus the narrative ends shortly after her account of Richard’s death in 1666 even though she lived to 1680, as if the couple’s lives had become so intertwined as to essentially end at the same time (at least in narrative terms). To wrap up both narrative and life, Fanshawe records completing several widow’s tasks, such as bringing her husband’s body back from Spain, where he had died, and burying him in a vault of her own making. Recording the story of their lives together for their only surviving son is just the final step in this memorializing effort. 32 See also Estelle C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present, who argues that the organizing principle of Fanshawe’s memoirs is “the mutual love between herself and her husband (26–7), and Brigitte Glaser, The Creation of the Self in Autobiographical Forms of Writing in Seventeenth-Century England: Subjectivity and Self-Fashioning in Memoirs, Diaries, and Letters, who observes that Fanshawe’s “narrative becomes particularly vivid when she portrays herself as her husband’s friend and companion rather than as an individual in a position of dependency” (101).

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nature soeuer” (3). Furthermore, she insists that “though he would say I managed his Domesticks wholy, yet I ever governed them and my self by his commands” (4–5). Ann and Richard are, such passages imply, fully interconnected. Indeed, the following passage leaves no doubt: Now you will expect I should say something … of us Iointly, which I will doe, though it makes my Eyes gush out with tears, and cuts me to ye Soul, to remember and in part express ye joys I was blessed with, in him. … we never had but one mind through out our liues, our Soules were wrapped up in each other, our aim[s] and designs one; our Loves one; and our resentments one. We so studyed one ye other, yt we knew each others mind by our looks. (5)

Fanshawe here echoes the romance commonplace by which a teller complies with an auditor’s command despite the pain in doing so and, more importantly, makes thorough use of the genre’s sentimental tone. Just as the Fanshawes’ mutual love operates on an elevated plane, and just as their individual characters are inherently noble, so are the adventures they share pure romance material. Of the numerous romance-like adventures Fanshawe records,33 I focus here on two that are significant for the insight they offer into her intense marriage and equally intense narrative style. In the first instance, Fanshawe relates how, while pregnant and nursing a broken wrist, she managed to escape from Cork, which had been newly seized by Oliver Cromwell’s forces, in October 164934: by chance my husband yt day was gone upon business … at midnight I heard ye great guns goe off and there upon I called my family to rise … and I did as well as I could in yt condition, hearing lamentable scricks [i.e. shrieks] of men & women & children I asked at a window ye cause they told me they were all Irish stript and wounded turned out of ye Town … upon ys I immediatly write a letter to my husband, … perswading him to patience and hope yt I should gett safely out of ye Town by Gods assistance, … wth promiss I would secure his papers: … Immmediatly [sic] I packed up my husbands cabeenet wth all his writings … & all other things … yt were portable & of value & yn about 3 a clock in ye morning by ye light of a Tapour & in yt pain I was in I went into ye Market place and wth onely a man and maid & … searched for their chief commander Ieffreys who whilst he was Loyall had received many civilitys from yor father, … He instantly writt me a Pass both for my self family & goods … wth ys I came through thousands of naked swords to red Abbey and hired ye next nighbours Cart which carryed all yt I could remove … [and, later] got safe to ye Garrison where I found your fathe[r] ye most disconsolate man in ye world for fear of his family which he had no possibility to assist but his Ioys exceeded to see me and his darling daughter, and to hear ye wounderfull escape we throug[h] ye assistance of God had made.35 (51–3) 33 Fanshawe’s narrative includes accounts of shipwrecks, robberies, Richard’s imprisonment, an encounter with an Irish banshee, plague, and numerous meetings with royalty. 34 Fanshawe mis-records the time period for these events as early November 1650. 35 Red Abbey is where the Fanshawes stayed while in Cork.

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Although this characteristically vivid and suspenseful passage centers on a moment when Fanshawe had to act on her own, it nonetheless reveals the way that she and her husband worked as a team. Fanshawe communicated her plan to Richard in the midst of chaos and danger, and she thought to secure his papers before fleeing their Cork home, a wise decision given Cromwell’s later comment that “it was as much worth to have seised his papers as ye Town for I did make account by ym to have known what these parts of ye Country were worth” (53). It is fair to wonder how Fanshawe knows what words Cromwell exchanged with his men, but there is no doubt that the whole episode makes an excellent story and contributes many exemplary qualities to a family history intended to present the best possible image of the Fanshawes’ lives together to their son. The second incident contains less political intrigue but more of the deep bond that linked the Fanshawes. As Ann reports, they were leaving Ireland when a Turkish galley approached the ship on which they were traveling: we believed we should all be carried away slaves for ys man had so loaden his ship wth goods for Spaine yt his Guns were useless … he called for armes & cleared ye Deck as well as he could resolving to fight rather yn lose his ship … my husband bid us be sure to keepe in ye Cabine and not appear, no woman wch would make ye Turks think we were a man of war, but if they saw women they would take us for merchants & boord us. he went upon ye Decks and took a gun & bandoliers and sword & with ye rest of ye ships company stood on ye Deck expecting ye arrival of ye Turkish man of war. This beast Captain had locked me up in ye Cabine, I knocked & called long to no purpose, untill at length a Cabine boy came & opened ye Doore. I all in teares desired him to be so good as to give me his blew throm Cap he wore & his tarred Coat, which he did & I gave him half a crown & putting ym on & flinging away my nights chothes [sic] I crept up softly & stood upon ye Deck by my husbands side as free from sickness & fear as I confess from discretion but it was ye effect of yt passion which I could never master. By ys time ye 2 vessels were ingaged in parley & so well satisfyd with speech & sight of each others forces yt ye Turks man of war tacked about & we continued our course, but when your Father saw it convenient to retreat looking upon me he blessed himself & snatched me up in his armes, saying Good God yt Love can make ys change, & though he seemingly chid me he would laugh at it as often as he remembred yt voyage. (61–2)

This account, which incorporates the familiar romance motif of cross-dressing, reinforces the depth with which the Fanshawes loved one another while also suggesting the degree to which stories of their life together became the fabric of their family’s history. Fanshawe thus passes the story-laden narrative to her son, the next carrier of the family’s legends. Attending to the family’s legacy is Fanshawe’s dominant motive, at least according to her introduction. But her memoirs do much more, as she skillfully blends travel narrative, biography, autobiography, war narrative, and genealogy into a captivating romance narrative. Fanshawe achieves this feat, furthermore, without once explicitly mentioning the romance genre. Her text thus provides a

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superb example of the way that romance haunts not only the thoughts of early modern Englishwomen but also their textual output. In scripting their own selves, as well as those of people close to them, they repeatedly manipulate what they find in the pages of romance into the characters and plots most suitable for their individual needs. As Fanshawe’s generically hybrid narrative further demonstrates, this use of romance for personal purposes is both sophisticated and compelling. Romancing the self is rewarding, if challenging, work. When it came to transforming a loved one into a character of heroic stature and idealized qualities, Hutchinson was equally talented.36 Unlike Fanshawe, however, the text in which she memorializes her husband, a man of “native majesty” (“To” 24),37 is truly the story of the man rather than of herself or their marriage.38 Indeed, her meager effort at self-narration in a separate document seems to have stalled rather quickly, resulting in only a few pages covering her birth through early maidenhood. Instead of self-narration, she devotes her narrative efforts to her husband, and—to use editor N.H. Keeble’s words—“Lucy Hutchinson herself … plays a very slight part in his history” (Introduction xxiv); she becomes, in fact, “a minor character … defined by her relationship to a man” (“‘Colonel’s’” 237) and even discusses herself in the third-person voice.39 But for all this, Hutchinson does not fail to capitalize on the triumphant marriage plot, recounting several tales of mutually loving couples that reinforce her claim that “the ground of happiness in marriage [is] mutual love” (44). In one of these episodes, Hutchinson digresses from the story of her husband’s life to tell a “memorable” (35) story of his maternal grandparents. Although this couple’s life together began with the greatest happiness and fortune, Hutchinson relates how the beautiful and exceptionally well-educated wife lost her mental capacity in a difficult childbirth. Yet this tragic alteration made no impact on the couple’s relationship. They were, Hutchinson continues, in no less constancy of love to each other, when even that distemper which had estranged her mind in all things else, had left her love and obedience entire to her husband, and he retained the same fondness and respect for her, after she was distempered, as when she was the glory of her age. (36) 36 A key similarity to Fanshawe’s text is Hutchinson’s blend of “genres for her own purposes rather than conforming to a single model” (Seelig 89). Specifically, she uses political history, Civil War narrative, biography, genealogy, spiritual polemic, and romance. 37 With hyperbolic terms similar to those used by Fanshawe, Hutchinson describes her husband’s physical traits and virtuous character in “To My Children,” an unfinished memorializing effort that precedes her Life of John. See esp. 18–30 of Keeble’s edition. 38 For a different reading, see Susan Cook, “‘The Story I Most Particularly Intend,’” who argues that Hutchinson “tells her own story as much as … that of her husband” (272). 39 Lest we find this too depressing, it is important to note that Lucy Hutchinson the character is an entirely separate entity from Lucy Hutchinson the narrator (and yet again from Lucy Hutchinson the woman). See Keeble’s excellent treatment of this point in “‘The Colonel’s Shadow.’” Furthermore, as will be demonstrated below, writing of oneself in the third-person voice is not necessarily self-effacing.

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Miraculously, this mutually adoring husband and wife died within a few hours of each other, even though the man seemed in good health, leading Hutchinson to speculate “whether some strange sympathy in love or nature, tied up their lives in one, or whether God was pleased to exercise an unusual providence towards them, preventing them both from that bitter sorrow which such separations can cause” (37). Hutchinson’s decision to include this poignant story despite the fact that it has no bearing on her husband’s life reveals a great deal about her as an author. First, as already noted, it reinforces her opinion about what makes a successful marriage and thus reflects positively on her textual construction of her own mutually loving relationship. Second, it incorporates several themes that repeatedly appear in Hutchinson’s marriage tales, such as constancy in marriage despite changes in the wife’s appearance, the possibility of marital happiness despite a range of obstacles, and the providential hand of God. Third, it suggests her delight in narrative. Indeed, Hutchinson’s Life is filled with stories, many of which (like this one) she received second-hand. Her narrative’s multiplicity40 thus reflects the storyladen romance genre, just as her inability to resist the narrative pull of a good tale resembles so many of the genre’s characters. Hutchinson herself admits to a fondness for narrative when, in her autobiographical fragment, she explains that her favorite pastime as a girl was reading (14). And she admits to indulging in amorous texts when, in the same piece, she explains that she “thought it no sin to learn or hear witty songs and amorous sonnets or poems, and twenty things of that kind, wherein I was so apt that I became the confidante in all the loves that were managed among my mother’s young women” (15). Yet, intriguingly, Hutchinson rarely references “amorous texts” in her Life of John. When she does reference romance in the biography, it usefully illuminates her authorial decision-making. For example, in the midst of her description of her courtship with John, she suddenly explains why she will tell no more: I shall pass by all the little amorous relations which, if I would take the pains to relate, would make a true history of a more handsome management of love than the best romances describe; for these are to be forgotten as the vanities of youth, not worthy of mention among the greater transactions of his life. There is only this to be recorded, that never was there a passion more ardent and less idolatrous; he loved her better than his life, … yet still considered honour, religion and duty above her. (51)

This brief invocation of romance, which Hutchinson uses in part to elevate her relationship with John to the rank of “the best,” demonstrates that she made a conscious authorial decision to adopt a graver and more mature tone than a more frivolous genre like romance would require. Likely, this also helps to explain a few mysteries in her own autobiographical narrative, namely several missing leaves in the manuscript after the above-mentioned reference to her household’s romantic 40 “[P]leasurable multiplicity” is one of the many elements that Fuchs attributes to romance-as-mode. See, for example, 66.

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intrigues and a few lines about what appears to be a romantic intrigue of her own.41 Perhaps admission of a romantic scandal in her past takes her too far afield from her narrative goal (in the autobiography) of thanking and glorifying God. Perhaps it is too sexually explicit to withstand censorship, whether by Hutchinson herself or someone else.42 Or perhaps—as her first editor suggests43—she simply abandoned her own story at this point in order to tell her husband’s. But it is also likely that this kind of tale is simply not in keeping with the kind of moral stories Hutchinson wants to tell, whether about herself or John. As Susan Cook argues of another instance in which Hutchinson mentions romance, this in her husband’s Life, Hutchinson requires a narrative mode that allows her to assert “God’s hand in events”: “If it were a romance, one should say after the successe, that the heroes did it out of excesse of gallantry … but we are relating wonders of Providence” (qtd. in Cook 273). It seems that, to Hutchinson’s mind, the ideal narrative mode for her purpose is simply not romance.44 In other words, Hutchinson’s choices should be seen as just that: choices. She struggles early in her life writing endeavors to find the right tone and method, as demonstrated by her decision to abandon her first draft of “To My Children” because “I so much dislike the manner of relating it that I will make another essay” (30).45 But eventually she figures it out, chooses the mature and measured tone most appropriate to her husband’s controversial life,46 and thus also chooses against many narrative aspects of the romance genre. But she does not forgo all aspects of romance. In addition to indulging in often digressive narrative and “toy[ing]” with “the romance voice” (Cook 275), Hutchinson chooses repeatedly to incorporate those versions of triumphant love and successful marriage that most favorably reflect her and her husband’s relationship and the providential hand in its development. Therefore, although she does not incorporate “all the little amorous relations” that preceded her marriage, she 41 These incomplete lines read: “any one mentioned him to me, I told them that I had forgotten those extravagancies of my infancy, and knew now that he and I were not equal; but I could not for many years hear his name without several inward emotions” (15). 42 See Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature, esp. 81. 43 See Keeble’s edition, 345n34. 44 Similarly, Seelig argues that “Hutchinson works to make her story both romantic and credible, as she asserts not the ways of the fiction writer but of Providence itself, and indeed uses our usual attitudes to the one to set off the greater credibility of the other” (85). On the other hand, Keeble interprets Hutchinson’s decision to forgo romance in the biography as entirely gendered: “The concerns of the Memoirs are overwhelmingly those of masculine discourse: war, politics and patriarchal religion. And with these, women have very little to do” (“Colonel’s” 231). I disagree, for this argument both reifies the reductive interpretation of romance as a feminine genre and ignores the romance elements that Hutchinson retains. 45 Keeble explains in his edition that this is followed in the manuscript by “a second, unfinished, attempt” (347n52). 46 John Hutchinson was one of the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant and ultimately died in prison.

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provides great detail about the earliest stages of her and John’s divinely ordained love. For example, she emphasizes that John falls in love with Lucy through hearsay while staying in a house said to be “so fatal for love that never any young disengaged person went thither who returned again free” (45). Hutchinson assures us that, being intelligent and governed by reason, John of course “laughed” at this tale (45). But such a combination of pride and scorn for love is the downfall of many a romance hero, and so it is for him. Upon hearing about Lucy, John “began first to be sorry she was gone before he had seen her, … Then he grew to love to hear mention of her,” such that “he began to wonder at himself, that his heart, which had ever had so much indifferency for the most excellent of woman kind, should have so strong impulses towards a stranger he never saw” (47). Upon hearing that she has married, he “turned pale” (48) and became lovesick. And shortly after learning that she is not married after all, he sees her for the first time and is indeed pleased with what he sees. Hutchinson’s slow and suspenseful narration eventually turns to her own feelings, as she reveals that in “spite of all her indifferency, [she] was surprised with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman” (49). Like so many of the women and romance characters discussed in this study, Lucy was “much perplexed in mind” over the marriage question, not having any interest in the proposition but being “obedient” and “loth to displease [her family], but more herself, in marrying such as she could find no inclination to” (50). With John, however, instant liking leads to acquaintance, acquaintance to friendship, and friendship to love. In spite of jealous acquaintances’ efforts to sabotage the relationship (51) and Lucy’s disfiguration due to the smallpox that ravaged her on the very day assigned “to conclude the marriage” (52), the two ultimately join their lives as husband and wife. This tale contains numerous echoes of Hutchinson’s other marriage tales, as well as plentiful traces of romance, from the scornful man destined to feel love’s pain to the traditional obstacles to true love. Yet Hutchinson adapts these elements to her religiously inclined purpose. The man who scorns love, for example, is not punished by Cupid’s arrow but directed by “the Lord, … who had ordained him, through so many various providences, to be yoked with her in whom he found so much satisfaction” (47) even though John had yet to even meet her when God begins guiding him in her direction. Similarly, after John demonstrates his loyalty and marries his pox-marked beloved without hesitation, no sorcerer’s cure but “God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her” (52, emphasis added). This is a marriage and a man worth noting, Hutchinson seems to say, with obvious spiritual and political implications.47 Indeed, Hutchinson’s Life is as much a religio-political text as anything else. As Keeble claims in the introduction to his edition, “Her work takes its place beside Samson Agonistes, Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696) and the body of nonconformist writing, as an attempt to perceive and accept God’s purpose in and after the Restoration” (xxi). Furthermore, her providential tale of her republican husband directly counters and challenges the traditional Royalist interpretation of events, according to which “[t]he Civil War and Interregnum were seen as divine judgment upon the merely conditional and partial obedience which subjects had granted to their sovereign” (Keeble, “Obedient” 202). 47

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A Short History of the Life and Death of Sr Ceasor Dappefer, the true romance written by Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–93), offers another variation on the happy marriage plot by telling a story not about her own romance but about her parents’ relationship. In her narrative, Jewlious (representing Calthorpe’s father) persistently pursues a reluctant Dorinda (Calthorpe’s mother), who regularly escapes to an idyllic wilderness retreat where she can enjoy solitude and private contemplation. Once again, our heroine is not interested in marriage. “Loue was altogether a stranger to her” (27v), the narrator explains, and Dorinda much prefers being alone in her private retreat (where a table is pointedly carved with an image of Diana) to the company of male suitors. But while there she reads a romance and experiences pity for the dejected Jewlious, both of which seem to incline her to love. Therefore, though she plays the Cruel Mistress role for a time, Dorinda is ultimately an exemplary early modern woman, obedient to her father in matters of love and a wise and loving companion to her husband once she and Jewlious are married. Because Calthorpe determined to stay faithful to reality, her tale contains none of the more far-fetched and miraculous events of fictional romance. But her narrative still follows the genre’s general trajectory, if in a much more compact space, and her characters speak in the genre’s melodramatic terms. What’s more, while no lions or bears threaten the hero and heroine, there is always the possibility that they might, for the narrator makes clear that Jewlious risks encountering the “wiLde beasts” (43v) that he fears lurk in the woods in order to pursue his coy beloved. Thus Calthorpe, like so many of her fellow life writers, draws from romance in part to highlight the dangers that face women around every corner. Jewlious may fear wild beasts, but clearly Dorinda is the hunted one in this tale; the narrator even describes Jewlious as “haueing … made as diLigent a search as any bLood hound” (44r) during his quest through the forest.48 Given the life-and-death implications of the behaviors and decisions associated with courtship, then, female life writers have two choices. On the one hand, they can turn the hunt that is courtship into the young maiden’s symbolic death knell, as she trades her youth and idealism for the drudgery, heartbreak, abuse, and solitude endured by women like Freke. On the other hand, life writers can alter the power dynamic between the hunter and the hunted as they explore possibilities for mutual love and harmonious marriage even in the midst of a patriarchal institution and culture. In this case, they lead their characters in exemplary fashion to Thrones of Love akin to the one that features so prominently in The First Part of Wroth’s Urania (1621)49 or to idealized relationships like the Fanshawes’. In between these two options, of course, are many shades of gray that can be seen most clearly in the rhetoric of marriage that female life writers use to convey their stories. Although it is unlikely that Calthorpe intended a negative commentary with this language, given the generally laudatory and self-serving nature of the text, it is tempting to read this passage, through a more Sidneian lens, as confirming the presence of a beast in the woods (just not the kind that Jewlious himself fears). 49 An image of the Throne of Love even appears on the title page of the first edition, though the role of enchantments like this one in Wroth’s text has been much debated. 48

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Rhetoric of the Heart In the course of narrating their romantic plots, early modern female life writers adopt very consistent and revealing rhetorical choices, collectively resulting in an ambivalent discourse that reflects the turbulent atmosphere in which they wrote, especially in regard to the transition from arranged to companionate marriage. Since marriage for upper-class individuals was more complicated than for their lower-class counterparts,50 and since most women capable of writing life narratives at this time were of the educated elite, issues like how not to alienate parents and potential suitors and how to accommodate romantic affection in addition to practical matters like dowries and jointures occupied center stage. Consequently, passive language and a reliance on the ideas of obedience, duty, and obligation distinctly characterize what I call “the rhetoric of marriage” in both romance and life writing.51 First and foremost, female life writers describe their guardians, suitors, and eventual husbands as deserving their compliance; rarely do they mention what they themselves deserve unless their virtue has somehow been wronged. Thus Halkett explains her decision to marry James (after several refusals) in the terms of obligation: “I was fully Conuinced noe man Liuing Could doe more to deserue a wife then hee had done to obleige mee[. A]nd therfore I intended to giue him my Selfe” (138). Similarly, in her autobiographical fragment, Hutchinson describes how her mother came to marry her father even though she was still heartbroken over another man: my father … fell so heartily in love with her that he persuaded her to marry him, which she did, and her melancholy made her conform cheerfully to that gravity of habit and conversation, which was becoming the wife of such a person, who was then forty-eight years of age, and she not above sixteen. (11)52

Elizabeth Cary (1585/86–1639) is described by her daughter-biographer in The Lady Falkland: Her Life as developing a doctrine of complete self-sacrifice to her 50 Spufford’s evidence of reading down the social scale further supports this point: “The courtship chapbooks … show, for instance, that the concept of romantic love as a basis for marriage was very much present in seventeenth-century humble society. This, reflected in its own twopenny literature, was not a world in which people married for economic interest rather than inclination” (Small 157). 51 Even the writing of a woman’s life is frequently presented as an act of obedience. See Nicky Hallett, “‘as if it had nothing belonged to her’: The Lives of Catherine Burton (1668–1714) as a Discourse on Method in Early Modern Life-writing,” for Burton’s writing of her life at the direction of her confessor, and Eckerle’s “Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space,” for the common prefatory gestures early modern women used to enable their authorial acts. 52 Not surprisingly, Hutchinson makes this tale yet another in the “triumphant marriage” series discussed above, for she claims that “[n]ever did any two better agree in magnanimity and bounty than he and my mother, who seemed to be actuated by the same soul” (13).

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husband’s will: “He was very absolute, and though she had ^a^ strong will, she had learnt to make it obey his. … Where his intressted was concerned, she seemed not able to haue any consideration of her owne” (115, 117).53 Even the fiercely independent and self-concerned Freke seems to accept this philosophy, for she advises another woman “to be more moderatt with her husband, pattion [passion] being seldom the wifes advantage and might force him to bee desperatte” (B: 283). Such reasoning helps explain how Freke could live months and years apart from her husband managing an estate on her own and yet consistently submit to his demands. Obedience is the wife’s law, and it frequently translates into selfsacrifice in matters of love and marriage. Accordingly, female life writers often attribute their marriage arrangements to God, their parents, or “friends” (i.e. relatives), thus eschewing personal responsibility in the matter as a good daughter should. Therefore, although A Short History’s Dorinda speaks scornfully to Jewlious during his relentless pursuit, Calthorpe assigns her mother’s character quite different rhetoric when Dorinda’s father gets involved: “I am so absoLutLy my parents right to dispose of,” the dutiful daughter explains, “that I dare not usurpe his power with any refLactorynes [refractoriness?] therefore what he has said I must submit to” (51r–51v). To his credit, Dorinda’s father states at least twice his firm resolution not to force his daughter to marry where she does not want to. Yet he also assures Jewlious that “I will manage this affaire with all the arguments on your behalfe and aduice her to order her affactions in complyance with a fathers intreaties in a thing which I hope will bring as much satisfaction as it can of aduantage” (50r). Given Dorinda’s response immediately after “some priuat discourse” (50v) with her father, he was true to his word, and she was true to her duty as a daughter. Although one must wonder how accurate Calthorpe’s representation of these conversations is, her dialogue clearly rings true when read alongside other women’s written testimony. Yet many of these women, perhaps unintentionally, also reveal the mechanisms at work behind their “choice” of spouse, especially the kinds of manipulative gestures that helped to encourage women’s obedience and thus coerce their “consent.”54 All references to the Life of Cary are from Heather Wolfe’s edition, as are the editorial markings in this quote. The representation of Cary in this biography may be even more positively skewed than is typical with life writing, since her daughter, likely Lucy, offers a counter-Reformation depiction of an idealized Catholic woman. According to this account, Sir Henry Cary, later Viscount of Falkland, “maried [Elizabeth] only for being an heire” (108) and was generally indifferent to her. For a thorough account of the authorship and context of Cary’s Life, see Wolfe’s introduction. 54 Of course, men were also manipulated into marriage, as demonstrated by Mildmay’s account of her husband’s initial reluctance to marry and the pressure his father used to urge the match: being then more willing to trauaile to get experience of the worlde then to marry so soone, [Anthony] was vnwilling to giue eare therevnto. But his father told him yf he did not Marry wth me, he should neuer bring any other woman into his house. Vpon wch importunitie of his Father, he was content. (37–8, emphasis added) Thomas Hoby found himself in a similar predicament when his mother essentially bribed him to win the hand of Margaret Dakins after each of Margaret’s first two 53

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Osborne is unusually blunt on this point when she describes her brothers’ interrogation (62) of her: “I shall bee baited most sweetly, but sure they will not easily make mee consent to make my life unhappy to sattisfy theire importunity” (85). Even so, she poignantly acknowledges that “I have found it a much harder thing not to yeeld to the Power of a neer relation and a great kindenesse then I could then imagin it” (95). Osborne’s perspective sheds light on more oblique accounts, like Calthorpe’s depiction of her mother’s decision to marry Jewlious, and even seemingly positive accounts, like the reference made by Elizabeth Walker (1623–90) to marrying Anthony based on “mutual love and liking” (A. Walker 27).55 After all, Walker’s discussion of two other potential matches makes it clear that her father’s opinion played a significant role in those decisions, thus raising questions about the extent of her “Choice” (16) in Anthony’s case. A particularly compelling instance of a woman’s account of a marriage she did not want appears in Thornton’s Book of Remembrances. Here Thornton recounts her radical shift from fervently desiring to remain single—married to Christ rather than a mortal man—to agreeing to a marriage proposed and arranged by her uncles without her knowledge. As one might expect, she faced extraordinary pressure to consent, especially since the marriage would help solve her brother’s financial difficulties. Thornton explains her decision in the following passage from the first volume of the three-part series she ultimately produced: As to my owne perticuler being willing to be aduisable by my freinds in ye choyse of a husband, deeming theire judgments aboue my owne. was perswaded yt this proposall might tend to ye good of ye whole Family & was inclined Vpon there grand motiues & inducements, to accept of this Motion for Mr Thornton. Contrary to my owne inclination to marriage, … Neuerthelesse, for so generall a beniffitt to my family. & hopes of finding a sober religious Person, I waued all other opportunities. (102–3)

Although Thornton’s frustration is muted here, it comes through much more clearly in a later statement, this one in the third volume of her series:56 Thus the bargaine was strucke betwixt them before my deare mother, or my selfe euer heard a silable of this mater. When as it most Conserned me, in a case on wch all the Comfort of my Life, or, missery, depended; wch for ye gaining this aduantag for ye clearing the Estate of the sequestration, my Vncle Willm followed, most earnestly, to propose, this match, wth all immaginable indeauors, husbands died. As William Cecil explains to Margaret’s father in a letter, Hoby’s “mother, hath provyded a good portione of lyvelod to be left to him, yf he shall content her in his marryadge, and wyll deal very honorably and kyndly with hym, to enhable hym to make to his wyfe a convenient joynture, in case she shall lyke of his choyse” (230, emphasis added). 55 Significantly, all of Walker’s published diary excerpts were selected and arranged by her husband in The Holy Life; the originals are not extant. 56 This is British Library Additional MS 88897/2.

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he could to vs; & threatned, if denyed that we should certainly, be Ruine’d, & the sequestration, would proccd [i.e. proceed], … Wch manner of perswasion to a marieage, wth a sword in one hand, & a complement, in annother, I did not vnderstand, when a free choyce, was deny’ed me. Tho, I did not resolue to change my happy Estate, for a misserable incombred one, in the married. yett I was much afflicted, to be threatened against my owne inclination, (or my future happyness). (39–40)

Throughout the rest of her autobiography, Thornton attempts to reconcile her own desires with her fate in a problem-plagued marriage, relying on the rhetoric of duty as well as her claim that the marriage was arranged “by devine Prouidence” (3: 70) despite this account of quite human involvement.57 Even in widowhood, when women had more agency than their never-married counterparts,58 women acknowledged the need to balance multiple considerations regardless of affection. Katherine Austen (1628/29–83), for instance, attempts to work through the complexities of the widow’s predicament in several private notebook entries, stating rather perceptively that “We must not … consent to a dishonourable marriage and then lay it vpon the appointment of Heaven” (131).59 Indeed, Austen gives women extraordinary agency—and thus responsibility—in this situation: When fond affection and deluded Iudgement [are] thus insnared into Errour, the Vnhappiness (we) I must own as the Contriver and Carver off: And not lay it on Distiny: (ffor we must know if we will consent to Vnhappy choices Distiny will not contradict it.) and we must sit downe vnder the burden of that griviance [that] our own weeke choice makes.60 (131)

However, she quickly steps back from this unforgiving position, concluding in the very next line that “Yet if we are in the care of God, with our endeavours will prevent our Vnhappiness” (131). The difference between giving responsibility for a bad marriage to God and putting oneself “in the care of God” in order to achieve For many other examples of the coercive techniques used to force consent to a marriage, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, esp. 233–66. Cressy’s examples have been culled from diaries and court documents, among other types of records. 58 Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England, makes a compelling case for the terms “never-married” and “singlewomen” as opposed to “unmarried.” See esp. 8–9. 59 All references to Austen’s Book M are to British Library Additional MS 4454. I have altered nothing of Austen’s original except lineation. The first full-text critical edition of this manuscript was recently published by Sarah C.E. Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M: British Library, Additional Manuscript 4454. 60 Austen’s original use of “we” in “I must own” (which she revised by writing “I” above her first choice and putting “we” in parenthesis) indicates that she speaks not only of her particular actions but also those of all widows. Since Austen frequently crosses out words and passages in her manuscript, the fact that she allows both words—and, thus, multiple meanings—to coexist at times is significant. 57

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a happier outcome is not entirely clear here. And Austen’s struggle to make sense of it highlights once again the difficulty—perhaps the impossibility—of claiming full responsibility for one’s choices in a marriage market that tends to put the woman’s interests last. Thus we see how the rhetoric of duty and obligation leads to the rhetoric of passivity, which in turn informs written representations of even the most femalecentered and independent of acts. In an example of the former, Ann Fanshawe describes in rather traditional fashion how Richard “married me” (12, emphasis added) but also, more surprisingly, how “My Dear husband had six sons and eight daughters borne and Christned, and I miscarryed of 6 more” (13, emphasis added). As noted above, Fanshawe’s tone throughout her memorializing narrative is purely laudatory, and yet, her passive sentence structure in this example suggests the kind of burden a woman took on in a marital relationship. While the man receives credit for all that is good and successful (even childbirth), the woman claims agency when something goes wrong (in this case, a miscarriage). Yet Anne Wentworth’s (c. 1630–fl. 1677) use of passive rhetoric to describe such willful, independent acts as publishing accounts of her husband’s abuse and actually leaving their marriage suggests that even 18 years of abuse at her husband’s hands is not enough to justify her decisions or to allow her to take credit for them. Instead, Wentworth gives all the credit for her actions to God, repeatedly insisting that she only left her husband when God made it clear that she must. For example, she claims that she “submit[s] to every rule given forth by the Spirit of God, to govern the relation of Man and Wife in the Lord” (Vindication 5) and even argues that the physical danger alone is not enough to justify leaving her husband. But the spiritual danger is: I was forced to fly to preserve a life more pretious than this natural one; and that it was necessary to the peace of my Soul, to absent my self from my earthly Husband, in obedience to my Heavenly Bridegroom, who call’d and commanded me (in a way too terrible, too powerful to be denyed) to undertake and finish a work, which my earthly husband in a most cruel manner hindered me from performing, seizing, and running away with my Writings. (4–5)

Although Wentworth had acted boldly and committed both marital and rhetorical crimes (the latter her attempt to publish her account), in this passage she adopts the passive rhetoric typical of her day. As with a woman’s decision to marry, choice of spouse, behavior within marriage, and even success in childbearing, writing about spousal abuse and leaving a marriage are here justified as acts ordered by a more powerful entity. In this case, Wentworth’s heavenly husband commands her obedience, and she thus emerges from her own textual defense as a model obedient wife. Wentworth’s case also demonstrates a few other key points. First, it illustrates how the language of romance can enter even primarily spiritual autobiographical texts, here in discussions of the writer’s relationship with her heavenly bridegroom and her struggle against all obstacles to be joined with Him. However, as a weighty

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spiritual tradition also supports this plot motif, and to a much greater degree than secular romance, I do not give it much attention here. Second, Wentworth’s example demonstrates that, while passive rhetoric often denoted passive behavior, it was also a tool that a writer could manipulate on her own behalf. Female life writers’ inevitably conflicted rhetoric of marriage was not, in other words, totally one-sided or as purely self-effacing as it may seem. On the one hand, it often indicates the extent to which women believed and supported the dominant cultural attitudes about women’s behavior. These include the emphasis on a woman’s four cardinal virtues (chastity, silence, obedience, and humility); the idea that a woman’s adherence to constancy was a sure means to female heroism; and, as already described, a belief in the value of female sacrifice to others’ needs. Although a surprising number of female life writers express ideas that are at odds with patriarchal ideology, most seem not only to accept it but also to take pride in the extent to which they adopt it. Indeed, their writing suggests that they generally wished to be obedient and often would choose obedience before what we might call “happiness.” For example, Hutchinson’s insistence on how honored she is to be Colonel Hutchinson’s wife serves the larger goal of rehabilitating his image in the aftermath of the Restoration but also indicates the degree to which she finds her identity in his. As she writes of herself, “she, that was nothing before his inspection gave her a fair figure, when he was removed, was only filled with a dark mist, and never could again … return any shining representation. The greatest excellency she had was the power of apprehending and the virtue of loving his” (Life 51). Other women took the ideology yet one step further by passing it on to their own children, as when Elizabeth Walker taught her daughters the wisdom of Bible verses that preach a wife’s subjection to her husband (A. Walker 75). On the other hand, adopting the role of a good early modern woman or constructing a virtuous self in writing was also a means of self-preservation. Although female life writers may freely admit their own sins while giving all the credit for most achievements and positive events in their lives to others, they at the same time insist on their own virtuous and chaste behavior. Thus Wentworth manages to depict herself as a model of obedience, even though she can just as easily be read as among the least obedient of the women considered here for leaving her husband. And Halkett, whose behavior during her affair with the married Bampfield was questionable according to all accounts, expends numerous words in her Autobiography to justify her actions and defend her virtue, insisting throughout that she always believed Bampfield’s wife to be dead and that she felt “as Secure” with him “as in a Sanctuary” (74), even though she later mysteriously refers to “what lengh I had gone{,} & rather more then Lese” (131) and tells her future husband that her relationship with Bampfield may mean she is no longer marriageable. Whether this was an excuse or a genuine concern, Halkett’s determination to explain her behavior is indisputable. Furthermore, given the toll that even the appearance of unchaste behavior could take on a woman’s health and reputation—in Halkett’s case leading her “ so great a distemper that I

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expected now an end to all my Misfortunes” (107)—it is clear why a life writer might draw attention to what she does right. Thus we can see that these female life writers’ ambivalent language also conveys a significant degree of self-interest. In fact, in most cases, the act of taking up the pen in and of itself counters the passive rhetoric that dominates so many narratives. For each life writing woman, an individual identity is both articulated and solidified in the telling of a life story, and while the frequent rhetoric of selferasure certainly undercuts the more heroic aspects of some of these tales, the women’s attempts to claim authority over their own stories can be read as the greater success. Action, rather than passivity, is required at every single stage of creating and recording a life account. Furthermore, in terms of attitudes toward love and marriage, women’s rhetoric in their life writing consistently suggests the nascent cultural revolution at work at this time. Even though the free consent of both parties was legally required for a marriage61 and even though the ideal marriage arrangement tried to balance the interests of all involved, inevitably “the tension between patriarchal authority and individual choice produced many domestic dramas” (Cressy 235). These dramas are enacted not only in the pages of romance (as we have seen), but also in correspondence and court records that detail failed negotiations,62 on the Renaissance stage in the form of countless tyrannical fathers and unwilling daughter-brides, and in the life writings of the women who experienced them firsthand. Thus the auto/biographical accounts sound a lot like the tragic tales voiced by romance’s female characters. But what gives these accounts a unique power is their revelation of how the drama plays out in a real woman’s psyche. Her conflicted rhetoric is one very real indicator of her struggle to reconcile so many conflicting demands in a changing marriage economy. Indeed, in the midst of such social upheaval, it is no surprise that women’s words often reveal their simultaneous acceptance of and resistance to cultural norms. When Halkett explains that, “though duty did obliege mee nott to marry any withoutt my Mothers Consentt, yet itt would nott tye mee to Marry withoutt my owne” (59), she asserts a desire to adhere to societal expectations through obedience to her guardian but also—counter to tradition—to look out for her own interests as well. As noted in Chapter 2, Osborne refuses to join a loveless arranged marriage yet also refuses to pursue a marriage with love unless “left free” (71) to do so. And Austen, having dutifully married once, subsequently refuses to give up her widow’s status and chooses instead to protect her fortune for her children and to honor her first husband: “ffor my part I doe noe Injury to none by not Loveing. But if I doe [love], I may doe real Injuries Where I am already engaidged. To my Deceased ffriends posterity” (132–3). Anselment argues that “[t]he image she presents of the widow and the position she takes against remarriage are in fact See esp. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 256. For one such epistolary example, see Isaac Stephens, “The Courtship and

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Singlehood of Elizabeth Isham, 1630–1634.”

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similar to those in the conduct books and religious commentaries of the period” (“Katherine” 7), yet Austen’s resistance is notable, especially given the fact that her widow’s heart is tempted: O my God … keep & defend me in this temptation now. When a person of a most subtil insinuation, of a most complying temper. of ffrequent oppertunities seekes … to take my affection. By acts of readines & assistances to me. And by his helpful officies of preseruation to my health in the time of this great danger. Doth by all wayes … [dive] into my temper and inclination. (123)

In this 1665 prayer, Austen reveals both vulnerability and indecision. However, rather than follow her seeming “inclination,” she asks God for “a Cautious prudence to behave & acquite my selfe That I may not doe a dishonourable ffolly. To sully and disparadge the ffaire prosperityes of my life” (123). In the shifting terrain of marriage in seventeenth-century England, Austen sees with surprising clarity that the “many … snares and traines” (124) women face justify choosing against the heart on occasion. That women are caught between old and new approaches to marriage becomes particularly clear as they move from the role of marriageable daughter to responsible parent, which—for many upper-class mothers—meant participating in some degree in the arrangement of their children’s marriages. Clifford, for example, delightfully recounts her children and grandchildren’s marriages in her voluminous family records, thus conveying her continued belief in the institution despite experiencing two unhappy marriages herself. And yet, when her second husband wants her to force her daughter to marry one of his sons against her wishes, Clifford allows her daughter’s choice to prevail, diplomatically failing to record the extent of her efforts to change Isabella’s mind in her account of the situation: About this time, … happened a great cause of Anger & falling out between my Lord & mee because he desired to have one of his younger sonnes marryed with my daughter Isabella, which I could in no way remedie, my daughter being herself extremly averse to ye match, though he believed it was in my power to have brought it to pass, being so persuaded by some of my Friendes.63 (96)

In contrast to Clifford’s behavior here, Thornton seemed to forget her own frightening and frustrating experiences as a reluctant bride when she arranged for her beloved daughter to marry so young. As all of these examples demonstrate, many life writers found room within the social spaces created by such a massive cultural shift to not only give voice 63 A similar example can be found in the experience of Mary Rich, whose choice of spouse against her father’s wishes led to great unhappiness but who nonetheless did not try to force her niece and ward Essex to marry against her will. As Anselment describes it, “[w]hen against all her advice Essex broke off a match, her upset aunt, perhaps recalling her own, resolved to let the young woman determine her own good. The countess continued, however, to vet prospective suitors until Essex agreed to accept one that met her aunt’s approval” (Introduction, Occasional 17).

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to female experience but also to occasionally determine the course of their lives. Most significantly, some also managed to script heroic roles for themselves despite the passive and conflicted rhetoric that most characterizes their narrative style.64 This hearty payoff exemplifies just what it meant for an early modern woman to romance her self. Adventurous Plots and Exemplary Heroines In addition to telling tales about love and marriage with a consistently passive yet conflicted rhetoric, the female life writers who were most obviously influenced by the romance genre also speak and act like romance heroines and sometimes even acknowledge this point themselves. For example, during one of the darkest periods of Osborne’s relationship with William Temple, she writes, “can there bee a more Romance Story then ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy. Ah I dare not hope it” (164).65 When their romance did find its happy conclusion in marriage, Osborne was not the only one to note the story’s resemblance to romance. Temple’s sister and first biographer, Martha, Lady Giffard (1638–1722), describes their seven-year courtship as “a History” (6); and Kenneth Parker begins his much more recent introduction to Osborne’s letters by noting that “[f]ew stories outside the realms of imaginative literature can match that of the love-affair between Dorothy Osborne and William Temple—in genesis, in obstacles confronted and overcome, in social and cultural context, and in its conclusion, which proved happy” (1). Numerous critics and editors have used similar terms to describe Halkett’s narrative, and Anselment has observed that Freke’s self-portrayal in her manuscript Remembrances conveys “a sensibility whose immediate counterpart may well be found in the fictional narratives shaped by the novels that later explore the central concerns of money, marriage, and family” (Introduction, Remembrances 31).66 But what exactly does it mean for a life writer to speak or act like a romance heroine? A self-narrative inevitably entails placing oneself at the center of the story, typically in the position of hero, heroine, or martyr, so centrality of character cannot be enough to justify a comparison to romance-like fiction. Furthermore, many other genres, especially spiritual auto/biographical narratives that trace the speaker’s crises and ultimate triumphs, rely on motifs of martyrdom and heroism, so heroic behavior is—on its own—not an adequate criterion, either (though it is important to note that romance-as-mode can encompass even spiritual texts). Rather, what I am interested in here is the voice with which a writer speaks. In other words, in addition to giving oneself a significant, often heroic role in a tale and For female heroism in women’s life writing, see Rose, Gender and Heroism, esp.

64

55–84.

65 In another instance, Osborne says of their marrying for “Passion” that “wee that are concerned int can only say twas an act of great kindenesse and somthing Romance, but must confesse it had nothing of prudence, discretion, nor sober councell in’t” (172). 66 Anselment refers collectively here to both manuscript versions of Freke’s Remembrances.

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focusing that tale on the domestic or political crises common to romance, narrators of the most romance-like auto/biographical tales also adopt a particular narrative style and tone. As is so often the case with tracing romance’s influence, identifying this feature is often what Fuchs describes as a “[you] know it when [you] see it” moment (2). Therefore, I here isolate some of the more obvious instances of this particular illustration of romance at work. These include moments when narrators recount dramatic events reminiscent of romance (as when Fanshawe describes the cross-dressing episode), poignantly discuss personal romantic dilemmas (as Halkett does in the Bampfield case), or incorporate the sentimentalized and often melodramatic dialogue of romance characters (as Calthorpe does when she recreates her parents’ early conversations). Among these kinds of evidence, the most obvious examples are those that tend more toward fiction than truth, the narratives of infamous female rogues like Mary Carleton (1635–73) and Mary Frith (1586/89–1659): Both … give evidence not just of having read romances, but of sometimes identifying with the fictional beings who were the subjects of other narratives, and of trying to see how they or some version of their own personae might fit into such a story. If Carleton sees herself as a Lady Errant, giving lustre to a romance, Frith pretends that she is a ‘squiresse’ as she gallops across London on horseback for a wager. (Todd and Spearing viii–ix)

Indeed, the narrator of Carleton’s The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663) could easily be one of the female storytellers described in Chapter 2. She introduces herself in a prefatory epistle as “an abused woman”; requests the assistance and “Noble and Merciful Protection” of her addressee, Prince Rupert (77);67 claims that her cause is somewhat urgent “because irremediable by the Laws of this Kingdom made against Femes Covert” (78); argues in a second personal address, this time to noble ladies, that her story, though “not much unlike those of Boccace,” is in fact “more serious and tragical” (79);68 eventually begins her story with a formulaic description of origin—“I was born at Collen” (82); and proceeds to tell a tale of an idealistic virgin who undertakes a solitary journey to escape an unwanted match only to find herself in an unhappy, deceptive marriage.69 From beginning to end, this is the stuff of romance, and Carleton acknowledges this fact repeatedly. All references to The Case are to Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing’s edition in Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mary Frith; The Case of Mary Carleton. 68 This is likely a reference to Boccaccio’s Decameron. 69 In a prior text, An Historical Narrative of the German Princess, Carleton also explains that she had been repeatedly failed by the knightly code—first when her bigamy case was settled in court rather than by “the English Gallants” who did not come to her defense and second when her husband “wore a Sword by his side and yet could suffer me to be stript of my necessary Rayment” when she was first arrested (4). By the time she shares her story with a broader audience, she is indeed in need of help—both to defend her damaged reputation and to retrieve her property from her husband. Carleton’s publications joined many others printed before, during, and after her trial for bigamy in 1663. See Todd and Spearing, xxxi–xl. 67

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Significantly, she also admits her avid reading as a young woman of “Romances, and other Heroical Adblandiments” (88). And yet, semi-fictional narratives like Carleton’s are written with a critical distance that is different in tone and character from most of my other examples, which simply make use of romance motifs and vocabulary. Carleton, in contrast, not only puts herself in the role of Lady Errant in her Case but also offers metacommentary on this role, as if winking to the reader in the midst of her narrative fun: I am not … the first woman, that hath put her self upon such hazards, or pilgrimages, the stories of all times abound with such Examples, enough to make up a volume. I might as well have given lustre to a Romance as any of those supposed Heroina’s: and since it is the method of those peices [sic], and the Art of that way of writing to perplex and intricate the commencement and progress of such adventures, with unexpected and various difficulties and troubles, and at last bring them to the long desired fruition of their dear bought content, I am not altogether out of heart, but that Providence may have some tender and more courteous considerations of me. (91)

In the process of actually acknowledging her manipulation of romance, Carleton also reveals “the indeterminacy of the boundaries separating history and fiction” (Chalmers 180).70 It is precisely this indeterminacy, after all, that Carleton needed. Indulging in romance tropes helped her present herself as an adventurous, if maligned heroine as well as likely increased her appeal to readers, particularly when she combined these tropes with those of another increasingly popular genre, the criminal biography.71 More popularity with readers would, in turn, lead to more support for her case and, possibly, greater financial returns. Although such meta-commentary and authorial eye-winking are essentially non-existent in most early modern women’s life writing, in which romance tropes tend to serve more limited, less public readerships, the writers certainly share with Carleton an understanding of how useful romance language could be for articulating personal trials and achieving sympathy for their plights. Thus Cavendish, who frequently condemns the unrealistic nature of romance, also occasionally makes use of its conventional plots and language. For example, in Sociable Letters (1664), a fictional collection of two women’s correspondence 70 See Wilcox, “Her Own Life,” 111–12, for further discussion of Carleton’s “knowing narrator” (112), and Hero Chalmers, “‘The Person I Am,’” for a fascinating discussion of Carleton’s sophisticated and sometimes contradictory use of romance conventions. Chalmers argues that Carleton ultimately deconstructs textual models like romance in order to “satiriz[e] cultural limitations imposed on female subjectivity” (173). Intriguingly, Carleton also turns on its head the traditional representation of the gullible romance-reading woman by condemning gullible men instead, specifically her husband and his family who, among other foolish acts, “indulg[e] in fictions of passion such as threatened suicide and other ‘stories’” (Wilcox 113). 71 See Chalmers for the complicated relationship between Carleton’s texts and genres like the criminal rogue biography.

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that often reflects Cavendish’s own experience, her effort to reclaim some of her husband’s lands by traveling alone from France to England during the Civil War period is framed in romance terms by one of the writers: I Was sorry to hear you intended to return into E., for I know that nothing but Necessity could Force you thither, although your Native Country, having been so Unnaturally Bereaved of all your Maintenance, by the Covetous Purloyning of your Unnatural Countrymen, and left to Seek, in a Wandring Condition, Fortunes Favour, which is as Inconstant as they are Cruel. (201)

The familiar romance term “wandering” immediately conjures images of the unfortunate female characters whose personal stories, as demonstrated in Chapter 2, are almost always sympathetic. Though this moment in Sociable Letters is brief, it nonetheless reiterates a theme of Cavendish’s—that she and her husband suffered unjustly (indeed, were “Robbed of all” [202]) at the hands of their fellow Englishmen both during and after the Civil Wars.72 Romance is a particularly useful vehicle for such a complaint. This in part explains why so many of the auto/biographical plots that most reflect romance occurred during England’s Civil War period, when routine daily life was disrupted, marriage itself required more heroic behaviors, and social codes were temporarily rewritten. In the first volume of her three-part narrative, for example, Thornton vividly describes the terror of being in a town under siege in 1643 as bullets seemingly came out of nowhere: “As I looked out at a window towards St Maries Church A Cannon Bullett flew soe nigh ye place where I stood yt ye window sudainly shutt Wth such a force, ye whole Tirritt shooke” (71). Traveling through war-torn landscapes with her family meant coming upon a town “sorely demolished, & all ye windowes broaken,” hearing the “many, sad complaints, of ye poore inhabitants” (79), and being subjected to the cruel threats of Parliamentarian men who “tooke vs downe, swearing & threatning, we should be striped” (80). When heroic behaviors are added to these kinds of dramatic details, one gets Halkett’s account of helping the Duke of York escape from St. James’s Palace and Fanshawe’s of her own escape from the chaos in Cork after the garrison there declared for Cromwell. Anne Wyndham (1632–98) took similar risks when she and her husband, Colonel Francis Wyndham, helped Prince Charles (the future King Charles II) escape from England in 1650. Not surprisingly, therefore, when she writes an account of this episode, Clavstrvm Regale Reseratvm or The Kinges Concealment at Trent (1667), she scripts herself as a romance heroine and even acknowledges outright the similarities between her tale and the literary mode. All of her story’s remarkable aspects and all of the key players’ actions, she claims, “would (were not the Persons yet alive, and the Story fresh in memory) rarifie it into 72 Similar language appears in Cavendish’s A True Relation, where the “cruell enemies” and “Barbarous people” (51, 48) who plundered her husband’s and her own family’s wealth play the role of villains.

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a Romance” (11).73 Although Wyndham acknowledges that her husband played the bigger role, she nonetheless notes—via the third-person voice—the bravery, quick thinking, and energetic contributions of supporting characters like the Colonel’s Lady.74 For example, when first informed of the King’s imminent arrival, this courageous woman does not display “any womanish passion” but, on the contrary, demonstrates “resolve (without the least shew of fear) to hazard all, for the safety of the King” (16). Furthermore, “this careful Lady” goes on an intelligence-gathering mission “under a pretence of a Visit,” using “the most industrious enquiry” (44), and occasionally converses with “the King” himself.75 In the end, “the Almighty crowned their endeavours with success, that his Majesty might live to appear as Glorious in his Actions, as Couragious in his Sufferings” (48, emphasis added). Clavstrvm Regale Reseratvm, a remarkable example of romance-inflected life writing inspired by England’s Civil Wars, clearly has both political and personal ambitions. It celebrates the Restoration, declares the Wyndhams’ role in protecting Charles, and affirms their loyalty to the King. Such affirmation may have been necessary, since Wyndham assures her readers early on that “[t]he reproaches and scandals, by which some envious persons have sought to diminish and vilifie the faithful services, which the Colonel out of the integrity of his soul performed unto his Majesty, shall not here be mentioned” (11). Clearly, her account is designed to silence such reproaches once and for all. But in the process of defending the Colonel, Wyndham grants herself a powerful spotlight as well, enthusiastically playing both storyteller and character, Royalist and loyal wife. On the other side of the conflict is Hutchinson’s thoroughly heroic account of her republican husband and—in more muted tones—her own efforts to save him from execution. As she puts it in the Life, when in the aftermath of the Restoration the fate of the regicides was being determined and her husband appeared bent on “being a public sacrifice, … herein only in her whole life, [she] resolved to disobey 73 All references to Clavstrvm are to the facsimile edition in The Early Modern Englishwoman series. Wyndham intriguingly claims that “a Narrative of these Passages was (by especial command from his Majesty) written by the Colonels own hand, immediately after the Kings return into England” (7). But Clavstrvm’s title page clearly states that it is “published by A.W.,” and her voice produces both the dedicatory epistle and the tale itself. 74 A similar, if less self-conscious example appears in a narrative of the Irish uprising at Waterford in 1641 that is conveyed via four letters written by a Mrs. Briver, the wife of Waterford’s mayor at the time. Like Wyndham, she includes among her cast of characters her innocent husband—“cast as a model of chivalric virtue” (McAreavey, “‘This’” 90); the chief villain—“a base turke of a feloe: and an unchristian licke [i.e. like] boor” (Briver 7); and the Mayor’s brave wife (i.e. herself). I am grateful to Naomi McAreavey for sharing with me an early transcription of Briver’s captivating epistolary narrative, now published as “An Epistolary Account of the Irish Rising of 1641 by the Wife of the Mayor of Waterford [with text].” 75 As Wyndham wrote Clavstrvm after the Restoration, she consistently refers to Charles as “the King” rather than as the Prince he was at the time of the event.

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him” (280) by writing “a letter in his name to the Speaker” of the Commons asking for mercy (281, emphasis added). This fascinating moment preserves the Colonel’s reputation as a republican while also presenting Hutchinson as a heroic woman who puts love for her husband before wifely duty or political allegiance. After all, as Derek Hirst points out, although “she passes over [the letter’s terms] in ringing silence in the [Life],” we now know that it contained both confession and regret (684), elements that could prove shameful to the “noble commonwealthsman” (683) she has been at such pains to construct. Hutchinson, in this light, sacrifices everything in order to save her husband’s life. Such tales are possible in part because of the confluence of narrative form and Civil War turbulence, as Keeble explains in a discussion of Halkett, Fanshawe, and Cavendish: [N]ational anarchy has an animating rather than an enervating effect upon their narratives; domestic instability proves to be enabling rather than paralyzing. To this extent, these testimonies of loyalty and obedience to prince and to husband are politically and culturally disobedient. They are plotted as a series of challenging adventures, casting their authors in the role of dynamic and initiating protagonists, rather than repining and lonely wives. … they nevertheless create from the exceptional experiences of the Interregnum years wayward heroines whose transgression of the bounds of the “naturally” womanly, though in the loyal service of patriarchy, contradicts its sustaining ideology. … Apparently devoted to the true centers of their political and private worlds—king and husband—they are in fact centering what should be marginal, granting a voice to what should be silent, affording a story to what should be uneventful. (“Obedient” 206, 216)

The dynamic female protagonists described here emerge from their texts in spite of the writers’ adherence to so many traditional narrative maneuvers I have already described, including the typical conclusion (often with a marriage) that effectively returns a woman to the patriarchal fold and the consistently passive language that encodes a woman’s submission to the patriarchal order. It is possible, in fact, that this phenomenon of the female protagonist is exclusively textual. But it is the romance genre that allows women freed up by Civil War upheaval to so effectively give “voice to what should be silent.” This helps to explain why examples of similarly heroic, adventurous plots appear in texts that are not explicitly linked to Civil War turmoil, including the occasional spiritual narrative. A case in point is Agnes Beaumont’s A Narrative of My Persecutions, a conversion narrative that explains the scandalous events of 1674, when she rode on the back of a horse with John Bunyan to a prayer meeting and was later tried and acquitted of killing her father. Beaumont (c. 1650– 1720) wrote her Narrative primarily to redeem herself in the eyes of her spiritual community, and the account makes clear that she risked her reputation and life for spiritual devotion rather than for romantic love. And yet, significantly, Beaumont’s narrative “does not … follow the basic pattern of female autobiography set up by the tradition of the conversion testimony” (Camden 13). Something else is going on here, and I argue that it is the influence of romance on the narration of

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a sequence of events that are both spiritual and domestic in nature. Indeed, as Vera J. Camden says in her edition of Beaumont’s Narrative, “[n]either fiction nor conduct book nor conversion narrative, Beaumont’s narrative of her persecutions emerges as an unusually candid record of a domestic crisis” (14). Given the precise nature of Beaumont’s subject, therefore, the spiritual narrative models available to her would have been inadequate, whereas a combination of secular and spiritual models would do greater justice to the many facets of her traumatic experience. She thus endows her tale with a “novelistic design” (28),76 and though “Beaumont was … doubtless inspired by [Bunyan’s] example to compose a record of her persecutions” (1), her ultimate product is both spiritual and secular and thus “a very different text from anything written by her famous pastor” (1).77 First of all, Beaumont’s plot plays out in fascinatingly secular ways, as it centers on a vulnerable, unmarried, 24-year-old maiden whose chastity is closely guarded by her father and whose scorned suitor seeks revenge. Furthermore, the heroine is a disobedient daughter who “venture[s]” her father’s anger (44)78 in order to pursue her own heart’s desire (in this case, attending a prayer meeting). When she makes the fatal decision to accept a ride with Bunyan on his horse, her father locks her out of the house. And when her father subsequently falls ill and dies, her former suitor accuses her of poisoning him. The result is a scandalous trial and a damaged reputation that Beaumont attempts to address head-on in her narrative. It is the combination of Beaumont’s tone of plaintive self-defense with a plot focused on a domestic crisis and an unmarried girl’s endangered reputation that makes her narrative reminiscent of the tales described in Chapter 2. Like those romance heroines, Beaumont insists that her motives were good and her decision to disobey her father painful and difficult; nonetheless, she explains, it was winter, and walking to the prayer meeting seemed out of the question. Furthermore, she explains in detail the depth of her personal crisis about whether to obey her earthly or heavenly father (49), thus defending herself as well as offering the kind of personal testimony valued in a spiritual community. Yet one of the key problems faced by Beaumont was that so many individuals interpreted events much differently. To their minds, Beaumont’s sins were not spiritual but carnal, and so her horseback ride—as she describes it and its aftermath—quickly becomes the stuff of Rumor, an idea often personified as a villain in the world of romance. Accordingly, a priest who saw Beaumont with Bunyan “afterwards did scandalize us after a base manner, and did raise a very wicked report of us, which was altogether false” (45), including how “at the 76 Several scholars have remarked on the unusually dramatic style of Beaumont’s text, including Camden, who also comments on her “gift for story telling” (14); Paul Salzman, Reading, who comments on Beaumont’s “dramatic flair” (21); and Tamsin Spargo, “The Father’s Seductions: Improper Relations of Desire in Seventeenth-Century Nonconformist Communities,” who notes that “Beaumont’s [writing] has been read and processed as a story” (266, emphasis added). 77 Spargo, for example, sees a combination of spiritual testament, domestic narrative, and legal disposition (264). 78 All references to Beaumont’s Narrative are to Camden’s edition.

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town’s end there we was naught together” (70).79 Even her father believes this more scandalous version of events and thus says she “should never come within his doors again, except I would promise him to leave going after that man” (46– 7). As the story of illicit sexual relations picks up steam and Beaumont’s father unexpectedly dies, her former suitor wastes no time rewriting Bunyan’s role in the incident as the young murderess’s accomplice. Thus one aspect of Beaumont’s crisis is the fact that she has lost control of her own narrative, and her written account is an effort to wrest that control back. At both narrative and literal levels, then, Beaumont’s experience underscores the fragility of a woman’s reputation, especially once she is disobedient. Like the misunderstood romance heroine who quickly finds herself surrounded by threats to her virtue and her life, Beaumont reports enduring numerous trials, including a freezing night alone in a barn, the specter of financial destitution (when her father threatens to remove his monetary support), the threat of capital punishment (during her trial), and the fear of assault. The latter becomes especially pertinent when she seeks help for her sick father in the middle of the night: And as I ran to the door, these thoughts met me at the door, that there stood rogues ready at the door to knock me on the head, at which I was sadly frighted; but thinking that my poor father lay dead in the house, I saw I was now surrounded with trouble. So I opened the door, and rushed out much affrighted. And it had snowed abundance that night; it lay very deep, and I had no stockings on so that the snow got into my shoes that I could not run apace, and going to the stile, that was in my father’s yard, I stood crying and calling to my brother. … Then I gat over the stile, and the snow water caused my shoes that they would not stay on my feet for want of stockings; but I ran as fast as I could. And about the middle of the close, as I was running to my brother’s, I was suddenly surprised with these thoughts, that there were rogues behind me, that would kill me. (67–8)

Certainly the heightened circumstances in which Beaumont finds herself justify her frantic behavior in this and other moments. But the maligned, frightened, and desperate voice with which she cries “out in a doleful manner” (68) to her brother in this scene (as well as to her readers beyond the text) speaks in the same tone and with the same frantic measures as so many of her fictional counterparts who must turn to self-narration to both save themselves and reclaim or rewrite their identities. Thus Beaumont makes use of many of the generic materials available to her in order to construct her narrative for the greatest sympathetic response. First and foremost, hers is a spiritually motivated account of a young woman who lovingly and devotedly serves as her father’s “caretaker” (Camden 15)—worrying about him even in the midst of her own desperate plight (51)—but also desires to serve God. Via this narrative, typical of the conversion narratives that would have been Although a horseback ride may not appear so troublesome to modern eyes, Camden usefully explains that “[i]t was, in fact, not uncommon at all for folks to engage in all manner of sexual activity while riding horseback; her ride would, in that sense, have represented to her community an outrageous carnal opportunity” (17). More obviously, simply being alone with a man was sufficient fodder for scandal in seventeenth-century England. 79

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both important and familiar to readers of Beaumont’s non-conformist community, Beaumont emerges from her text as a heroic Christian martyr, willing to risk both reputation and a father’s love for her faith. Vocalizing her experience in this way is a sanctioned performance of the “intense self-scrutiny and then selfdescription which [was] fostered in the church” (2).80 Yet Beaumont’s account also manipulates romance-as-mode as she gives voice in romance terms to the plight of many women of her day. When one puts aside the church-going at the center of her disagreement with her father, one sees more clearly the young woman “enslaved as [her father’s] caretaker,” “cloistered … with an aging father” (15), torn by conflicting obligations, besieged by the jealousy of both father and suitor, violently subjected to “patriarchal authority” (20), further maligned via vicious gossip, and threatened with “economic dependence” (23) as well as any number of physical dangers. As Camden so eloquently puts it, “[t]hough not a fiction, in its own way hers is a very Richardsonian tale of sexual intrigue, filial disobedience, personal anguish and public vindication; here is the country girl’s own version of virtue in distress and virtue rewarded; the self triumphant, Puritan style” (28). Beaumont’s text thus usefully demonstrates how approaching romance as mode or strategy allows us to see it at work even in the most unexpected of genres and how, in this particular case, romance tropes could help articulate the struggles of the body even in a work most interested in the state of the soul.81 However, as noted above, not all heroic or adventurous plots can be attributed to romance. Indeed, generically speaking, Christian tales of conversion and religious persecution require a certain amount of hardship and suffering, and hagiography itself offers its own brand of heroism.82 Spiritual life writing, furthermore, tends 80 Specifically, this was the First Independent Church at Bedford, a separatist church with “moderately Calvinist” doctrines (Camden 2). Beaumont wrote her Narrative in 1674, immediately after the events occurred, and it was then circulated in manuscript. The text in which it was first printed, in 1760, “became something of a non-conformist classic” (9). 81 In another example, a 1697 letter later published as Faith Promoted, and Fears Prevented, from A Proper View of Affliction as God’s Rod, James Young encourages his wife’s complete submission to God’s will in the midst of economic hardship in part by invoking aspects of romance characterization that are translatable to a spiritual context, including bravery, resolve, and valor: How much have you and I both been taken with the lively descriptions of bravery and resolution of mind in the imaginary heroes mentioned in romances; and how much have we really loved a fictitious knight errant for his valour, which existed only in the fancy of the author? Now, comes our own metal to be tried, shall we alter our opinion of bravery and resolution, because we are the persons that must be the actors ourselves? (13) 82 Quaker women’s lives are a good example of spiritually motivated texts with heroic personae that resist the style and tone of a more romance-inflected narrative like Beaumont’s. See also Wolfe, who notes that “numerous familiar representations of triumph over obstacles and impediments to the true faith … appeared in both Protestant and Catholic literature: such as, the persecuted persecutor, the witch trial, a storm at sea, and a dangerous forest” (67). Of course, many of these “symbolic commonplaces” (67) appear in romance as well.

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“to engage with both the temporal and eternal, the parallel lives of body and of soul” (Hallett, “‘as’” par. 10, emphasis added), whereas romance emphasizes instead the bodily adventures that may or may not reflect the internal heroics of the soul. But as life writing became increasingly popular for early modern women, it also became increasingly diverse and generically complex. Spiritual life writing dominated the scene, but personal secular accounts also had their place. And in both types, writers drew from the sources and genres they knew, both spiritual and secular. Beaumont’s narrative provides just one example of this cross-hybridization of secular and spiritual types, and it demonstrates how attending to life writings’ stylistic and generic influences often proves more useful than categorizing them according to a vaguely conceived spiritual/secular distinction. As noted at the beginning of this section, the life accounts that are most indebted to romance contain not only heroic self-fashioning but also a distinctive style that also accommodates sentimentalized language and melodramatic tones. We see such language when the widow Austen, remembering an earlier courtship, says that her persistent suitor “took me by the hand” and “sed What a hand was there to be adoard” (135); when Fanshawe describes how her husband “with all expressions of Ioy received me in his arms” (32); and even when the oft-cynical Cavendish confesses in a letter to her husband that he has changed her: 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, a strange enchantment. (“Letter” 297–8)

Cavendish here finds recourse in the common romance state of enchantment in order to express an otherwise inexpressible depth of feeling. However, in addition to conveying powerful emotions and inducing sympathy for a writer or speaker, romance discourse can also introduce a note of levity into a text. Osborne certainly has fun in her letters to Temple when she depicts them and numerous others as romance characters. She recounts visiting shepherdesses and hearing them sing ballads (89, 91); laments Fortune’s cruelty to her and Temple (81); nicknames one of many men she discusses “the Squire of Dames” (95);83 and, as noted in Chapter 2, uses the traditional courtly love term “servant” to 83 The Squire of Dames is a character from Book III of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene but also a more general, somewhat derogatory term for a dandy of a man who courts many women but none successfully. As summarized in Samuel Butler’s Characters, a “Squire of Dames” is a general lover, that addresses unto all but never gains any, … a kind of hermaphrodite, … which makes him take no delight in the conversation or actions of men, … but apply himself to women, to whom the sympathy and likeness of his own temper and wit naturally inclines him. (367, 368) Indeed, the man whom Osborne dubs “the Squire of Dames” “has soe many Mistresses that any body may prettend a share in him and bee beleev’d” (95).

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refer to her suitors as well as herself in her relationship with Temple. Accordingly, she actually proposes marriage to him (64); characterizes her determination to be courageous during one of their many separations as “my Gallantry” (69); and adopts the male lover’s dramatic flair when she claims that the moment they lose hope they will ultimately be together “tis time to dye, and if I know my self I should need noe more to kill mee” (150).84 In other words, Osborne’s utter familiarity with the romance genre allows her to discuss it analytically, as in her epistolary conversations with Temple and others about individual texts, but also to use its language as a kind of shorthand for her experiences and her emotions. Thus it becomes apparent that beneath Osborne’s levity lurks more serious commentary. For example, in universalizing traditionally masculine words and conceits like “gallantry,” Osborne underscores her relatively forward-thinking ideas about marriage, including the importance of compatibility and true friendship between partners and the negative impact of money in marital negotiations. In regard to the former, she writes in a 1653 letter—the same year of a seeming intensification in her relationship with Temple—that “if wee are friends wee must both comande & both obay alike. Indeed a Mistresse and a Servant, soundes otherwise, but that is Ceremony, and this is truth” (98). Thus she plays the roles of both mistress and servant,85 gallant and “Valiant Lady” (93). In regard to the emphasis on finances in marriage arrangements, Osborne uses romance language to undergird rather forceful critiques. Thus she writes flippantly but also bitingly of one of her many suitors: What has kept him from marryeng all this while, or how the humor com’s soe furiously upon him now, I know not, but if hee may be believ’d, hee is resolved to bee a most Romance Squire and goe in quest of some inchanted Damzell, whome if hee likes, as to her person, (for fortune is a thing below him & wee doe not reade in History that any knight, or squire, was ever soe discourtious as to inquire what portions theire Lady’s had) then hee comes with the Power of the County to demande her, (which for the present hee may dispose of, being Sheriff). (80)

Of course Osborne and the sheriff-turned-squire know that a woman’s fortune and portion are much more important than “her person,” but—as is the case with romance itself, which frequently operates as code—adopting the genre’s terms allows Osborne to name in more delicate terms what most prefer not to name at all. The suitor of whom she speaks, in other words, feigns love to be his motive when in reality they both know otherwise. Thus Osborne reveals that she is no gullible reader of romance but, on the contrary, an extraordinarily intelligent and sophisticated one. And she’s quite capable of reading her suitors as well. 84 Ironically, given some of the gender reversals that appear in her letters, Osborne claims not to like when “women court” men, at least not in the romances she reads; see esp. 180 for this critique. 85 Similarly, she refers to herself as Temple’s “Prisoner” (92).

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The Moral of the Story Just as political agendas frequently lurk beneath romance’s seemingly frivolous surface, so life writers typically have more at stake than simply trying on the fancy dress of a romance heroine. By way of concluding this chapter, therefore, I review the quite varied ways in which romance motifs in particular (as opposed to other generic influences) enabled sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women to articulate their individual agendas. First and foremost, as many of my examples have demonstrated, romance enables the creation of a sympathetic heroine who can help the writer explain and defend her behavior. This type of self-justification ranks with spiritual selfexamination and testimonial as the most common motives for life writing. Since self-defense is more successful when the defendant is sympathetic, as when she speaks with “the remarkably emotive power of the voice of a damsel in distress” (Ottway 140),86 it is also the most common reason a life writer might turn to romance when constructing her self-story. Thus Halkett, Thornton, Wentworth, Carleton, and Beaumont converted themselves into romance-like heroines in order to defend their behaviors to a judging audience.87 But romance is a valuable auto/biographical tool even when the person who most needs to understand the writer’s behavior is herself. The autobiographical process is a powerful way for a woman to make sense of and come to terms with her own past, and romance’s extraordinary cultural presence in early modern England meant that, for some women of this period, coming to terms with the past was to confront the genre head-on. Ramona Wray makes a compelling argument that this was the case with Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1624/5–78), whose conflicting life accounts I discuss in Chapter 4. For now, it is enough to note that, at least in her Autobiography, “exploiting the conventions, logic and morality of romance … enabled [Rich] both to justify the filial disobedience that any other discourse would castigate and to register how, through an unwitting investment in romantic ideology, she arrived at the poor choice that underpinned her marital decision” (“[Re]Constructing” 151). “Romance made me do it” may seem a poor excuse for life-altering decisions like Rich and Freke’s—both of whom chose their own marriage partners based on love—but it makes a good tale and speaks volumes of the genre’s ideological power. Sheila Ottway, “They Only Lived Twice: Public and Private Selfhood in the Autobiographies of Anne, Lady Halkett and Colonel Joseph Bampfield,” refers to Halkett here. 87 Again, Briver offers another example, though her account of the crisis at Waterford defends both herself—who would need “relief in her own right. … if her husband were to be killed” for betraying the English settlers’ cause (McAreavey, “‘This’” 86, 80)—and her husband, whose fate hung in the balance at the time she wrote her letters to the captain of a nearby Royalist garrison. Indeed, given the precarious state in which the Brivers and their children found themselves, Mrs. Briver’s urgent insertion of self and story into public affairs is strikingly reminiscent of the numerous female storytellers considered in Chapter 2. 86

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Closely related to self-justification is asserting control over the image of one’s self or of a loved one. Although in most cases this means crafting a positive image in contrast to a more negative one, this kind of self-fashioning does not have to be based in defensive gestures. Instead, it can simply mean creating the self that one would most like remembered, whether by a few family members or a much larger public. Many of the writers considered in this chapter, such as Halkett, Wyndham, Fanshawe, and Hutchinson, fashioned heroic personalities, whereas others (or sometimes the same writers, but in different moments or texts) chose to create individuals who were in some way exemplary. This was the case for Calthorpe, Cavendish, Fanshawe, and Hutchinson, among others. Closely related to this function is a writer’s desire simply to memorialize a figure of importance in her life, as Fanshawe, Hutchinson, and Cavendish did for their husbands.88 For all of these variations, romance’s idealization—identified by Fuchs as one of the genre’s defining elements—is particularly useful. Perhaps the most compelling instance of this use of romance is Hutchinson’s life of her husband, though precisely what she was trying to accomplish continues to be a source of debate. As noted above, her account presents herself, the Colonel’s wife, as a self-sacrificing woman who authored her husband’s confession against his own beliefs and desires in order to save his life.89 However, in “Remembering a Hero: Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of Her Husband,” Hirst draws attention to Hutchinson’s many misrepresentations in the text—especially in regard to her husband’s increasing Royalism—in order to argue that her primary creative construction in the text was her husband as republican rather than herself as sacrificing wife. “Hutchinson,” Hirst suggests, “constructed a romance out of her husband’s life. The steadily virtuous Colonel she presented was not the Colonel she lived with” (689) but instead a man more in line with her own republican values and with the kind of man she wished her husband to be. According to this reading, claiming authorship of the confessional letter preserves the fiction of his loyalty to the republican cause more than anything else. Although, in the end, we cannot be certain precisely what motivated the details of Hutchinson’s account, her reliance on romance motifs to create the history she most wanted preserved confirms once again the genre’s value for a range of personal, historical, political, and even fictional projects. Certain kinds of history certainly improved through the use of romance motifs, as seen in Calthorpe’s narration of her father and grandfather’s stories entirely in the terms of romance. As she claims, this made the project more entertaining for her, and it no doubt fed her interest in authorial experimentation, but it also likely 88 This particular use of life writing in which a woman creates a textual monument to a loved one is yet another way in which early modern women intervened in traditionally male discourses and activities. For a fascinating account of early modern Englishwomen’s memorializing efforts via monuments, see Chris Laoutaris, Shakespearean Maternities: Crises of Conception in Early Modern England, 212–67. 89 Whether Lucy actually authored the letter or simply wrote what her husband dictated is a source of much speculation.

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made a much more memorable piece of family history than would have been the case had she simply described how her two rather wayward ancestors eventually got back on track and made remarkable successes of themselves. Indeed, life writing inevitably alters the reality as it was actually experienced, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Hutchinson’s account may have altered details of seventeenth-century republican history; Calthorpe’s account gave a more aristocratic air to her family’s history; and Halkett, Freke, Thornton, and Wyndham strove to set the record straight on all kinds of personal, national, and political levels. Still others waded much more boldly into autobiography’s potential for fantasy and wish fulfillment by constructing the selves they would like to be—often a self modeled on a romance heroine. Although harder to trace than many other motives, wish fulfillment seems to inform many women’s romances (which I discuss in Chapter 5), as well as auto/biographical accounts in general. For example, Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing argue that both Carleton and Francis Kirkman, one of the pamphleteers who wrote about Carleton in 1673 (the year of her execution for theft), “tried to rectify the accident of their birth by writing fantastic accounts of themselves” (xliv), Kirkman via his autobiographical narrative, The Unlucky Citizen (1673), and Carleton through her ongoing pamphleteering. Over and over again, writers like Carleton, Calthorpe, and Hutchinson use romance motifs to imagine an alternative reality. Even Osborne through her epistolary activity considers what marriage would look like if the terms on which it was based were radically changed. Thus her letter writing also offers social critique and occasionally—like Carleton and Cavendish’s writing—even assigns the blame to romance; in other cases, she uses the genre to safely mock the traditions that define her patriarchal world. All of these examples suggest that romance was infinitely flexible and could assist in a range of self-authoring work. By way of a final example, I turn again to Halkett, who manipulated romance so thoroughly and so compellingly in her life account. Part self-defense, part history, part self-explication, and part devotional exercise, Halkett’s memorable narrative both explains and condemns the writer herself. Thus, like Rich and Freke, she makes of her own experience a warning tale, an exemplum that may persuade others to make different life choices. Although many scholars have discussed Halkett’s sophisticated and self-serving “self-imaging” in her Autobiography, Suzanne Trill reorients the conversation in important ways by situating the piece in the full context of Halkett’s corpus—which is dominated by spiritual texts— rather than treating it as a stand-alone work. According to Trill, the result is to see that Halkett constructs herself not “as a spirited, if somewhat misguided, royalist heroine whose main aim in life was to find fulfillment in romantic love” but instead as “the rather more solemn, biblical example of ‘a Widow Indeed.’ … Halkett’s writing as a whole demonstrates the destruction … ill-advised attachments can cause” (xvii–xviii). Although I do not believe that Halkett must have constructed herself either as a romance heroine or as an exemplary widow, Trill’s analysis of how Halkett converts her experience into a moralistic tale is compelling. This is

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especially so given Halkett’s use of a controversial genre like romance to achieve a potentially didactic end. Halkett clearly found value in romance as well as spiritual genres, so she engages in sophisticated genre-blending in order to simultaneously defend her behavior, condemn dishonest men, and make her own life experience into a lesson for others. Romance, complete with its embedded narrative exempla, once again proves itself to be entirely consistent with a life writer’s needs, in this case Halkett’s self-construction as an ideally repentant widow. The following chapter will consider romance’s more insidious role in women’s textual self-construction, whereas this chapter has focused on women’s more intentional engagement with the genre. Both versions of romance’s influence, however, demonstrate similar realities: that the pervasive, if controversial, romance genre was a force to be reckoned with and that it enabled a compelling, if somewhat differently skewed, account of early modern Englishwomen’s experience than has traditionally been heard.

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Chapter 4

The Specter of Romance While the examples provided in Chapter 3 demonstrate how resourceful and creative early modern female life writers could be in putting romance to work for them in their life writing projects, the examples in this chapter bring into sharper focus just how fraught the point of contact between writer and romance could be. The benefits of deploying romance in narrative self-construction were—as we have seen—significant, especially in the creation of sympathetic versions of self. Yet the risks of such textual experimentation always threatened. For example, although Mary Carleton (1635–73) made effective use of the “Lady Errant” character in The Case of Mary Carleton (1663), in the aftermath of her execution ten years later, this same image was turned against her when Francis Kirkman, in his The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled (1673), “reminded the reader what such a figure really was: an errant lady” (Todd and Spearing xliii). In a moment like this, the reality of romance’s less attractive associations, such as wayward women and digressive narrative, become crystal clear, demonstrating why many other women hesitated to articulate themselves in romance terms and why still others explicitly repudiated the genre. Yet all of these authorial responses, from the most benign to the most negative, point to romance’s potent and pervasive presence in the early modern landscape. For the female life writer in particular, romance was a force to be reckoned with. Therefore, almost immediately upon embarking on a self-narration project in which she voiced her personhood on the page, a woman would need to confront romance and decide, whether consciously or unconsciously, how she would address it. Would she take advantage of its narrative resources and energy? Would she acknowledge its danger by ignoring it, thus hoping to keep herself free of its taint? Or would she throw her own energy back at it in an effort to reject or repel all that was threatening within it? The possibilities are as endless and varied as the kinds of romance that circulated in early modern England and the range of women who became life writers during this time. But the result of this initial and inevitable confrontation between a female writer and the image of womanhood that was projected by romance is that even the texts of women who spoke against the genre reveal evidence of its influence and, often, the deployment of romance to achieve their authorial goals. Even the act of critiquing the genre, in other words, introduces romance and all its negative associations into a text, thus bringing to life the very specter the writer wished to kill off in the first place. Of course, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, many female life writers valued romance and effectively tapped into its heroism, idealized characters, and moralistic defenses of women. So it is important to emphasize that the specter of romance I refer to here is not monolithic but multi-faceted. Indeed, in the end,

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it is not a mysterious force at all but a complex and controversial genre to be written, read, or avoided, as well as a tool to be manipulated in the interest of self-construction or self-preservation. In this chapter, I focus on those writers who made the opposite decision of those considered in Chapter 3 and took up the fight against romance, choosing to attack it rather than to befriend it. After a brief consideration of the arguments used against the genre, especially by female life writers, I then provide examples of romance-inflected life writing produced with the pens of these very same writers. Extended attention to the compelling examples of Lady Elizabeth Delaval (1648/9–1716) and Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1624/5–78), form the heart of the chapter, as both women in their voluminous textual output simultaneously denounce and manipulate romance techniques. Women’s Critique of Romance As noted in previous chapters, explicit textual references to romance in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England tended to be negative rather than positive, and— despite the occasional defense of romance—most women vocalized the dominant cultural attitude and tried to steer clear of the genre, both in their reading and in their writing. Some women appear to have succeeded, as illustrated by the case of Elizabeth Walker (1623–90), whom I discussed in Chapter 1 as the ideal mother and wife immortalized by her husband, Anthony, in The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker (1690). According to this text, which combines excerpts from Elizabeth’s personal diary with Anthony’s narration of her life, Elizabeth was an exemplar of private heroism: giving birth to 11 children (including three stillborn), educating her children and servants, studying and writing about spiritual issues, maintaining faith despite a constant battle with melancholy, and healing minor injuries and illnesses in her household. To make this image of the Godly Wife even more effective, Anthony works hard to distinguish Elizabeth’s life from far-fetched romance. For instance, he explains his use of specific names and places with the justification, “I conceiv’d it necessary to make it evident I write not Romance, but matter of Fact, and unquestionable Truth” (195). This disclaimer underscores how important it was that an exemplary religious woman like Elizabeth not be confused with romance heroines, who were already tainted with sexuality and secularism and generally understood by those within the religious community as not worthy of imitation. Elizabeth clearly agreed, for in her diary she expresses the fear that she will become the subject of “Books and Ballads cried … about the streets” because of her ongoing emotional and spiritual troubles (19–20). To become “public” in this way, specifically in a kind of vulgar, low-class literature, would diminish her reputation, whereas Anthony’s representation of her, in a text destined for a distinctly Christian community, would make her appropriately exemplary. Once again, through Elizabeth’s fear about the fate of her story, one sees the vague and ever-shifting border between morally useful life narrative and scandalously public life narrative. A woman like Elizabeth could never be too careful about which side of that blurry line she stayed on.

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And yet, it would be possible for both Walkers not to mention romance at all. Numerous spiritual auto/biographers provide details of their or their subjects’ lives and struggles without invoking romance. And the rest of Elizabeth’s self-writing as we have it contains no romance echoes at all, nor any indication that she even read a romance. So the Walkers’ vocalized concerns point to the significant anxieties that accompanied a woman’s appearance in print and the particular associations their contemporaries were likely to make about such a woman. Therefore, most female life writers who did succumb to romance’s charms claim that they eventually “saw the light” and gave it up. Of course, the sin of romance reading was not gender-specific, as both male and female life writers confess to having loved romances in their youth and utilize similarly venomous language to express their regret for having done so. For example, Richard Baxter, the highly regarded seventeenth-century Puritan author, notes in his autobiography that “I was extremely bewitched with a love of romance, fables and old tales which corrupted my affections, and lost my time” (qtd. in Spufford, Small 74). He is similarly judgmental about his wife’s youthful romance reading, noting in his life of Margaret that she enjoyed “glittering her self in costly Apparel, and delighting in her Romances” (4).1 Vavasour Powell, another seventeenth-century evangelist and spiritual autobiographer, notes of his own past that “Either Hystorical or Poetical Books, Romances and the like were all my delight” (qtd. in Spufford 74). Delaval and Rich repent of the same sin in their autobiographical writings, Delaval noting that “Reading unprofitable Romances” (74) filled and thus wasted the time “which shou’d haue Been spent in laying a good foundation of What is to be learnt in such Book’s as teach’s us Heauenly wisdome” (15–16)2 and Rich recording in her autobiography that her sister-in-law influenced her “to be very vain and foolish, inticing me to spend (as she did) her time in seeing and reading plays and romances” (Some 4).3 Their Scottish contemporary Elizabeth Blackadder, Mrs. Young (1659/60–1732), in her “A Short Account of the Lord’s Way of Providence towards me in my Pilgrimage Journeys,” says she even regrets telling romance-like stories: This I thought then only to be an innocent diversion with my comrades; but after my reflection on this practice has frequently been very bitter to me, especially

Unfortunately, although Baxter includes some excerpts from Margaret’s life writing in A Breviate, this is his assessment; we do not know what Margaret thought about romance in her later years. 2 Delaval’s assessment concurs with an admonition by Puritan minister Samuel Torshell, who says, “Away with your Spenser, your Ariosto, your deare Arcadia too, if these doe steale away your hearts and time from Scripture-study and Meditation” (qtd. in Brayman Hackel, Reading 154–5). 3 The sister-in-law referred to here is Elizabeth Kilegrew, the wife of Rich’s brother Francis. Unless noted otherwise, all references to Rich’s autobiography, Some Specialities [sic] in the Life of M. Warwicke, are to T.C. Croker’s edition. Croker modernized both spelling and—to a lesser degree—punctuation in his transcription of what is now British Library Additional MS 27357. 1

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since the Lord (who is the God of truth) was pleased to discover to me something of the corrupt source and fountain of all these follies. (386)

All of these examples, of which there are many more, indicate the pervasive power of romance over young minds and the frequent rejection of this influence in maturity. They also make very clear that romance’s vilification was common in the spiritual community, where the intense lens of self-examination made no allowances for fanciful thinking,4 the privileging of romantic love over spiritual love, or the untruths that were a hallmark of the genre. And yet there was also room for a more nuanced approach to romance, for somewhere between an Elizabeth Blackadder (who rejected an earlier appreciation for the genre) and an Elizabeth Walker (who seemed never to have succumbed to its influence) was the much more complicated attitude of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), who “may have claimed that she ‘never read a Romancy Book throughout’ … but … nevertheless knew exactly what such a book was like” (Todd and Spearing viii). Cavendish’s life in exile during the Civil Wars contained its fair share of romance-like events, inspiring fellow life writer Samuel Pepys to famously describe her as a character right out of the pages of a romance: “The whole story of this Lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic” (qtd. in Lilley xii). This kind of social commentary may well be the fate that Elizabeth Walker so feared that she chose to preemptively address it, and it may also explain Cavendish’s desire to clarify so often and so vociferously her relationship to the genre. As has been duly noted, she expended quite a lot of critical ink on the subject of romance throughout her corpus even as she produced her own romanceinflected material. As is the case with most topics engaged by Cavendish, her critique of the genre appears at times contradictory, but her commentary suggests that the main element about romance that bothered her was its detachment from reality. Hers is not the attitude of a self-flagellating Puritan but of a thoughtful author and non-traditional early modern wife whose defense of both identities required numerous pages and a vast amount of energy. Nonetheless, she articulates the same concern as Anthony Walker when, in her preface to The Life of William Cavendish Duke of Newcastle (1667), she explains that her life of her husband is superior to a romance, or histories that are like romances, because it is more truthful. Indeed, she insists, her work will not substitute “romancical falsehoods for historical truths” (lvii). Again and again, Cavendish uses romance as her default example of texts that are not realistic enough for her liking. Thus, when one of the fictional letter writers in Sociable Letters (1664) argues that heroic poems are too implausible, she says that “they are for the most part Romances, containing more Lies than Truth, more Impossibilities than Probabilities” (183). In another instance, the writer similarly claims that “whosoever doth Heighten the Sacred Scriptures, by Poetical Expressions, doth See David George Mullan, Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland, who explains that the “brand of Protestantism” practiced by Blackadder and her husband, James Young, “was inveterately opposed to the romantic imagination” (386n10). 4

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Translate it to the Nature of a Romance, for the Ground of a Romance is for the most part Truth, but upon those Truths are Feignings built” (186). But Cavendish’s position on fictionalizing is not always negative, suggesting that feigning in and of itself may not be the problem.5 Indeed, Cavendish herself created numerous fantastic narratives, most obviously The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666), which has been described as a “scientific romance” (Cottegnies 126). She, too, could feign and was apparently quite willing to do so. Thus it becomes clear that, for Cavendish, it was not feigning that was the problem but the effect of such feigning on readers who proceeded to develop a false sense of reality. On this point, Cavendish is loquacious. For example, take “Mrs. H.O.,” a possibly fictional woman discussed by one of the letter writers in Sociable Letters: for all her Discourse, or most part of it, is to Men, and to some she doth repeat several Places and Speeches out of Romances, and several Speeches and Parts of Playes, or Passionate Speeches, and if it be concerning Love, then she turns up the black of her Eyes and Whines, and lifts up her Hands after the French Mode; also she is ready and quick in giving Sharp Replyes, for which she is highly Applauded by the court Gallants which gather about her. (125)

Because this woman is under the influence of romance, Cavendish’s letter writer claims, she makes a fool of herself in public. In other cases discussed in other letters, women develop impure thoughts: “the truth is, the chief study of our Sex is Romances, wherein reading, they fall in love with the feign’d Heroes and Carpet Knights, with whom their Thoughts secretly commit Adultery, and in their Conversation and manner, or forms or phrases of Speech, they imitate Romancy Ladies” (67–8). Perhaps worst of all, one of the letter-writing personae argues, is the unrealistic expectations such texts lead women to have of marriage itself. After all, these women and their equally “Amorous” male counterparts “[m]arried Mortal Creatures,” she explains, “not Gods or Goddesses, nor such Worthy or Constant Damosels as Romances feign, so as their Love Vanishes as Poetical Airy Castles, or Inchanted Towers” (141). At least as far as Sociable Letters is concerned, the problem appears to be feigning in combination with genres read by women who are frequently ill-equipped to deal with such fantastical material: for the most part Women are not Educated as they should be, I mean those of Quality, for their Education is onely to Dance, Sing, and Fiddle, to write Complemental Letters, to read Romances, to speake some Language that is not their Native, which Education, is an Education of the Body, and not of the Mind. (73)

5 For early modern poets’ defense of feigning, see, for example, Philip Sidney’s Defence and An Collins’s “The Discourse” section of her Divine Songs and Meditacions. Both poets argue that feigning can convey morality.

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As we will see, this mind-body distinction is critical for Cavendish, whose fanciful Blazing World is constructed not on the physical love of its main characters but on their transcendent, gender-bending, and body-defying intellectual union. Of course, one must remember when reading Sociable Letters that the attitudes expressed are almost always in the words of Cavendish’s letter writers, not Cavendish herself. James Fitzmaurice, editor of a recent edition, argues that “Cavendish teases her readers [when she condemns romance], for she, herself, wrote romances. Often the heroines of her romances have too much ‘good sense’ to read such romances as they inhabit” (68n1). Certainly, Sociable Letters is filled with irony. And yet, the critique Cavendish offers in the passages quoted above is relatively consistent with attitudes expressed elsewhere in her work. And the concern is apt. According to her logic, if women are not well educated and then read unrealistic texts like romance that specifically develop a concept of romantic love that is not likely to pertain to most women’s marriages, then the likely fate of such married women is disappointment, unhappiness, or worse. As Cavendish writes in a letter to her sister Ann, “there is … much Danger in Marrying” (Sociable 272). Although she goes on to insist that “there being no Life I Approve so well of, as a Married Life, were [i.e. where] as much Sympathy Joyns Souls, and Affection Hearts, as Ceremony Joyns Hands,” she states quite bluntly that the alternative is not worth the risk: “to live with Antipathy must needs be very Unhappy,” so “where there is a Hazard in the Choice, and a Security in not Choosing, the Best is to be Mistress of your self, which in a Single Life you are” (273). Given the marriage minefield that was early modern England, Cavendish’s concern about how romance might mislead women into the wrong impressions of a specific partner or of married life in general seems quite prescient. Thus Cavendish seems to value romance for its intellectual and literary qualities but not for the mind-numbing effects it is capable of producing in readers who do not fully understand how it works. Here it becomes clear how different Cavendish’s concerns about romance are from those of critics like Anthony and Elizabeth Walker, who fear that an association with romance can only detract from a woman’s reputation. The simplistic formula that emerges from most antiromance commentary in this period is that romance is not Christian, or not moral, or not moral by Christian standards. But Cavendish, by contrast, worries that women might appear foolish and gullible or find themselves in marriages that are unsatisfactory in part because they bear no resemblance to the stuff of romance. This is an entirely different critique, one based in social and intellectual concerns rather than spiritual ones. It is tempting to psychoanalyze Cavendish, to ponder whether her own marriage did not live up to the romance ideal (thus leading her to critique that very ideal) or whether her own failure—through barrenness—to become an ideal wife according to the terms of the day led her to privilege an intellectual legacy over a bodily one. Certainly, these are possible interpretations, and it is commonly accepted that Cavendish attempted to build her identity and future fame on her intellectual endeavors, literary productivity, and self-construction as her husband’s equal. But in the end, what matters here is that Cavendish’s critique is entirely consistent

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with her claim that she finds greater pleasure in the world of the mind than of the body and with her insistence that her marriage is built on a respectful, mature, intellectual love as opposed to an emotional, foolish, amorous one. Indeed, to a woman of her intellect and experience, romance’s most common representation of love appeared unrealistic, deceptive, and ultimately frivolous. As one of the female personae of Sociable Letters explains in her response to “Romance A”: I think there is more Love than Reason in it, and more Wit than Truth or Probability of Truth; and certainly it is deplorable, that so much Wit and Eloquence should be wasted on Amorous Love, as also to bring all Scholastical, as Theological, Physical, Logistical and the like Arguments, Disputes and Discourses, into the Theme of Amorous Love, which love is between Appetite or Desire and Fruition of Different Sexes of Men and Women; but I perceive that Romance-Writers endeavour to make all their Romance-Readers believe that the Gods, Nature, Fates, Destinies and Fortune do imploy or busie themselves only in the affairs of Amorous Lovers, which is a very low Imployment or Concern. Also … it seems Amorous Love is Composed more of Water than Fire, and more of Desire than Fruition. (132–3)

Significantly, this analysis acknowledges romance’s eloquence and wit while condemning its exclusive application to the subject of romantic love. In contrast to traditional romance as her letter writers understand it, Cavendish insists in a preface to Nature’s Pictures (1656) that her own authorial endeavors, even “those tales I name Romancicall,” have more substantive subject matter and goals: I would not have my readers think I writ them, either to please or to make foolish whining lovers, for it is a humour of all humours I have an aversion to; but my endeavour is to express the sweetness of Virtue, and the Graces, and to dress and adorn them in the best expressions I can. … Neither do I know the rule or method of Romancy writing; for I never read a Romancy Book throughout in all my life, I mean such as I take to be Romances, wherein little is writ which ought to be practised, but rather shunned as foolish amorosities, and desperate follies, not noble love’s discreet virtues, and true valour. The most I ever read of Romances was but part of three books, as the three parts of one, and the half of the two others. And if I thought those tales I call my Romancicall Tales, should or could neither benefit the life, nor delight the mind of my readers, no more than those pieces of Romances I read did me, I would never suffer them to be printed. … Likewise if I could think that any of my writings should create amorous thoughts in idle brains, I would make blots instead of letters; but I hope this work of mine will rather quench amorous passions than inflame them, and beget chaste thoughts, nourish love of Virtue, kindle humane Pity, warm Charity, increase Civility, strengthen fainting Patience, encourage noble Industry, crown Merit, instruct Life, and recreate Time. (qtd. in C.H. Firth, xxxix–xxx)

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Significantly, Cavendish here seems to echo defenders of romance in her claims of moral value, as she intends specifically to “benefit the life” and “delight the mind of [her] readers.” I have quoted these passages at length for two reasons: first, because Cavendish is frequently cited as one of romance’s most passionate early modern critics (a point that simply does not do justice to the complexity of her stance), and second, because these passages make clear how essential it was to Cavendish’s own selfconstruction as an author (and even, perhaps, to her sense of her self as a woman and wife) to offer a thorough critique of romance. In order to explain her own work, Cavendish had to explain how it was not like romance, the genre most often associated with women in her day. In order to justify her own choices in both personal and authorial life, Cavendish had to point out how they differed, in carefully reasoned ways, from the choices idealized in romantic and heroic literature. And in order to complete the critique of marriage that was central to her work, Cavendish had to acknowledge the potentially damaging power of romance on naïve female readers who would one day be wives and desperately needed to know truths, rather than lies, about that state of life. In all of these ways, Cavendish enacts my primary argument in this chapter: that romance was such a force to be reckoned with, especially for early modern women, that a woman could hardly take up the pen without summoning its presence and then having to carefully think through what her response to it would be. Whatever her choice, romance’s power had to be acknowledged. We have seen, for example, how Lucy Hutchinson (1619/20–81) explicitly explained her decision not to make her biography of her husband into the romance it well could have been and how numerous traces of the genre made their way into her text anyway (though—as she intended—not as the primary narrative thread). Yet Hutchinson’s neutral attitude toward romance, which she dismisses as a generic model only because it does not suit her material, and even Cavendish’s complex analysis of the genre’s pros and cons differ dramatically from the writers who seem to make romance’s vilification a personal cause and who dismiss it as a model because of what they see as its essential immorality. For these writers in particular, coming to terms with the specter of romance had numerous social and personal implications. Elizabeth Delaval and Mary Rich: Two Case Studies Many of the examples considered in Chapter 3 appear in secular auto/biographical texts that share many romances’ prose narrative structure as well as some of the genre’s content. But the specter of romance haunts very different forms of life writing as well, including the meditation genre with which many early modern Englishwomen engaged. This spiritual genre contained significant autobiographical potential in addition to its obvious devotional value.6 According to seventeenth6 Despite the common use of this devotional practice, Raymond A. Anselment notes in his introduction to The Occasional Meditations of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick that “[t]he feminine practice of meditation … has not been discussed extensively” (1).

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century practitioner and theorist Robert Boyle,7 one of Rich’s brothers, writing occasional meditations encouraged one to “‘spiritualize all the Objects and Accidents that occur’ to the devout soul” (qtd. in Anselment, Introduction, Occasional 3). According to her own description, this is precisely what Lady Grace Mildmay (c. 1552–1620) did in concert with her daily Bible reading. She would “delight in the meditiation [sic] … vpon euery occation of thoughtes arysing in my mynde, or vpon whatsoeuer myne eye did bohold [sic] or myne eare did heare, applying the same as I was directed by the spirit of God” (46). Some individuals developed observations on nature and some on political events. Still others, especially women, made the daily occurrences of their domestic lives the subject of spiritual contemplation and analysis. Thus women’s meditations during this period incorporate a remarkable range of material and varying degrees of auto/biographical detail. Although this extraordinary flexibility has created numerous cataloging problems with seventeenth-century texts,8 it was a critical aspect of the appeal for its practitioners. The flexible subject matter of the occasional meditation (to be distinguished from more formal “deliberate” or “solemn” meditation) made it Fortunately, his introductory comments begin to rectify this problem, especially in regard to women’s occasional meditations; see esp. 2–4 and 20–34. See also Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education, esp. 174–6; Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Redeeming Parcels of Time”; Suzanne Trill’s introduction to Lady Anne Halkett, esp. xxxiv–xxxvii, on Halkett’s “decidedly individual” approach to the genre; and Lady Grace Mildmay’s Meditations, in which she eloquently explains that her collected meditations, the culmination of her lifelong meditational practice, “is the consolation of my soule, the joye of my hart & the stabilitie of my mynde” (30). 7 Boyle’s Occasional Reflections Upon Several Subiects. Whereto is premis’d A Discourse About such kind of Thoughts, including “Discourse Touching Occasional Meditations,” was published in 1665; as noted in Chapter 1, the text was among Halkett’s reading on meditational practice. For a useful discussion of how Boyle’s approach differs from that of other theorists (not least of which is his assertion that occasional meditations do not need to be limited to the spiritual), see Coolahan, esp. 133–7. 8 An instructive example is Katherine Austen’s Book M, a commonplace book that is “in part a book of occasional meditations; … in part a book of Psalm meditations and paraphrases, part diary, part mother’s advice book, part family record, part literary miscellany, and part manuscript of original poetry” (Ross 4). Because of this generic hybridity, Book M does not fit neatly into any of our modern categories and, as a result, has been described as a diary (Kouffman, “Maternity” 171), a “Miscellaneous diary” (Mendelson, “Stuart” 202), and “neither a diary nor a memoir” (Anselment, “Katherine” 7) even though Austen herself referred to it as “this book of my meditations” (166). An example of the opposite problem is the critical treatment of Halkett’s personal writing, which, as already noted, consists primarily of extensive meditations despite the scholarly focus on her autobiography. As Trill persuasively argues, because Halkett’s extant manuscript “volumes are catalogued as ‘Religious Meditations,’ they have been largely overlooked and unexamined (xviii). Yet Halkett’s meditations “provid[e] detailed insights into Halkett’s life and experiences as a wife, mother and widow from 1659 to 1699” (xviii); therefore, they are, arguably, just as valuable autobiographical documents as the autobiography itself. Both examples demonstrate the dangers of working with rigid assumptions about genre in this period, especially when the materials in question are “meditations.”

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“accessible to all classes, and especially to women. The emphasis on practice over method is enabling, and suggestive of an attainable means of self-improvement” (Coolahan 124). Occasional meditation further helped individuals monitor their use of time and avoid wandering or idle thoughts (124), often understood to be a distinctly feminine problem. And it was commonly practiced in forms already acceptable for and familiar to women, including spiritual journals and diaries (129). Occasional meditation was, in short, a “wholly sanctioned activity” (129). Here I consider two of the genre’s most devoted female practitioners, Elizabeth Livingston Delaval and Mary Boyle Rich, Countess of Warwick.9 Both women wrote voluminously, were intensely devout, enjoyed romance in their youth but rejected it in their maturity, and found themselves in relatively unhappy marriages. More significantly for the purposes of this chapter, both also produced texts that bear the unmistakable markings of romance, Delaval by deploying traditional romance motifs and characters to script herself as a sympathetic victim, and Rich by manipulating the genre’s seductive optimism in order to defend, explain, and even redeem her youthful behavior.10 Lady Elizabeth Delaval Like many Englishwomen caught up in the chaos of the Civil War period, Delaval’s early life reads like a plot in a romance. She was left with an aunt in England as an infant because of her parents’ engagement in Royalist activity;11 placed for a brief time in the Queen’s court; manipulated by numerous suitors and parental figures who tried to determine her fate in marriage; denied a match with the man of her choice; and left in emotional turmoil when that man reneged on their plan to elope and subsequently married someone else. She eventually married a man chosen for her and was so unhappy in the married state that she likened the condition to “shakells” (i.e. shackles) (314).12 Yet the echoes of romance in Delaval’s meditations Anselment argues that “Rich’s occasional meditations are a form of religious devotion that possibly no other contemporary woman developed as distinctly, if not extensively. … [They] have a religious and personal immediacy that sets them apart from other works in this tradition,” especially in “their concrete detail, vivid analogies, and homely comparisons” (Introduction, Occasional 1, 3, 34). 10 For Delaval and Rich’s indebtedness to romance in their life writing, see esp. Margaret J.M. Ezell, “Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine,” and Ramona Wray, “[Re]constructing the Past” and “Recovering the Reading of Renaissance Englishwomen.” 11 As Douglas G. Greene explains this early crisis, Delaval’s father began writing to the exiled Charles II after Charles I’s execution. Yet “[t]he government intercepted some of the letters, and he fled with his wife to the Hague, leaving their infant daughter Elizabeth in the care of his sister Lady Stanhope” (1). For more on Delaval’s biography, see Greene’s introduction to his 1978 edition of her Meditations (a title assigned by Greene, not Delaval). 12 Intriguingly, Delaval’s later life also appears the stuff of romance, but the details are sketchy and generally unreliable. The limited evidence suggests that she became involved in “Jacobite schemes to regain the throne” (Greene 16) for the exiled James II and ultimately had to leave England to escape arrest. Greene believes that she married a second time in 1686, less than four years after being widowed, and died in Rouen in 1716. 9

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go beyond content to inform her narrative method as well. In an extraordinarily complex manipulation of romance-as-strategy, Delaval condemns the genre and blames it for much of her unhappiness yet uses many of its elements to script the most advantageous version of her life’s events as possible. The resulting text both rejects and validates romance at one and the same time. Intriguingly, this compelling instance of romance-inflected life writing appears in the form of spiritual meditation, for Delaval’s manuscript is ostensibly a collection of meditations that she began writing at age 14 and then first collated— with connecting, explanatory narratives along the lines of “this meditation was written when”—around age 20. Many other sections appear to have been added even later (including after her marriage), though the meditations themselves extend only through her 22nd year.13 Thus the text that has come down to us presents a layered version of her former selves, in which each interpretive layer re-explains these past selves from the current moment in time. It is also through these explanatory moments that link distinct episodes in her life that Delaval’s text becomes increasingly narrative in form. A young teenager’s efforts at interpreting her personal crises and failings through a spiritual lens are thus overlaid by an older, more disillusioned woman’s perspective. At first glance, the spiritual component of Delaval’s text is in keeping with meditational practice as it was understood in her day. She collects her meditations in an act of penitence and thus focuses on what she deems her most significant sins. “For What can be more mortifying to a Christian,” she writes, “then Fresh, and liuely representation’s of those sin’s They haue been guilty of” (2). This traditional framework provides the evidence of a shameful life, makes that life available for self-examination, and acts as a mirror that honestly reflects the sinfulness of the writer’s lived life back to her. In this way, the acts of recording, confessing, and reflecting both represent and bring into being the Christian soul at work. Furthermore, as noted above, the penitential process as it operates through meditation encourages the writer to develop observations about God through consideration of her own life experience. But here is where Delaval’s meditations begin to differ from most traditional examples. First, as Margaret J.M. Ezell argues, Delaval’s meditations “were clearly not a daily devotional exercise. The entries are not done on any regular basis, nor are they meditations on conventionally pious themes, … Instead, they act most frequently as a response to a personal crisis” (225, emphasis added). Second, in the process of confessing and dissecting her sins on paper, usually in a moment of personal distress, Delaval tends to look for explanations beyond herself, rather than within herself as the meditation form demands. Consistently, she points to See Ezell (221–5) for theories of the text’s composition. Like so many instances of life writing from this period, Delaval’s is generically hybrid, including prayers and copies of letters in addition to the meditations and explanatory narratives. As Ezell argues, Delaval “creates in her religious meditations a chronicle of her secular life which is not bound either by the demands of conventional piety or literary genre” (218). 13

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other individuals who she believes encouraged her so-called sinful behavior and in this way attempts to make sense of her unhappy fate. Significantly, among the numerous human villains Delaval constructs, she also assigns a blameworthy role to the romance genre itself: How many year’s of my life are now past in Which I have aply’d my selfe to study the Vaine things of this world, to be a iudge of What is generally estimed good bredeing, to Vnderstand the Wit of a Romance, or a Poem But not to learn Wisdome, and such understanding As guides us to know what the Will of the Lord is. (37–8)

The complaint is a familiar one among romance’s detractors. Indeed, Delaval’s narrative could easily support an early modern anti-romance campaign due to the compelling evidence it provides of two particular points: one, the dangerous influence lower-class women who indulge in fantastical tales can have on innocent children, and two, the ill effects of youthful engagement with the romance genre. In the first place, Delaval assigns much of the blame for her romance habit and subsequent spiritual failings to the influence of one Mistress Carter, a servant who, according to Delaval’s account, employed numerous manipulative strategies to ingratiate herself with the young girl, including feeding her fairy stories: As soon as I was ten yeare old she begun to Delude me with Tale’s of Fary’s, charged Me with great secresy, and told me that if She and I cou’d but get out often to walke Alone, the Queen of that vnknown Land she Vs’d to talke to me of (prouided that she found I was uery secret) wou’d be so graceous as to let me Se in priuate one of her Court, which Fary Wou’d be order’d to bring me a considering Cap, which when I had wore a while upon the Intersestion of Mris Carter, (and still upon Condition that I continued uery secret) Another Fary shou’d meet me in the Wood’s With a far greater present, which was a Wishing Cap, and as soon as I begun to wear It, what euer I desier’d I shou’d obtaine. All this I firmely beleiued. (12–13)

In fact, Delaval continues, “So eagerly bent was I upon these thing’s that I thought it alltogether needlesse to pray or To read the holy scriptures. and cou’d with All my heart haue tore my Gouernesse in peces when Euer she hinder’d Mris Carter’s priuate walk’s And mine” (13–14). In other words, Carter’s introduction of unrealistic, foolish tales to the young Delaval leads her to prefer those tales over more worthwhile subject matter and even to rebel against the more traditional education she received in the schoolroom. She becomes so addicted to escapist forms of literature, in fact, that she consistently chooses romance over spending time with girls her own age or reading more edifying material: Mris. Carter had so fill’d my head With foly’s, that … what I red was alltogether Romances. I was but Some few month’s past ten year’s old, before I had red seuerall great uolum’s of them; all Casander, the Grand Cyrus, Cleopatra And Astrea; thus vainely pass’d the Blosome time of my life. (15)

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As so many had argued before her, Delaval “found by experience that [romances] rob us insenceibly of many-many houer’s Which of themselues fly but too fast, since they are Giuen us to worke out our Saluation in” (43, emphasis added). Thus romances replace more instructional texts, and foolish notions supplant “Heauenly wisdome” (16). Carter’s negative influence is obvious and the ill effects of her teachings extensive. As Delaval explains it, the servant’s fairy stories “by degre’s” became “much More dangerous discourses”: my Eare’s she dayly fill’d with prayse’s of my Selfe, and told me that my growing Beauty in Some lettle time wou’d certenly make a conquest of many heart’s. and that the end I was To make of those too Fary Cap’s she had so Long been talkeing to me of, was only to Derect me wisely to chuse, whose passion of All those that wou’d pretend to me deserued Best to be my Husband. By which mean’s she put the thought’s of loue Into my heart much to soon. (16)

In other words, in addition to encouraging misspent time, Carter and the stories she peddled also gave Delaval unrealistic ideas about men, love, and marriage, ideas that would be directly responsible for her numerous subsequent misadventures in love (confirming Cavendish’s claims about the genre’s negative influence on marriageable maidens). According to the narrative that accompanies and orders the meditations, the slightly older Delaval’s filial disobedience, narcissistic behavior, and general lack of gratitude can also be traced to Carter’s heretical ideas, especially romance’s superiority to scripture, the right of a woman to choose her own spouse, the importance of romantic passion in a marriage, and a woman’s rightful pride in her own appearance. Indeed, the frequency with which Delaval’s meditations worry over her primary sins (pride, indulgence in idle or evil discourse, envy, and desire for romantic love) indicates that these heresies were not easily recovered from. But it is the misconceptions about love and marriage conveyed by romance that are most at issue here, since Delaval’s account demonstrates precisely how they led to the miseries of her courtship years, which ended with the dissolution of her relationship with the man she loved, James Lord Annesley, and marriage to the man chosen for her, Robert Delaval. Quite simply, romance had failed her, despite all the faith she had put in its teachings. As her narrative makes clear, Delaval as an unmarried but romance-schooled girl enjoyed giving her thoughts over to love: “Euen at the time of my prayer’s is my Head filled with thought’s of him: and to, too apt am I To omit my Deuotions ether Publick, or priuate, rather Then loose an ocation of seeing that youth, who has found The way thus far to gaine my heart” (159).14 She similarly enjoyed sharing lovers’ discourse, “of talkeing with a real or A pretended louer” (205) and “hear[ing] him talke like one of the Louers I haue Red on in Romances” (227). 14 Greene believes that Delaval refers here to either Annesley or the Comte Dohna, a nephew of the Swedish ambassador and relative of William of Orange (216n90); these are the primary two men for whom Delaval expresses romantic affection in her text.

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Perhaps most importantly, Delaval simply expected to marry the man of her choice, the man she loved “aboue all the rest of mankind” (163). Thus she resented parental interference in this choice: “the Rage of Anger I am in has Forced me to neglect the paying my Aunt those dayly duty’s That I ow her. my Counternance to her is quite allter’d, and As if she were under my power, not I her’s, I am grown Peuish and morose in my Conuersation” (164). Nonetheless, she trusted whole-heartedly in the course of True Love, choosing to wait for her guardians and Annesley’s parents to change their minds rather than resign herself to an unhappy ending, for “nothing upon Earth Cou’d euer hapen to make me giue my selfe to another If he continued constant” (246). And eventually, as time passed without any change of heart on the part of the lovers’ parents, she chose romantic love over filial obedience. At this critical moment, the tragic climax of Delaval’s relationship as well as of the love story embedded in her meditations, she decides to elope with Annesley against her previous objections only to find that his father had in the meantime arranged another match for him. The scene that played out between Annesley and his father at the moment the young lovers’ plans were discovered was, of course, not witnessed by Delaval. But her thorough knowledge of such incidents from all of her romance reading enables her to reconstruct it on the page in similar terms: both his Father and his Mother were out of there Wit’s … they Show’d him my letter [in which she agreed to elope], and the Earle of Angelsey (who was One of the most pasionate men upon Earth) swore If he presumed to disobey his will, that he might beg With me if He pleased, but that he wou’d not Giue him a six pence of his Estate, which shou’d All be settled upon his second son … my Lord Anesley (being as I imagine) coueitous in his nature, frighted with these Threats yeilded to his Fathers will, and instead of Comeing to my Cousen Esex Griffins house sent me an [sic] letter in which he say’d that he had done all that was posible to haue the hapynesse of being euer mine, without absolute ruine to us both, and therefore he beged I wou’d release the promiss that had pass’d betwixt us. (249–50)

Delaval had believed in the idealized narrative of romance that assured her true love could overcome all obstacles and that on those occasions when it could not, the lovers’ constancy would at least persist. So this turn of events is a dramatic jolt to her world view. Delaval’s efforts at rationalization in the face of this shock are among the most poignant moments in her manuscript, for they unmistakably reveal a woman in crisis. It is no coincidence, for example, that Delaval first attempts to make sense of her meditations—and the life experiences they relate—in the midst of her heartbreak over Annesley (2). In this moment it becomes clear that the exercise of collecting her meditations is less an act of repentance or spiritual devotion than an attempt to reconcile herself to the unsatisfactory way her life has turned out. Admitting that she has “turn[ed] not to God till banish’d from the World By distress” (6), she tries to convince herself that even if “it were posible … to meet with the prosperous success

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in all the Design’s thou hast formerly pursued with so much Eagernesse,” such success and happiness would not provide spiritual health (4). The devoted Christian voice that speaks here appears to be a consequence of the tragedy experienced by the romance lover who speaks elsewhere. Indeed, before deciding that Annesley’s betrayal is a good thing because a life with him would not have enabled spiritual health, Delaval resorts to an explanation more in keeping with a romance plot: that Annesley’s love was “falce” (253) rather than true and “disembled” (253) rather than genuine. Thus romance provides the explanation for her heartbreak, but it also deserves the blame. Delaval rejects both her beloved Annesley and her beloved genre, pledging to “neuer trust sighs, tear’s nor Vow’s Any more” (254) and instead placing all of her love and trust in Christ, the most trustworthy beloved she can find and the bridegroom of all willing Christians. But the emergence from this text of a woman married to a man not of her own choosing and instead wholly “charmed With [God’s] loue” (286) is less victorious than defeated, since she accepts this fate only after the relationship she most desires is no longer possible and romance itself has failed. Delaval’s critique of romance is both thorough and passionate, implying a direct causal relationship between a servant woman’s unrealistic, dangerous stories and the subsequent unrealistic and unrealizable expectations that an impressionable girl under her influence could develop about love and marriage. But to take Delaval’s rejection of romance at face value would be to underestimate her wit and her strikingly independent character. For even more than its critique of romance, Delaval’s meditation-based narrative conveys a defense of herself. And in order to make this defense as effective as possible, she somewhat ironically scripts the early portion of her life as romance. The distinction between these two ways of reading Delaval’s manuscript is subtle but significant, for her tale provides yet another powerful instance of an intelligent woman’s manipulation of romance-as-strategy for her own benefit. In this case, Delaval deploys the following conventions: a familiar romance plot in which lovers are pitted against unreasonable parents and a cruel marriage economy, several familiar romance villains, a virtuous heroine torn between multiple allegiances, an embedded critique of arranged marriage, and extensive melodramatic language. Much of Delaval’s romance-like plot has already been explained. But in addition to the primary narrative of doomed love, Delaval incorporates the traditional royal setting of romance with an episode in which the King himself pledges his support for her cause,15 as well as an elaborate subplot in which her Aunt Stanhope collaborates with Lord Roos (later the Earl of Rutland) to keep Delaval unmarried until he manages to get Parliament to agree to his divorce so that he can marry her himself. This stratagem helps to explain why Stanhope 15 According to Delaval’s account, the King offered to help persuade Annesley’s father to consent to the match (247) after he had been put off by Lady Stanhope’s cold response.

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whisked her young charge out of town the moment a viable match presented itself and how the alternate match for Annesley was conceived in the first place. As Delaval explains, Rutland engaged his mother to “imploy A Friend of hers … to make a maryage betwixt one of her Daughters, and Lord Anesley” (245), and so she did.16 Via this sinister plot in which adults with ill intent conspire against young and innocent lovers, Delaval’s narrative becomes more complex and gains a hint of the multiplicity of character, motivation, and plot common to romance.17 Delaval’s cast of characters is also familiar, including traditional villains like the surrogate mother (Stanhope), the evil servant (Carter), and the inconstant lover (Annesley, who is first depicted as “a youth, that … all the rest of my Friends Thought euery way a match suteable for me” but tellingly becomes “that Vngratefull youth who … my best Friends with earnestnesse, aduised Me to auoid” [162, 260]), as well as a traditional heroine. But here the sympathetic victim of the villains’ lies and machinations is herself. According to Delaval’s construction of events, she is repeatedly taken advantage of, misled, and used as a pawn in others’ concerns until other, more virtuous individuals come along to set her right again (in other words, until she is rescued). Indeed, the need for the young Delaval to be rescued is a consistent theme from the earliest moments of her manuscript, when she recounts being “preserued” as a baby “From the rage of rebell’s” and “the Perill of the sword” (26). Later, of course, she had to be “resque’d … from Mris Carter” (23). And finally she is rescued by God himself. Given the plot in which these events unfold, Carter is a predictable, if convenient, scapegoat; God a rather formulaic replacement for the lover who has failed her; and the victimized heroine at the center of events necessarily innocent, virtuous, and well-meaning. After all, she could not garner sympathy if depicted otherwise. Accordingly, Delaval de-emphasizes moments that indicate her own culpability—such as when she says, “I listen’d to all [Carter’s] Fable’s with as much Atention, as if her word’s had been Oracle’s” (16, emphasis added)—and instead depicts herself much more emphatically and consistently as a woman with a deep sense of filial responsibility who is determined not to marry her beloved without her guardians’ consent. In fact, she is quite direct about her obligation to her aunt, who “toke me out of my Cradell—And has euer since prouided for me” (162), and explains that she worked hard to reconcile her own wishes with Stanhope’s. But she also describes how she tried to accommodate the wishes of her father, her beloved, and her grandmother, who in letters to Delaval (some of which are copied into the manuscript) encouraged her to express gratitude to the parental figures in her life who were working so hard to assure her happiness in marriage. Even when recording her decision to elope against some of these same individuals’ wishes, Delaval justifies the decision by explaining that a friend Despite this success, Delaval was married before the Earl of Rutland’s divorce became official, and he had to turn to Plan B, according to which—Delaval explains—he and his buddies would “drinke [Mr. Delaval] to death” (320). 17 Multiplicity is yet another of the romance elements that Barbara Fuchs identifies as primary to the genre. 16

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convinced her to do it and that one of the friend’s most convincing arguments was the fact that her father supported the match even if her aunt did not.18 The tortured indecision recorded in Delaval’s meditations conveys quite plainly that this is not a rebellious woman at heart but—on the contrary—a good girl attempting to make the best decisions she can in the midst of multiple, often conflicting allegiances. Indeed, it is this aspect of her tale that comes closest to a direct critique of arranged marriage, for Delaval’s narrative makes clear that, like so many of romance’s female storytellers, she is a pawn in dramas much bigger than herself. This is especially apparent in the Earl of Rutland subplot described above, but it is also clear in the motivations Delaval attributes to those who oppose her match with Annesley, especially her aunt and his father. Stanhope, she claims, acted out of revenge: But because I once disobey’d my Aunt in not giueing my Selfe to a young Man that she had chose for me (who was Indeed both hansome, Rich, and great; yet one who being Off a contrary Relighon to mine, my Consience wou’d Not suffer me to be ty’d too.) she crosses me now out of reuenge.19 (163)

Annesley’s father, in turn, is offended by Stanhope’s cold response to his initial offer and thus looks elsewhere for his son’s wife. Thus Delaval’s narrative demonstrates how parental figures’ petty attempts to arrange a child’s marriage are often based in their own selfish motives. Secondarily, she incorporates a critique of the dual financial/emotional costs incurred by women in marriage. As Delaval explains in a section devoted to her concerns about entering the married state with exorbitant debt, I planely see [my father] wou’d much sooner part with a great Summe For my Portion, then with a small one to pay my Debt’s. Because he thinks the last of these not nesesary to be Done first. But I am quite of a contrary opinion, and do firmely Resolue neuer to be maryed at all, rather then to mary Whilest I am in Debt, And what is most unfortunate to Me, no one Friend I haue finds it reasonable to argu This poynt with my Father, and take my part in it. (129)20

Her primary concern, she adds in another passage, is that if her debts were not paid off “before I was a wife, they Must certenly haue fallen upon my husband; which I might very probable haue been many times reproach’d withall By his relation’s” (89). Delaval’s logic is quite reasonable given the marriage economy and gendered doubled standard of her day, and her eventual victory in getting her Remarkably, Delaval writes that her father even encouraged her to elope. The man in question was Frances Lord Brudenell, a Roman Catholic. 20 Delaval does not use indentations to indicate new paragraphs. However, like 18 19

Greene, I have interpreted her frequent use of “a gap between lines” to indicate the same thing (19) and have introduced new paragraphs at these points.

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debts paid before her marriage provides the only happy plotline in an otherwise tragic tale of doomed love. Such a tale must, of course, be conveyed in the heightened tones of romance. Thus Delaval depicts her lovers engaging in dramatic behavior, such as Annesley begging on his knees, and speaking in the language of the romance lovers she so enjoyed reading. After Annesley has proved false, for example, Delaval records in her meditations the vows he had once made to her, partly—it seems—to justify why she trusted him and partly to relive the treasured time they had shared: amongst other things I remember well that he Beged of God (if euer he cou’d be capable of breakeing His vow’s to me,) that the chruch [sic] in which he was to be mary’d to another might fall upon his Head and crutch [sic] him to peces, and if that Iudgement failed that he might neuer liue a Happy day with his wife, that there discord might be known to all the world, that at last He might not dy a common death but some Remarkable way, by which Gods heauy Iudgement might be uisible upon him, and That as for his Race if he left any behind him he wish’d They might all be miserable as well as him selfe after All these wicked Curses upon himselfe he swore He loued me beyound expresstion, and that he Cou’d not bear with my … haueing A Doubt of his truth for he was sure there was Nothing (except the murder of his Father) which He wou’d not do to be euer mine. his extrauagant Expresstion made my bloud chill, and I blamed Him uery much for them, at the same time I cannot But own I was guilty of tasting a secret pleasure when I thought of all his flights of passion, which Made me foleishly belieue, he neuer cou’d haue Changed. (255–6)

This account, written in her second meditation of her twenty-first year, is part of her attempt to come to terms with the sudden conclusion of a relationship that had lasted for three years, and its emotion is understandably raw. Yet, for a spiritual exercise, it dwells disproportionately on the lover’s vows that Delaval has already admitted to cherishing. The emphasis on this “secret pleasure,” re-experienced in the act of writing, thus jars with her concluding recognition “that nothing can Happen with out [God’s] permission” (259). Indeed, this discrepancy between a seemingly spiritually motivated exercise and the strikingly secular content of Delaval’s meditations is one of many indications that multiple and conflicting goals are at work in this particular instance of life writing. Another is the discrepancy between the heroine’s victim role and Delaval’s own obvious intelligence, creativity, and feisty spirit. After all, plenty of evidence from the period, including many of the examples considered in Chapter 3, demonstrate how often early modern women were coerced into marrying according to their parents’ wishes and against their own hearts. Were Delaval truly of the same mold as these women, as her representation of her loyal and obedient younger self would suggest, she likely would never have resisted her guardians’ choice for her, and she certainly would not have consented to elope with a man rejected by her aunt, the person most responsible for raising her and one who would add £4000 to her marriage portion (86). But Delaval, no matter how she attempts to write the tale, was not such a woman. She was spirited and

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independent, the kind of girl who at a very young age directed and starred in a local production of “the refined Pastorall of Pastor Fido” (34).21 And she was well versed in an entirely different discourse than obedience alone. This discourse led her to expect that right wins over wrong and that true love rises above all obstacles, economic or otherwise. But of course she was wrong. Thus her manuscript also offers a complex, illustrative example of the effects of competing discourses on an early modern woman’s sense of self. On the one hand, Delaval internalized enough of seventeenth-century England’s Christian world view to turn to meditation and prayer in the first place. She clearly understood the purpose of these activities and so diligently filled pages with her regrets about wasted time, idle conversation, lack of trust in God, disobedience, vanity, and many other flaws. Her meditations accordingly witness a woman in the process of attempting to suppress her spirited determination to the will of others and to the code of morality that obtained at the time. On the other hand, Delaval also internalized a discourse of romantic love that was peddled in the romances of her day and suggested that patience, true love, and virtuous dealings with the opposite sex would, more likely than not, be rewarded with mutual affection and happiness in marriage. The conflict between these two discourses is, not surprisingly, brutal. In the aftermath of this conflict, in the period of time between her beloved’s breaking off of their relationship and his imminent marriage, Delaval returned to her more youthful meditations with a vow to shed no more tears “for the seuerity of my Aunt who might without difuculty haue Setled me in the world according to my wish’s Nor for the falcenesse of a Louer, who has been Alltogether unwhorthy of my heart, … [nor] for the loss of any Thing but [God’s] favour” (4–5). Notably, these are not the words of a woman who believes herself to have done wrong (no matter how consistently she finds ways to claim responsibility). Instead, they are the words of a woman who, at heart, believes herself to have been wronged. And in her retrospective narration of events, she attempts to defend this woman. In the end, then, it becomes clear that Delaval’s rejection of romance is a means to an end, or perhaps multiple ends. It most obviously supports her self-characterization as a pious and repentant woman that the meditation genre both calls for and brings into being. But it also serves as the core of her self-defense in her impassioned effort to make sense of her fate. Therefore, although it appears that Delaval began writing meditations as a spiritual practice, she ended by trying to impose a narrative on her life, connecting meditations with narrative bridges and generally explaining—for whatever future readers she imagined—the context for individual narrations. In other words, from 21 This pastoral tragicomedy by Giovanni Battista Guarini is the same text that Sir Richard Fanshawe translated and continued, as noted in Chapter 1. Delaval played the role of Amarillis. Significantly, Ezell notes, “the plot of Il Pastor Fido and its language share several striking features with Lady Betty’s account of her romance with Lord Annesley” (230), further underscoring the constructed nature of her narrative and the influence of secular models on it.

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beginning to end, Delaval’s poignant writing has a story to tell, and—as Ezell so convincingly argues—“it is the conventions of romance, of fiction, not of spiritual meditation, which she utilizes to manage her grief through her writings” (235, emphasis added). Thus Delaval’s life writing can be read not simply as a warning tale about romance’s evil influence but also as yet another example of how an early modern woman might employ the genre’s narrative tools in her own selfconstruction. Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick Mary Rich’s premarital life also provided plenty of fodder for a romance plot, primarily because she insisted on marrying second son Charles Rich22 against her father’s wishes, thus enacting—once again—the familiar disobedient daughter23 versus dictatorial father plot. However, Rich led a model Christian life from at least 1648 (just a few years after her marriage)24 and belonged to a family and extended community with extensive spiritual and autobiographical habits that likely encouraged her own intensively introspective adulthood.25 Rich’s brother Robert, quoted above, wrote and theorized about spiritual meditations and produced an autobiography of his early years.26 Her brother Roger wrote autobiographical plays and based some aspects of his romance, Parthenissa, on individuals and incidents in his own life.27 Her father, Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, wrote both a diary and an autobiographical account.28 And Rich’s fatherin-law, Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, was a dedicatee of John Beadle’s influential The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (1656), a text that Mary 22 Charles’s status changed nearly 18 years into their marriage when his older brother died and he became the Fourth Earl of Warwick. 23 In his own diary, Rich’s father describes her as “vnruly” when she refuses his choice of spouse (qtd. in Palgrave 38). 24 Rich seems to have always been spiritually inclined, but it was during the summer of 1648 that she committed to renouncing the more frivolous behaviors of her youth and early married years. 25 Rich often devoted hours a day to solitary spiritual meditation, either in an outside space like her beloved “wilderness” at Leighs or indoors writing in her closet. In the latter case, “Rich spent entire mornings or afternoons writing [meditations] and sometimes revised her first thoughts” (Anselment, Introduction, Occasional 23). Furthermore, she engaged in both varieties of meditation popular at the time: “set” and “occasional” (Palgrave 201). 26 This autobiography, An Account of Philaretus During His Minority, was first published posthumously. 27 For a review and brief analysis of Roger’s dramatic output, see Kathleen M. Lynch, Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery, esp. 145–60 and 168–87; for an overview of Parthenissa, see esp. 187–94. 28 Richard Boyle’s diary was not published until 1866 in The Lismore Papers; his autobiography, True Remembrances, was written in 1632 and published posthumously with Thomas Birch’s The Life of Robert Boyle in 1734.

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herself likely read and that taught the Christian diarist to record God’s mercies as a means of practicing praise and gratitude; Rich even met Beadle on at least one occasion (Anselment, Introduction, Occasional 5). She also knew and read the works of Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine and life writer noted above for his disdain for romance, and “was the ‘Person of Honour’ for whom [Nathanael Ranew] wrote … Solitude Improved by Divine Meditation” (1670).29 Even Rich’s friends, like the exemplary diarist Elizabeth Walker and her husband-biographer Anthony, also discussed above, practiced introspection through their life writing. In short, Rich witnessed a range of autobiographical practices among her closest friends and acquaintances, and—in terms of meditation in particular—“would have had many opportunities to discuss first-hand the nature and practice of an increasingly well-established form” (20). Indeed, many of Rich’s meditations reveal that she not only found great spiritual satisfaction in the practice but also gave significant thought to how it should work and what it should accomplish. Meditation, she writes, should “blow up those sparkes of devotion” (42); “dealight me but instroukte me, too” (43); and help sustain “the heate I gett at ordinances … by keapeing my self warme with inflameing, warmeing considerationes” (47).30 Her diary entries further illustrate how she incorporated meditative practice into her daily life, as she constantly records meditating on sermons she has heard and books she has read, as well as writing and reading her own meditations. Such entries indicate that she almost always followed a particular sequence of devotional activities that would build on one another. As she explains in a typical entry, she “went in to my clossett wrote Som Scripture reflectiones and occasinall meditationes, then red the worde and prayed” (28r).31 She reads her meditations, another entry suggests, in order “to moue my heart” (95v, emphasis added). And in the entry for September 20, 1667, one witnesses her enjoyment of this desired result. While reading one of her own meditations about washing a “table booke,”32 she writes, “God was pleased blessed be his name, to stur upe instantly my heart to beg with great plenty of teares that he wolde waich [i.e. wash] away all my Sines with the blood of Christ that thay might be as Cleare done away as If thay had neauer bene” (117r). Over and over again, Rich’s entries testify to her belief that the key to effective prayer Ranew was a Presbyterian clergyman, a friend of Rich’s, and a frequent visitor to her home. 30 All references to Rich’s occasional meditations are to Anselment’s edition. This is the first edition of Rich’s complete occasional meditations. One hundred and eighty-two of her meditations are extant. 31 Unless noted otherwise, all references to Rich’s diaries are to vol. 1 (British Library Additional MS 27351) of the original manuscripts, all aspects of which I have maintained with the exception of lineation. However, it should be noted that, because Thomas Woodrooffe, son of John Woodrooffe (Rich’s domestic chaplain at the time of her death), has so thoroughly “corrected” Rich’s spelling and other aspects of her writing, it is nearly impossible to distinguish between their hands at times. 32 Anselment includes this meditation on 62–3. 29

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and participation in the Lord’s ordinances is being in the right frame of mind, and writing and reading meditations helped her achieve that state. Meditation, in other words, was essential to her spiritual life. Most significant for the purposes of this study is that the enriched spiritual experience enabled by Rich’s meditative practice derived from meditations on her own life experience, often everyday, even trivial occurrences like “being in a great heate after walking and then for feare of catching colde putting on another scarfe” (Occasional 47), the inspiration for one of Rich’s 1663 meditations. In other words, meditation and autobiography are mutually enabling activities for Rich, and it is nearly impossible to separate one from the other in her corpus, despite the label attached to a given piece. Both autobiographical meditation and meditative autobiography enabled the development of her distinctive authorial voice and likely contributed to her confidence in deriving wisdom, or life lessons, “from my own experience” (50).33 Indeed, Rich was quite comfortable advising not only those individuals for whom she was responsible, such as household servants and the three nieces she had agreed to raise after their father’s death,34 but also neighbors, friends,35 and her husband. In turn, she became an exemplar of Christian piety, famously lauded as such in a funeral sermon-turned-published life written by Anthony Walker,36 who in addition to being one of Rich’s friends also served as the household chaplain for her father-in-law and became one of her closest spiritual advisors over the years. Not surprisingly, in the dedicatory epistle to his published sermon on Rich, Walker once again expresses a fear that his exemplary female subject will be wrongly associated with romance; thus he explains that he has not “dressed up” his depiction of Rich “with all the ornaments of which ‘twas capable,” since, had he done so, it “would have looked in this Age, more like a romance than an History” (“To” A5v). As we will see, Walker’s concerns may have been justified in this case, if not in his wife’s. 33 See also Anselment’s introduction, in which he notes that Rich “achieved a distinct sense of self through her piety and writing” (4), and Avra Kouffman, “‘Why feignest thou thyselfe to be another woman?’: Constraints on the Construction of Subjectivity in Mary Rich’s Diary,” who argues that Rich “derives an unmistakable sense of power and authority from her adherence to societally acceptable doctrines, and … uses her position as a respectable Christian to authorize her advice towards others” (15–16). 34 These were the daughters of her husband’s brother, Robert, Third Earl of Warwick. 35 To cite just one example, Rich took advantage of a visit to the home of her friends George and Elizabeth Berkeley in August 1667 to proselytize, noting in her diary that she “dayly indeauerd [Lord Berkeley’s] Saluation” (109r). She also wrote her epistolary Rules for a Holy Life at his request, and it has been suggested that Berkeley himself published Historical Applications and Occasional Meditations upon several Subjects as a result of Rich’s influence (Palgrave 172–3). 36 Walker’s Eureka, Eureka: The Virtuous Woman found Her Loss Bewailed, and Character Exemplified in a Sermon Preached at Felsted in Essex, April, 30, 1678 was published in 1678. Rich’s early editors continued to focus on her exemplary nature, as when Croker introduced his 1848 edition of her autobiography as the work of “Mary, the pious Countess of Warwick” (vii).

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To be fair, Rich’s extensive corpus of life writing, including spiritual meditations, thousands of pages of diary entries totaling five volumes of densely packed writing, and an autobiographical narrative later published as Some Specialities [sic] in the Life of M. Warwicke (1848), collectively and predominantly convey a formidably devout presence quite equal to the one eulogized by Walker. Indeed, were one to read only Rich’s meditations or diary, which testifies to her devotional spirit as well as her wifely self-sacrifice in the face of Charles’s temper and gout, one might believe that she had purged all remnants of such adolescent habits as romance reading from her psyche. However, Rich’s autobiography, which idealizes her courtship and marriage at the same time that it records her repentance for disobeying her father, creates a quite different impression and begins to suggest both the extraordinary complexity of her self-representation and its indebtedness to romance. This complexity in regard to romance may be, in part, yet another legacy of her family, as several Boyles experimented not only with life writing but also with romance (sometimes in the same text) and exhibited an intense love-hate relationship with the controversial genre. In addition to Roger Boyle’s partially autobiographical Parthenissa, Rich’s brother Robert also borrowed extensively from romance in his autobiography. Rich’s self-narrative is thus one in a series of personal family accounts that draw on romance for plot, character, or style.37 Read through the lens of romance, then, Some Specialities begins quite characteristically, with the phrase “I was born” (1), and proceeds to narrate the 37 Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “Gendering Prose Romance,” also notes the Boyle family’s penchant for both romance and autobiography: “In the large and gifted family of the Earl of Cork, a daughter and two sons drew on romance reading to reflect on their lives, though in divergent ways. … Each of these three brilliant young people both read romance avidly and wrote some form of autobiography” (133). Yet the Boyles’ relationship to romance was undeniably complex and often inconsistent, as illustrated by the Earl forbidding his sons to read romances yet giving Rich a copy of Arcadia when she was quite young. As Lawrence Principe, “Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso,” argues, “[t]he attitude of Robert Boyle ... and indeed of the whole Boyle clan ... towards romances is not straightforward” (379). Robert’s attitude was at best “ambivalent”—“sometimes deprecating his enthusiasm for them as an improper diversion from more worthwhile goals” and sometimes recognizing “potential benefits in exploiting the form,” especially “the potential for including moral messages” (Hunter, Introduction xvii). Thus, despite his concerns, he wrote his own romance titled The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, a fragment of which was published anonymously in 1687. As for his autobiography, its many romance elements include the protagonist’s name, the work’s “third person narrative structure, including the use of reported speech and the attempt to depict emotions, and … its style, with its long sentences with balanced clauses” (Hunter xxi). Roger, on the other hand, not only wrote Parthenissa but also began another romance, English Adventures, and wrote a play based on the popular French romance L’Astrée (Lynch 147). Yet even in his preface to The First Part of Parthenissa in 1655, he enigmatically claims that he will not “endeavour to Apologize for Romances, for though I thinke I could say somthing for them, yet I am certaine I can say more against them” (B1r).

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key events in Rich’s life through the early 1670s. Furthermore, Rich’s courtship and marriage dominate the narrative, as they best represent the selfish youthful self for which she continues to do penance. Indeed, as Ramona Wray argues, the “idealized construction” of her relationship with her eventual husband “can … only be sustained through an almost exclusive focus on the period of courtship.” Thus “Rich devotes nearly half of her text to the period before marriage and is notably silent on the subject of her relationship with Charles once they are man and wife” (“[Re]Constructing” 153). In addition to the romance-like structures and themes, Rich also draws on the genre for characterization, first presenting “herself as an eminently eligible heiress” (152) who, like many romance heroines, has no interest in marriage whatsoever. Rich recounts receiving proposals of marriage endorsed by her father as early as age 13 or 14 and time after time rejecting them. In the first such instance, Rich uses quite familiar language to explain how, “though my father pressed me extremely to it; my aversion for [James Hamilton] was extraordinary.” In later cases, she says, I still continued to have an aversion to marriage, living so much at my ease that I was unwilling to change my condition, and never could bring myself to close with any offered match, but still begged my father to refuse all the most advantageous profers, though I was by him much pressed to settle myself. (4)

As Wray puts it, “[a]t no point is the dovetailing between Rich and the romantic heroine more evident than when she expresses her dissatisfaction with the prospect of an arranged marriage” (152). But the entrance of Charles Rich into the scene adds the requisite plot complications to this tale of the independent-minded young woman, who admits that she “did not find his declaration of his kindness disagreeable” but immediately worried about her “father’s displeasure if I should embrace any such offer” (6). Despite her best efforts to stay true to her father’s wishes, however, Charles’s performance as “a most diligent gallant” eventually “did insensibly steal away my heart” (7). The various episodes in Rich’s representation of this courtship echo numerous romance plots, including the suitor’s secret courting, the woman’s determination to refuse him yet inability to actually do so, and—of course— the commonplace dilemma between reason and passion. On the one hand, Rich understood that to marry Charles would be to disobey her father and to accept a standard of living to which she was unused. But, on the other hand, she knew he was the only man who had ever tempted her to the married condition. Therefore, she hovers in a state of indecision: “[t]hus we lived for some considerable time, my duty and my reason having frequent combats within me with my passion, which at last was always victorious, though my fear of my father’s displeasure frighted me from directly owning it” (8). It is only when Rich contracts the measles and her secret relationship with Charles is about to be exposed that the lovers’ plight reaches a desperate state and, again in terms reminiscent of a romance, Rich succumbs to her suitor’s persuasive rhetoric:

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he had with me about two hours discourse, upon his knees, by my bed-side, wherein he did so handsomely express his passion (he was pleased to say he had for me), and his fear of being by my father’s command separated from me, that together with as many promises as any person in the world could make, of his endeavouring to make up to me the smallness of his fortune by the kindness he would have still to me, if I consented to be his wife; that though I can truly say, that when he kneeled down by me I was far from having resolved to own I would have him, yet his discourse so far prevailed that I consented to give him, as he desired, leave to let his father mention it to mine; and promised him that, let him make his father say what he pleased, I would own it. (10–11)

In this moment, Rich’s loyalties realign, shifting from her father to her beloved and husband-to-be. Accordingly, it is in the aftermath of this episode that Rich’s independent personality reasserts itself. According to her account, having once “resolve[d] to endure any thing for [Charles’s] sake” (12), she confronts her brothers (her father’s emissaries) with what she terms a “resolute, but ill and horribly disobedient answer” in which she explains that “I would not marry him without his [her father’s] consent, but that I was resolved not to marry any other person in the world” (13). Even when her father eventually does consent, “though not to give me my before designed portion” (13), Rich does not cease doing things her way. For she rejects the “public marriage” her father wants her to have and decides instead, “without my father’s knowledge, to be privately married at a little village near Hampton Court” (14). Even the kindest of readings cannot remove the stain of disobedience from Rich’s actions at this critical juncture of her life. Indeed, Rich proceeds through the rest of her autobiographical narrative to directly confront and acknowledge this behavior as one of her greatest youthful sins. Her disobedience in marriage, she comes to believe, was not only a sin against her father but also against God: “I by my marriage thought of nothing but having a person for whom I had a great passion, and never sought God in it, but by marrying my husband flatly disobeyed His command, which was given me in His sacred oracles, of obeying my father” (15). But her tendency toward disobedience was also manifested in other ways. Thus she also repents more generally of the kind of woman she was at that time, in the years just before and after her marriage: as vain, as idle, and as inconsiderate a person as was possible, minding nothing but curious dressing and fine and rich clothes, and spending my precious time in nothing else but reading romances, and in reading and seeing plays, and in going to court and Hide Park and Spring Garden. (21)

It is this vain, romance-reading, disobedient woman who must be supplanted—in the course of Rich’s life as well as in the autobiography that represents it—by the “pious,” “exemplary,” and self-sacrificing woman of the diaries, meditations, and eventual biographies. Therefore, on the most basic level, Rich’s autobiography is a conversion narrative—the very kind of tale one would expect a devout woman of her status

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and spiritual persuasion to pen near the end of her life.38 But it is so much more than that. For in order to articulate her conversion as vividly as possible, Rich incorporates the language and motifs of the very genre that epitomizes her preconversion identity, thus creating a mini-romance in the midst of what might otherwise be a purely spiritual text. Even though Rich claims that turning her life around meant trading “idle books” for “the Word” (22), it seems those idle books had left their mark. And when Rich began the work of putting her life story into words, they resurfaced to provide the most effective tools for the job. Thus romance helped determine the precise kind of feigning she would employ in her self-construction and the precise kind of narrative she would relate in the process. Most specifically, the romance mode allowed Rich to script the younger version of her self as a well-meaning, if naïve, young woman. This depiction results despite her various acts of disobedience, for though she acknowledges her selfishness in marrying Charles, regrets putting her father through so much trouble, and understands that God had advised her differently, she never states or even suggests that she should not have married Charles. On the contrary, she expresses gratitude to God that He brought her, “by my marriage, into a noble and, which is much more, a religious family” (15, emphasis added). By this account, her marriage transforms from her greatest act of disobedience into one of God’s greatest favors to her and, in the process, loses some of its sting.39 Furthermore, in an ends-justifies-the-means kind of way, Rich recounts a happy marriage in which Charles is attentive to her and she loves being with him; his death in 1673, she notes, was the greatest affliction in her life (33). In other words, according to Some Specialities, Rich suffered no punishment for her great misdeed but was instead rewarded with a loving husband for her companion and a deeply religious family in which her own spirituality could blossom. The “Mary Rich” of this text is a spiritual and moral woman who repents of her early failings but who nonetheless emerges as justified in her behavior. But this is not the woman or the tale that appears in Rich’s diaries. In these pages, which convey the day-to-day reality of Rich’s experience as opposed to a romance-inflected account of virtue rewarded, one finds not just a spiritual woman but also an unhappy, even psychologically tortured woman who bemoans her sins on a daily basis and worries constantly about the immoral and temperamental man to whom she so misguidedly joined herself as a young woman. Indeed, in the extant diaries, which begin in 1666, Charles Rich is no gallant, no “hero taken straight from the pages of a romantic novella” (Wray 152), but a swearing, temperamental, abusive man whose ill health seems only to aggravate his tantrums and his demands on his wife. Comments in Rich’s diaries suggest that she wrote most of the autobiographical narrative in 1671, but some material had to be written later. Rich died in 1678. 39 As Wray puts it, “[r]omance … is constructed simultaneously as the guarantor of happiness and as the medium through which Rich is able to gain access to the deity” (“[Re] Constructing” 157). 38

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Indeed, one of the most powerful of the many repetitive patterns of behavior recorded in the diary is the vicious cycle in which Rich first prays to God to forgive her husband’s sins and to help her be patient with her condition; second finds herself the victim of one of Charles’s inexplicable fits of temper; third gives in to her hurt feelings and either engages Charles in dispute or weeps over her situation; and fourth prays to God again to forgive either or both of these responses, as well as her husband’s temper, blaspheming, and other “pasionate” behaviors. As this scenario appears repeatedly in almost identical form, one example should suffice. In her entry for November 26, 1667, Rich provides a lengthy description of her morning devotions, which include retiring to a private space, reading, meditating, and praying. Her prayers, as is often the case, include a request for God’s “conuerting Grace” for her husband, who the day before had cursed at the dinner table (140r). Rich next records how she spent the dinner hour visiting with friends and then how the day unexpectedly took a sour turn when she got home: when I reaturned my Lord fell, without any ocasion giuen by me, into great passion with me, which trobled me so much that I fell into adispute [sic] with him wherein I was uery pationately afected, and wepte much, and spake unaduisedly with my lipes, telling him that I was with his unkindnes to me so much trobled that I was weary of my Life, and that my life was aburden to me: after I came from him too I wepte much, but afterwardes I went to praye and did beg Godes pardon for my sheding so many teares for any thinge but my sinnes. (140v)

Finally, in the next day’s diary entry, in which Rich records going about her daily routines in a less-than-desirable frame of mind, we can see how her dispute with her husband continues to affect her: “in the morneing as sone as upe I retired red and meditated but fonde a uery great melancholly indisposition upon me. not haueig [sic] recouered the disorder of the day before, yet I indeauered to bringe my minde into frame and went to prayer” (140v).40 Rich’s married life, as it is represented in her diaries, is filled with such episodes. In the best of times, she is able to convince her husband that he needs to turn to God and improve his ways. But in the worst, she is emotionally abused or diverted from her beloved devotions in order to play nursemaid to his numerous illnesses and erratic moods. There is simply no way to read her marriage, even by early modern standards, as a happy one or as the kind of relationship for which an otherwise obedient Rich would have disobeyed a father. Accordingly, entirely in keeping with the spirituality of the day, Rich frequently comments in her devotions on the unsatisfactory nature of worldly things. For example, on December 6, just a short time after the altercation with her husband described above, Rich records meditating on “the insofisansy of all sublunary thinges to make me happy, … and how often I fond that what I beleeued wold 40 In this particular instance, Rich does not seem to get her spiritual strength back for several days, reporting being “dull and distracted in duty” until her November 30 entry, when she finally has “sweet Comunion with” God (141r).

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most conduce to my happynes, I after saw was far from doeing it” (142v–143r). Such passages suggest not only why Rich turned to such intense spiritual habits41 but also why she may have indulged in the freedom of self-narration provided by her foray into memoir writing. For in the autobiographical narrative, a form less centered on spiritual self-examination, she could tell her story in as idealized a manner as possible. Nowhere is the fact that autobiographical form determines content more clear than in this particular case. In her meditations, Rich turns life’s most mundane occasions into spiritual lessons. In the diary, she bemoans her life’s problems and works to find spiritual peace despite them; here she does a daily penance, repeatedly repenting of her disobedience of her father, for which she seems unable to forgive herself, while just as consistently having to confront, in the figure of her husband, the consequence of that disobedience. But in the narrative form, she imagines and thus brings into being a different reality altogether. In this medium, she could write the tale that would bring earthly happiness, and she could explain to herself and others how she ended up in the place that she did. Therefore, although both the diary and autobiography enable Rich to attempt to come to terms with the same reality, they do so in quite different ways, from the creation of different characters to the use of different language and motifs. Furthermore, they are governed by quite different influences, with daily experience and Christian introspection informing the diaries and idealism and secular tales like romance informing the narrative. Like so many of her life writing counterparts, Rich thus “expresses an early modern sensibility that is both secular and spiritual” (Anselment, Introduction, Occasional 34) but in a combination that is uniquely hers. What is less clear is how intentional Rich’s reliance on these various genres was and exactly what she hoped to accomplish with Some Specialities in particular. As noted above, the autobiography certainly helps to justify Rich’s behavior by explaining her emotional state of mind at the time of her most significant In her 1901 biography of Rich, Mary E. Palgrave insists that her diary must have been more than simply a spiritual record, especially given the state of her life by the time she started it in 1666: before that year she had been stricken by her heaviest sorrows and … the wearing visitation—the “smarting tryall”—of her later years had come upon her in its fulness. She was a childless mother, “a woman grieved in spirit”; all hopes of another heir to save their branch of the family from being quite put out were fading from her; and in the region of her home life, where if anywhere she had the right to look for comfort and sympathy, she met with little but harshness, and misunderstanding, and ill-temper. … No, though doubtless … she kept that daily record … in order to her spiritual advancement, she also turned to her diary because it was ‘someone to speak to,’ because she was sore-hearted and solitary and often much cast down, and could unbosom herself to its kind and safe ear of some of the trouble that hung so heavy on her sensitive spirit, but of which she might tell nothing to the world. (209–10) This reading suggests that Rich, like Delaval, turned to her self-writings in times of trouble and heartache. 41

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disobedience. But Wray takes this argument a step farther, compellingly claiming that Rich’s narrative justification also pins responsibility on the romance genre itself: “[b]y exploiting the conventions, logic and morality of romance, Rich is enabled both to justify the filial disobedience that any other discourse would castigate and to register how, through an unwitting investment in romance ideology, she arrived at the poor choice that underpinned her marital decision” (“[Re]Constructing” 151). Wray’s theory is certainly plausible, as we have seen Delaval—in much more direct terms—also blame romance and its peddlers for her misspent time and unrealistic expectations of marriage. But the ever-forthright Rich is oddly subtle here, if she indeed intended to scapegoat romance. To make her point, Wray must turn to evidence in Rich’s self-accounting diary—a quite different genre that emphasizes the superiority of heavenly life to the earthly one and thus, not surprisingly, “registers the discrepancy between the idealisation of the heterosexual union in romance and the ‘reality’ of married life” (153). In other words, form matters. And it follows that the version of Rich’s life that appears in her diary, a conduit for daily record-keeping and self-examination that depends on a writer’s interpretation of events as they appear at the moment, might differ dramatically from the version that appears in her autobiography, a form with the greater potential to liberate a writer to create the past as she would have it. In this context, it is important to consider what romance-as-strategy offered to Rich as a life writer. For while romance reading very likely contributed to her unrealistic and ultimately unrealized expectations of marital love, just as it did in Delaval’s case, it also provided the language and motifs for the precise kind of narrative she needed when writing her life account. Thus Rich’s narrative does more to help her redeem herself as heroine (a feat only possible because of the romance motifs she adopts) than it does to condemn romance itself. The mature, devout Rich may indeed have despised the genre for its “delusive qualities and coercive power” (153), among its many other vices. But the mature woman Rich, who may have been concerned not only about her own posthumous reputation but also that of the Rich and Boyle families, neither stooped to blame a genre nor resorted to vilifying her husband in her life story. Instead, she created a tale of mutual love, innocent waywardness, and divine redemption. Furthermore, although it certainly helps us to read Rich’s texts alongside one another and thus to recognize the tragic irony and falsehood in her account of marital happiness, it is not likely that Rich herself would have expected or intended such inter-textual reading. If anything, it is the autobiography that she would have expected other eyes to see.42 In the end, although it is certainly true that Delaval and Rich’s life accounts offer a powerful warning about the dangers of “an insidious cultural mythology” 42 Kouffman, “Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries,” argues that “Rich almost certainly composed the journals with the knowledge that they would eventually be published, since her cleric [Walker] encouraged journal-keeping and eventually published two lengthy elegies incorporating diary entries from Rich and his own wife” (173–4). Yet neither of these was published during Rich’s lifetime, and encouragement of journalkeeping hardly indicates intent to publish.

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(Wray, “[Re]Constructing” 154) like the one propagated by romance, they also offer instructional tales about how women might redeem their selves—or at the very least better understand their selves—by manipulating romance motifs with their own pens and to their own ends. Indeed, as Wray also argues, “[r]omance, which carries its own particular brand of morality, is the discourse which most credibly authenticates Rich’s decision to contract an unpopular marriage” (154–5) and—we might add—Delaval’s decision to elope with the man she loved. Rich and Delaval script themselves as romance heroines of independent spirit who unfortunately find themselves the victims of others’ dishonesty and machinations. It is a story we have heard many times before, but it is no less powerful for the repetition. The Moral of the Story In content and technique, little distinguishes the examples of women’s life writing examined in Chapter 3 and those considered here. In all cases, the writers create compelling narratives in which love and marriage dictate events; independent, often heroic behaviors dominate the plots; and both writers and characters speak with the traditional rhetoric of obedience and duty. Yet there is a difference in some of the writers’ attitudes toward the romance genre, and the fact that even those writers who speak negatively about romance still deploy it in their self-narratives indicates just how powerful the genre was as a means of self-understanding. In other words, romance was not just a kind of text to be read or—as some would have it—studiously avoided. On the contrary, romance came to embody a range of cultural anxieties—such as wayward tongues and bodies, idleness, and rhetorical excess—that accrued distinctly feminine associations over time. As such, a woman seeking to embody herself in textual form looked directly into the face of the force that was Romance. In the course of this interaction, women made decisions about whether to construct a self in keeping with romance models or in opposition to them, but in many cases they also took advantage of romanceas-mode. Approached in this way, romance offered a stock set of characters, an idealized discourse particularly suited to discussions of courtship and marriage, and narratives of “true love” foiled or pursued against the odds. In short, romance was a tool to assist a woman’s self-construction. Whether she used the tool or not, and whether she created herself in the mold of a romance heroine or as everything that a romance heroine was not, the genre was still there, influencing those choices. Thus, even women like Rich and Delaval—who felt that they had been betrayed by the genre, blamed it for everything from misspent time to unwise marital choices, and ultimately rejected it—nonetheless chose to put romance to work for them in their particular textual creations. Romance is always just one ingredient in the mix of course. But, ironically given the culture’s spiritual emphasis, it is one of the richest, providing a certain degree of spice as well as greater insight into how early modern women understood and constructed their selves.

Chapter 5

Romancing the Self in Autobiographical Romance Although most women in early modern England who engaged in textual selffashioning did so in sanctioned spaces and forms—diaries, private narratives, meditations—a few produced fictional forms as well, including romance. Such literary experimentation was rarely without controversy given the period’s generally inhospitable attitude toward female authorship and toward women’s engagement with romance in particular. Indeed, some men opposed women’s reading precisely because they feared that “female readers of the Arcadia threaten to become writers of the Urania” (Brayman Hackel, Reading 54). Nonetheless, enough female writers ventured to romance their selves in fictional romance as to make a brief exploration of it useful here. Well-known aristocratic women created several notable examples. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, published by Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1651) in 1621, was one of the most infamous roman à clef romances of her day, one that she continued in a never-published Second Part. Wroth’s aunt, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), made significant revisions to her brother Philip’s unfinished “new” Arcadia and supervised its publication in 1593.1 Although this romance incorporates more of her brother’s autobiography than her own, it is very much a Sidney family text, and the Countess herself lives on in its most familiar title, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Even Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), whose critique of the romance genre I explored in Chapter 4, wrote several texts that qualify as romances, including “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” (both included in the 1656 Nature’s Pictures) and The Blazing World (1666). Significantly, Cavendish’s romance-inflected texts are like much of the rest of her corpus in their incorporation of auto/biographical detail.2 But other, lesser-known women also experimented with the romance form, and not just in their self-writings. As I have noted, Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–93) included a prose romance, A Short History of the Life and Death of Sr Ceasor Dappefer, in her manuscript volume of original compositions. Hester Pulter (c. 1605–78) wrote The Unfortunate Florinda, a text that bears traces of her own romance reading in the form of, for example, a reference to a character from 1 With the exception of this editorial intervention, Mary Sidney’s output as an author was in significantly more sanctioned, spiritual forms. 2 Indeed, Kate Lilley argues that in “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” Cavendish “was rewriting the narrative of her own history as romance” (xvii).

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Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532).3 Additionally, Anna Weamys (fl. 1651), author of A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” (1651), and the anonymous, possibly female author (fl. 1682) of the unpublished manuscript romance Rivall Friendship4 dared to enter forbidden territory by going beyond the already controversial reading of romance to actually writing it.5 In considering the appeal of the romance genre to a writer, several possibilities emerge. For example, as Annabel Patterson argues for Elizabethan England and Lois Potter for mid-seventeenth-century England, romance offered a suitably veiled language for political commentary; this same feature made romance an ideal form for family histories—as both fictionalized and more factual roman à clefs. Indeed, tracing auto/biography’s influence on romance (rather than the other way around) has been the traditional approach to the intersection between romance and life writing. But another reason for romance’s appeal was that it offered a perfect venue for enacting wish fulfillment. G.C. Moore Smith characterizes the romances of William Temple, future husband of Dorothy Osborne (1627–94/5), as “the stories written by a despairing lover of 22 in the small hours of the night to express his own yearnings in a disguised form” (xviii). And it has long been accepted that Wroth’s “Urania constituted for its author at least in part an enacted daydream in which she imagined, in the residual, masculinist, terms of chivalric romance, what her life as her cousin’s ‘truest wife’ might ‘really’ be like” (Waller 56).6 Indeed, although writing romance as political commentary was not unheard of for women,7 female life writers typically put the genre to work on behalf of family history and wish fulfillment. Therefore, just as many women turned to life writing in order to take control of their life stories, so did a few others turn to romance itself for the same purpose. And yet, whereas romance-inflected auto/biography seems to have had a productive, even accepted place within a woman’s personal writing practice— as I have demonstrated in the previous chapters—auto/biographical romance was a different matter altogether, one with its own complications as well as 3 I am grateful to Alice Eardley for sharing this detail with me, as well as an early version of her forthcoming edition of Pulter’s work, currently only available in manuscript at the Brotherton Library at Leeds University. The Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso was translated into English by John Harington in 1591. 4 Jean R. Brink, “Theorizing Attribution and Authorship: ‘Rivall Friendship,’ An Anonymous Seventeenth-Century Romance,” posits that the likely author of Rivall Friendship, an Arcadian romance housed at the Newberry Library, was Bridget Manningham. 5 A more complicated example is that of Mary Carleton’s The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, considered by some to be a semi-fictional romance; see especially Helen Wilcox, “Her Own Life.” However, so many questions surround Carleton’s identity and the text’s authorship as to make it less useful for this particular study. 6 The cousin referred to here is William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, Wroth’s first cousin and the father of two of her children. 7 Urania in particular has been considered from this angle.

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unique benefits. In the following pages, I first delineate what it took for a woman to progress from a romance reader to a romance writer and then consider the personal benefits that may have accrued to lesser-known romance writers like Calthorpe and Weamys. From Reader to Writer As already discussed, Margaret Tyler (fl. 1578) makes a compelling case for women’s reading, translating, and writing of romance in her preface to her translation of Diego Ortuñez de Calahorra’s The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1578). Indeed, even as she admits that the content of The Mirrour is “a matter more manlike then becometh my sexe” (Aiijr), she nonetheless defends a woman’s right to write it: But as for the manlinesse of the matter, thou knowest that it is not necessary for euery trumpettour or drumstare in the warre to be a good fighter. They take wages onely to incite others … So Gentle Reader if my trauaile in Englishing this Authour, may bring thee to a liking of the vertues herein commended, and by example therof in thy princes & countries quarrel to hazard thy person & purchase good name, as for hope of well deseruing my selfe that way, I neither bend my selfe therto nor yet feare the speach of people if I be found backward. I trust euery man holds not the plow, which would the ground were tilled; & it is no sinne to talke of Robinhood though you neuer shot in his bowe: Or be it that the attempt were bolde to intermeddle in armes, … yet to report of armes is not so odious but that it may be borne withall, not onely in you men which your selues are fighters, but in us women, to whom the benefit in equall part apperteineth of your victories. (Aiijr–Aiijv)

Tyler’s preface so boldly and logically confronts her potential critics that it is now a familiar set-piece of early modern women’s defenses.8 But hers is not an unambiguous defense. Indeed, in a number of ways, Tyler’s preface underscores just how difficult it was in the early modern period to defend women’s intellect or right to basic education without at the same time confirming negative stereotypes. When, for example, Tyler refers to the trumpeters and drummers’ “priuy maimes, … thereby recurelesse [i.e. incurable]” (Aiijr), she of course refers to the wounds or deformities that prevented these musicians from actually fighting in battle. But by comparing female translators and writers to permanently deformed men, she inevitably reminds readers of several cultural beliefs, including the idea that women are physiologically misformed men and the notion that, since Eve’s capital crime, women are morally incurable. “M.T. to the Reader” is frequently referenced in critical works on early modern female authors and anthologized in collections of early modern Englishwomen’s writing. Examples of the latter include Betty Travitsky’s The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance and Suzanne Trill, Kate Chedgzoy, and Melanie Osborne’s Lay by Your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England, 1500–1700. 8

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Similarly, though Tyler concedes that it might be too bold for women to actually take up arms themselves, she nonetheless proceeds to offer mythical and literary examples of women who did this very thing, including Amazons and The Mirrour’s own Claridiana. Again, Tyler’s defense wavers awkwardly between presenting a positive image of what women are capable of, an image confirmed by Tyler’s own act as translator, and undermining that image with reference to monstrous female bodies and their monstrous, immoral potential.9 Indeed, Wroth felt the sting of this kind of imagery when Edward Denny addressed her as a “[h]ermophradite in show, in deed a monster” in a bitter poetic response to the published Urania (qtd. in Roberts, Introduction, Poems 32). Therefore, although Tyler argued that it was, theoretically speaking, just a matter of degrees from dedicating a romance to a woman to having her read it to having her write one of her own, the argument was not widely supported and the reality of female authorship less straightforward. As a result, as so many critics have reminded us through the years (Virginia Woolf not least among them), the example of others was often essential to women actually taking up the pen. Indeed, the evidence suggests that many female life writers had family members who also engaged in auto/biographical writing of some kind, and romance writing seems to have been a similar kind of “habit,” one practiced by multiple family members through multiple generations. For both the Boyles and the Sidneys, for example, romance became something of a family tradition. “The subjectivity that Sidney granted to his sister as a woman reader of romance,” Lori Humphrey Newcomb observes, “ultimately licensed his niece as a woman writer of romance” (“Gendering” 126). Although even this kind of example and support did not, as we have seen, guarantee success or make the path of authorship an easy one, it was without a doubt helpful. Thus, in select cases, family practice, authorial experimentation, the increasing role of life writing in individuals’ self-understanding, and the mutually enabling relationship between reading and writing combined to produce female romance writers. Some of these women, like Calthorpe, kept their writing within their homes and possibly even within their closets.10 Others, like Weamys, tentatively ventured into the public realm under the protection of male supporters who often introduced the writers to their readers via prefatory assurances and disclaimers. And still others, like Wroth, went public in the boldest, most scandalous of ways; Wroth, for example, printed her romance without any prefatory apparatus whatsoever. The appeal of documenting family history and creating personally satisfying fictional outcomes for one’s own life clearly made such authorial adventures worth the risk. I do not mean to suggest that all early modern literary representations of Amazons are negative, since many are not. However, an Amazon’s presence almost always becomes a site in which contradictory attitudes and anxieties about women are enacted. 10 Indeed, Margaret Hartley, one of the churchwardens of Calthorpe’s home church (St. Peter’s Church, Ampton) and a self-professed Calthorpe fan, had no idea that Calthorpe had produced any writing at all until I brought it to her attention. 9

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The Family Romance The best example of the fictional family romance11 informed by significant auto/ biographical detail is Wroth’s two-part roman à clef.12 However, as Urania has received so much critical attention in recent years, I focus here on the virtually unknown example of Calthorpe’s roman à clef family romance, in which she narrates her grandfather and father’s indirect paths to success and her father’s relationship with her mother. I use the term “family romance” quite literally here, to indicate a romance text written about the Calthorpe family. And yet, the more traditional association of the family romance with psychosexual drama and illicit or repressed sexual desire may not be entirely out of place, for the unmarried Calthorpe’s idealized and heroic male ancestors dominate the text. As Gary Waller explains, “[a] familiar version of the family romance involves casting [the father] in the role of the glamorous or permissive hero who rescues the daughter from the humdrum and oppressive” (38). In Calthorpe’s case, there is no indication of any unhappiness from which she might need to be rescued. But there is certainly the sense that her father—and his in turn—made possible the respectable and happy existence of those who came after them, Dorothy included. Analysis of Calthorpe’s use of the roman à clef form further supports this interpretation. In this fundamentally paradoxical form, in which real personalities are veiled behind more or less fictional characters so as not to expose them to prying eyes, the act of putting such representations first into writing and second into circulation in fact exposes the veiled individuals to prying eyes, often in a very public and intentional way. In other words, the genre by its very nature begs readers to ask for the key that is being tantalizingly withheld, as was famously the case with Urania. In this instance, we know enough about Wroth and her romance to at least partially understand her motivation for veiling the people behind some of her characters: she hoped to avoid scandal in the public sphere while providing entertainment for her coterie readers (usually family members) in the know. But Calthorpe’s case raises more difficult questions about the necessity and purpose of a veil, especially since her text does not seem to have been intended for publication or circulation beyond intimate acquaintances yet still seemingly hides real individuals behind romance-like names. Indeed, she titles her narrative both A Short History of the Life and Death of Sr Ceasor Dappefer and “a pleasent histtory of JewLious and Dorinda,” thus introducing her three primary characters in characteristic romance fashion. 11 For the family romance, see esp. Gary Waller, “Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance: Gender Construction in Early Modern England.” For a more general discussion of seventeenth-century family history, see Allan Pritchard, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey, esp. 199–218. 12 Clare Kinney, “‘Beleeve this butt a fiction,’” aptly describes it as “a complicated act of simultaneous masking and disclosure, eliding the distinction between fiction and fact, romance and autobiography” (155).

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Yet the names certainly contain clues to the characters’ true identities for family insiders. And, as noted in the Introduction, Calthorpe’s own words indicate that she did not really care how thin her fictional veil was. First, she directly acknowledges the factuality of her tale, noting in prefatory comments that “the truth of it was so Lately represented that some of those worthy persons are still Liueing and ownes what is here repated” (14v). And second, she essentially identifies the personalities behind her characters when, after the narrative has concluded, she defends her authorial choices as motivated by a desire “to giue a true reLation of my owne fameLy” (61v) (in addition to entertaining herself in the writing process).13 Like her choice of the roman à clef form, this justificatory statement suggests that Calthorpe assumed readers. However, since she provides enough information here to identify the specific family members in her tale (such that, even hundreds of years later, decoding the characters and major events of the tale is a relatively straightforward process, especially once the father and grandfather characters have been identified), her use of the fictional veil seems essentially meaningless. Thus I argue here that Calthorpe chose this particular form for her tale not to veil a family truth but instead to illuminate it. The clues to her likely motivation can be found in the romance itself, as well as in Calthorpe’s biography. All evidence suggests that this devout, never-married woman of a locally important gentry family was incredibly independent, strongwilled, and philanthropically inclined; indeed, her charitable donations in her home village of Ampton, County Suffolk, continue to be remembered and memorialized in the local church (Figure 5.1).14 Yet what we know of Calthorpe now is a direct result of her own efforts, which produced not only the manuscript in which A Short History appears but also a number of projects and memorials dictated by her will. These include a 1000-pound endowment for the construction and maintenance of an almshouse in Ampton (Figure 5.2); a self-memorializing sculpture in Ampton Church in the form of a woman kneeling before a book (Figure 5.3); and “[a] silver bason for the offertory, … ‘The Gift of Mrs. Dorothy Calthorpe’” (Proceedings 196).15 That this never-married woman with no children for a legacy chose instead to write a family history, endow an almshouse, and dictate the construction of monuments in her own memory suggests not only a woman with pious impulses and family loyalty but also a woman with an extraordinary desire to be remembered and recognized. Thus we can read the fictional, meditative, and biographical writings collected in Calthorpe’s manuscript volume first and foremost as a never-married woman’s effort to record her identity for posterity, this being—of course—a common motive for life writing. Indeed, the fact that Calthorpe had no children to keep her memory alive makes this possibility even more likely. And yet, beyond the See the introduction, 1, for the full quotation. I am deeply grateful to Margaret Hartley for giving me a personal tour of Calthorpe’s

13 14

church and for sharing with me her invaluable knowledge of Ampton and Calthorpe history. 15 This piece remains the property of St. Peter’s Church.

Fig. 5.1

St. Peter’s Church, Ampton, July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

Fig. 5.2

Former Calthorpe-endowed almshouse, July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

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Dorothy Calthorpe monument in St. Peter’s Church, Ampton, July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

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implied value that comes with linking herself to noble ancestors, Calthorpe’s romance does much more to increase the reputations of her grandfather and father than it does for herself. A Short History is clearly a biographical—rather than autobiographical—piece. Other motives than self-memorialization must, therefore, be operative, including the one offered by Calthorpe herself when she identifies her authorial method in the romance as, in part, a diversion of sorts. Read through this lens, as a writing experiment and a test of her own intellect, Calthorpe’s choice to veil her characters and then give away the key might be a way of showing off, of making sure that others recognize her creativity and literary skill. Certainly, her reliance on allegory throughout the text suggests its literary ambitions. Allegory is operative not only in the romance’s roman à clef form, which itself encourages allegorical reading, but also in the drawing of a chapel in red ink that introduces the entire manuscript volume (Figure 5.4). Significantly, this drawing introduces yet another possible motivation, for beneath this drawing on the volume’s title page, an inscription reads: A red marbLe Chappel Errected by my hand Dorothy CaLthorpe Iun 20 1684

This striking visual and narrative introduction conveys a clear sense that what is to follow is a finished product, indicates the great pride and quite intentional selfdocumentation that informs the entire manuscript, and endows Calthorpe’s book with additional, distinctly spiritual, meaning. Through this image, in other words, her text becomes not only a private space in which to compose her own texts and to practice literary technique but also a chapel in which she can enact her spiritual devotion through writing. In this way, the title page points to the devotional aspects of Calthorpe’s writings.16 Indeed, spiritual themes like the importance of Christian stewardship unify the entire volume and indicate great care in the ordering of the individual pieces as well as suggesting yet another overarching goal for the text. Thus familial, authorial, and devotional purposes come together in this one tiny volume and suggest that Calthorpe took care to construct it in a very particular way, to fill her allegorical chapel with carefully chosen monuments to her own and her family’s identity. This family wielded great power and influence in Ampton and elsewhere for generations, perhaps the most notable member being Dorothy’s paternal grandfather, Sir Henry Calthorpe (1586–1637), who was—among other things—Solicitor-General to Queen Henrietta Maria and Attorney-General of the Court of Wards and Liveries. This man is the Sir Ceasor Dappefer of the romance’s main title, a second son who—at the beginning of the narrative—gives up on the 16 For a reading of Calthorpe’s manuscript through the devotional lens, see Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, “The Devotional Writings of Dorothy Calthorpe.”

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Title page of Dorothy Calthorpe manuscript, in red ink (b421 v.1).

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university life that was to prepare him for a reputable career as a lawyer and instead spends his time on the continent “Liu[ing] by his witts” (16r). Because he is at heart a good man and eventually begins to “dispise this rambLing kind of Life” (16r), his story quickly becomes a prodigal son tale. As his real-life success as a “notable lawye[r]” for the crown (Brooks 563) would suggest, Henry Calthorpe and the character in which he is shadowed make good in the world and gain the respect of all who come to know them. Henry’s son James Calthorpe (1626–59) is both Dorothy’s father and the “Jewlious” of her romance’s alternate title. His quest for Dorinda’s love dominates the middle of the tale and is its most romance-like feature. But Jewlious’s story also offers another example of the prodigal son motif. Despite being Sir Ceasor’s heir, the narrator reports, Jewlious “was not of a uery compLying umer nor so obeadient to his mother as he ought to a been … and nothing could content him but maring before he came of age” (23v–24r). Happily, Jewlious’s extraordinary determination in his pursuit of his beloved pays off, and, eventually, in part due to Dorinda’s virtue and wisdom, Jewlious also establishes himself as an important man in the community. Perhaps most important for Calthorpe (as both daughter and author), he also leaves his descendants financially secure. Both of these plotlines about Calthorpe’s male forebears are supported by historical detail, and they are clearly Calthorpe’s main interest in her narrative. As explained in her postscript justification, partially quoted above, she says that she ends with her “fathers death haueing no reason to unreauell any furder because he prouided for us all out of his own industerry without being beholding to his fameLy” (61v–62r). The key here seems to be a demonstration of her family’s fiscal responsibility, a responsibility that clearly had to be learned but that ultimately makes the Calthorpes notable. Indeed, as mentioned above, Calthorpe’s entire volume emphasizes stewardship, perhaps most obviously her prose piece “A Discription of the Garden of Edden,” in which Adam laments his own poor stewardship and admonishes his descendants to do better. When read alongside “A Discription,” which immediately precedes A Short History, the exemplarity function of Calthorpe’s romance becomes remarkably clear, for the tale represents her family as heeding Adam’s warning and thus setting an example for the wider community as a good gentry family should. In this way, Calthorpe’s text is in keeping with other family histories of the period, which “often display an exemplary aim, an intention of showing descendants what to emulate or shun by the examples of their forebears,” and which tend to focus “on family status and alliances, management of estates, and public and military service” (Pritchard 201).17 Following the clues of Calthorpe’s roman à clef reveals that her construction of her family as exemplary stewards of money, property, and Christian virtue is no coincidence, for the family’s earliest known ancestor, Godric, was appointed dapifer in the town of Calthorp early in the eleventh century (Carr-Calthrop 13). A “dapifer” is essentially a steward, “one who brings meat to table; hence, the Calthorpe includes all of these topics, including exemplary military service through mention of her mother’s brother, Sir John Reynolds (1625–57), a Parliamentary captain who died at sea. 17

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official title of the steward of a king’s or nobleman’s household” (OED). It was an “honourable” position and “conferred considerable dignity” (Carr-Calthrop 13). This ancestor thus initiated a family tradition of stewardship by literally becoming a steward to the local religious community. Furthermore, his descendants through his great-great-grandson Peter continued in the role of dapifer of the abbey; a total of eight family members ultimately held the position (Carr-Calthrop 14–17, 23). That Dorothy Calthorpe, writing hundreds of years later, not only knew this detail of her family’s history but also chose “Dappefer” for the name of her grandfather’s character in the romance confirms her interest in genealogy generally and the theme of stewardship in particular. The Calthorpes, it seems, are by their very nature “stewards.” Indeed, Calthorpe’s brother James would later found a school in Ampton for local poor boys,18 and Calthorpe herself would demonstrate exemplary stewardship with her almshouse donation at her death. Therefore, read in the context of this pervasive theme—in both the romance and, one must suppose, the family itself—Dorothy’s family romance operates simultaneously as a defense of her family and as an exemplum about Christian stewardship. This didactic function could be valuable for future descendants of the family, as well as for a non-Calthorpe readership. Thus it becomes increasingly clear that Calthorpe’s romance is best read as a text in which “images direct readers back to the real people and events for whom and about which the fiction is written—allegory as roman à clef” (Zurcher, “Ethics” 74). The other approach, one also commonly applied to seventeenth-century prose romance, would entail reading for “symbolic meaning,” a method by “which particular examples or images in a fiction lead readers to infer the abstract ideas that are its real content” (74). But there is no evidence of a significant family secret that Calthorpe would have wanted to hide. Furthermore, not only is the disguise she provides rather thin (if it were indeed intended to hide), but she herself begins the unveiling that ultimately reveals Ceasor and Jewlious to be exemplary heads of an exemplary family: her own. Indeed, the Calthorpe family, including herself, becomes in her tale the logical product of two Calthorpe men who developed into models of public responsibility after rather wayward beginnings. Therefore, for Calthorpe, the roman à clef form offers not a veil for her father and grandfather but a spotlight—a mechanism for drawing attention to a specific aspect of their virtuous characters. Her choice of fictional names for her characters further supports this hypothesis. The name “Dappifer” is clearly significant to the Calthorpe family, and the choice of “Ceasor” as Henry Calthorpe’s fictional first name speaks for itself. But even Jewlious’s name is pertinent, drawing attention to the “jewel” of the family, the “jewels” his excellent stewardship protects, and the same ancient noble heritage that “Ceasor” references (i.e. “Julius”). Where no symbolic meaning is to be had in a name, Calthorpe does not worry about allegorical value at all, for example simply converting the name of her mother, Dorothy Reynolds Calthorpe, into the more romance-like “Dorinda.” In other words, the very process of decoding the tale of Jewlious and Dorinda does not lead to scandalous secrets or embarrassing 18 Known as “a ‘blue coat’ school … [i]t opened in the building to the south of the church in 1712” (Hartley).

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truths, as it did for certain readers of Wroth’s Urania, but instead to an enriched allegorical reading that simultaneously encouraged readers to enact Christian stewardship and lauded this very quality in the Calthorpe family. This bold goal would seem to fly in the face of numerous Renaissance norms, especially for women. But Calthorpe maintains her narrative focus on male family members and, as already noted, bends the will of her main female character to her father and suitor’s will for her. The female writer’s concern for self-presentation that so consistently appears in other forums here takes the more subtle form of virtue-by-association. In these ways, Calthorpe’s construction of a textual chapel in which she could memorialize the Calthorpe family in the best possible light is not so different from the heroic biographies that Cavendish, Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80), and others produced of their husbands. Calthorpe’s concern for her own posthumous memorialization—noted briefly above—is much clearer in her will. First, she describes a memorial of sorts for “the Middle of the front of the [alms]house” that should take the form of a “square stone to be fixed and ingraven thus Dorothy Calthorpe has paid her vow to the Great God that sent her into the world for this purpose” (37r).19 Second, she bequeaths “ffifty pounds to sett me up a hansome monument in Ampton Church” as follows: Lett it be putt up right against my Uncle Whitells in the Chancell because I suppose my brother will putt up his right against my Grandfathers[.] Lett a black marble ovall Arch be fixed in the Wall and a White marble statue kneeling before a marble table with a book open upon it and an hour glasse and a deaths head standing on it and a little tapour and what inscription at the bottom you please. (37r–37v) (Figure 5.3)20

Third, she makes a very specific request for her grave: a marble stone of 10 pounds laid upon my grave with my Coat of Armes cutt upon it and buried where no body ever was either in Church or Chancell with my name on the stone and this engraven with it: I troubled no mans dust: Lett others be to me as just. (37v) (Figure 5.5)21 19 Although the letters have worn away, this plaque remains above the main door at the original site of the almshouse; see Figure 5.2. Calthorpe’s will is Prob 11/417 of The National Archives of the Public Record Office. 20 The inscription placed below the monument reads, in part, “To the pious memory of Mrs DOROTHY CALTHORPE, … This Virgin Foundress of the Almshowse left this life for a better … In the 45th year of her age. A Virgin votary is oft in Snares / This safely vow’d & made ye Poor her Heirs” (Proceedings 195). 21 In most cases, Calthorpe’s directions seem to have been followed quite closely. The most significant exception is that the almshouse, which she had intended to have “six ground rooms” (37r) for “six poore honest old widows or old maids” (36v), was instead built for four women (White 302). The almshouse still stands but has been converted to rental property; I am grateful to its current tenant, Mel Wallage, for allowing me to take a look inside the building and to enjoy a cup of tea in the garden during my visit to Ampton in 2010. Calthorpe’s grave remains undisturbed in St. Peter’s Church, Ampton.

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Calthorpe’s grave in the chancel of St. Peter’s Church, Ampton, July 2010. Author’s personal photo.

Thus we can see that Dorothy Calthorpe went to great lengths to assure not only her father and grandfather’s place in local memory as responsible stewards of land and money but also her own. Her efforts involved manipulating monumental display, as other women also began to do in the seventeenth century,22 as well as the roman à clef genre, putting its multiple layers to work in the interest of the 22 See Chris Laoutaris’s chapter “Speaking Stones: Memory and Maternity in the Theatre of Death” in his Shakespearean Maternities.

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Calthorpe family. Consequently, even though her manuscript passed quite privately through numerous generations before finally being sold at auction with other materials from the Shrubland Park estate of the Sixth Baron de Saumarez in 2006, her memorializing efforts largely paid off. Thanks to her work as a “choreographer of memory”—to borrow Chris Laoutaris’s apt phrase23—the Calthorpe dapifers live still in local memory, and the monuments of Ampton Church continue to pay homage to their generosity, especially to “the pious foundress” Dorothy Calthorpe (Proceedings 195). Of course, there are many ways to memorialize one’s self or one’s family in writing, more traditional life writing being the most obvious choice. What Calthorpe’s family romance demonstrates is that auto/biographical fiction is also a useful vehicle. In her tale, she combines roman à clef features and historical detail with romance motifs that both entertain and convey a moral message. These motifs include brief digressions, descriptive detail, passionate declarations of love, pastoral retreats, and idealized characters. The result suggests that even straightforward historical fact can be enhanced and even elevated in moral tone when wrapped in a thin romance veil. And yet, Calthorpe and Wroth’s choice of genre is not without contradiction, especially when considered through the lens of gender. Much as Waller has argued of Urania, in which “the chivalric romance of male heroism … provides the main metaphorical vehicle for its female author’s fantasies” (57), so does Calthorpe’s male-focused story revel in the father’s successful conquest over the mother, who as a maiden seems happiest when alone in her pastoral retreat. But just as Urania’s Pamphilia (one of the characters in which Wroth represents herself) notoriously martyrs herself to Love, so does Calthorpe’s Dorinda acquiesce to marriage—a decision that Calthorpe’s narrative makes seem essential if the Calthorpe family is ever to achieve its seemingly pre-ordained status as exemplary community stewards. Nonetheless, even though “the incestuous/patriarchal family romance” may manipulate its female characters “as a terrain for the male fantasies within the incestuous family structure” (59), it also gives a woman like Calthorpe—whose legacy ultimately takes the form of texts, monuments, and acts of charity rather than children—a means of writing her self into the family history. Imagining the Happily Ever After Weamys’s approach is quite different: whereas Calthorpe made use of romance as roman à clef family history, she was clearly more interested in the genre’s potential for wish fulfillment. In A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Weamys concludes several of the New Arcadia’s unfinished plots, provides happily-everafter endings for most of the characters, significantly streamlines the narrative, and literally romances her self by writing her name and work into the literary history 23 Lauotaris (228) uses this phrase to describe Anne Russell and her mother, Elizabeth Hoby Russell.

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of the most famous and respected aristocratic romance.24 Weamys’s example clearly illustrates how a woman’s reading of romance could lead to her writing of romance, and it suggests how—for some writers—authoring was a kind of reading (Brayman Hackel, Reading 53). For someone like Weamys, continuing the tale was a means of maintaining contact with beloved characters beyond the original borders of a text and even redirecting aspects of the story in more preferable ways. Indeed, a comparison of the Continuation to its predecessor reveals more than anything Weamys’s single-minded drive toward the “happily ever after” conclusion associated with popular romance but certainly not provided by the hybrid Arcadia available to most readers of her day,25 for to make happiness abound where there was primarily chaos and confusion requires extraordinary narrative gymnastics. Here I focus on just one of Weamys’s narrative choices: her decision to extend a happy ending to Mopsa, the much-maligned peasant woman whose uncouth manners and mind-boggling blend of ignorance and naïveté draw nothing but scorn from her fellow Sidneian characters. Indeed, the Mopsa created by Sidney is not only the butt of jokes, the pawn of her superiors, and a scapegoat for many of the troubles that plague Arcadia within the text, but she also becomes literary shorthand for all that is unappealing about lower-class women reading and authoring in the early modern period. Therefore, Weamys’s more positive portrayal nearly 70 years later adds a powerful, if unexpected, chapter to Mopsa’s story, one that has the potential to rewrite her role in literary history as a symbol not of women’s narrative failure but of women’s narrative success, or—at the very least—of what was at stake in non-aristocratic early modern women’s quest for narrative power. After all, whereas Mopsa triumphs in A Continuation, she repeatedly fails at the most basic acts of literacy in Arcadia. Because Sidney’s King Basilius misreads an oracle early in Sidney’s text and—in an attempt to keep his daughters from marrying—assigns one of them to Mopsa’s family for safekeeping, the world of romance quite suddenly intrudes upon Mopsa’s mundane existence. She immediately becomes a witness to—and occasional participant in—the kidnapping, fighting, cross-dressing, and courting typical of literary romance and its royal characters. However, Mopsa lacks the status, interpretative skills, and experience necessary to read her new world successfully. Thus she constantly misinterprets what is going on around her and is easily manipulated by the more rhetorically savvy aristocrats who now share her home. Two scenes in particular demonstrate Mopsa’s failings with basic “reading” Although continuations of popular romances like Sidney’s were common, it was not typical for an otherwise unknown woman like Weamys to author them. In my discussion of Sidney’s text, I use the shorthand titles Old Arcadia (OA) and New Arcadia (NA) for his original and revised texts, respectively. All references to the New Arcadia are to Viktor Skretkowicz’s edition (which ends precisely where Sidney stopped his revisions, in the middle of Book 3), all references to the Old Arcadia are to Katherine Duncan-Jones’s edition, and all references to the hybrid version in which the end of the Old Arcadia is appended to the revised portions of the New Arcadia are to Maurice Evans’s edition. 25 The Old Arcadia was not published until 1912, but a hybrid version, which was quickly preferred to the unfinished New Arcadia alone, was first published in 1593. 24

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and “writing” tasks and thus explain why her character—for Sidney, at least— symbolizes the culture’s greatest fears about female readers, speakers, and writers. In the first scene, in which Prince Musidorus disguises himself as the shepherd Dorus and tells an autobiographical tale intended to woo the Princess Pamela while seeming to woo Mopsa, the poor girl reveals an utter inability to read. Throughout the lengthy narration, she continues to believe that Dorus is a shepherd and, more miraculously, that he desperately loves her. She is not inquisitive, having no questions to ask before, during, or after the narration; she is inattentive, seemingly oblivious to Dorus’s accidental slip into the first-person voice; she is utterly unengaged, even falling asleep during part of the tale; and she is highly impressionable and gullible, thus missing all of the tale’s subtlety. As the narrator of the Old Arcadia says, “Mopsa … could open her eyes upon nothing that did not all to-bewonder her” (163). Pamela, on the other hand, is an educated, intelligent, and skilled reader who also has the advantage of already knowing about many of the events Dorus describes; she thus picks up on the clues he leaves for her, points out discrepancies in the tale, asks pertinent questions, and quickly notes his momentary use of the first-person. By the time the narration is over, she is well aware of the shepherd’s true identity, and she is well on her way to loving him in turn. All in all, Musidorus proves himself a capable and skilled storyteller, Pamela demonstrates superb reading, and Mopsa does not. Even so, Mopsa is not entirely responsible for her spectacular failure to figure out what is going on in this scene. On the contrary, many details are beyond Mopsa’s control and thus demonstrate the extent to which epic-romance narratives like the one Dorus tells are intended to exclude those of Mopsa’s status. Unlike Pamela, for example, Mopsa is uneducated in the ways of courtly love and so does not understand the need for the narration at all. As Dorus and Pamela playfully negotiate ways for him to prove his love for Mopsa and Dorus asks whether his “unworthiness” is his “mind, estate, or both” (NA 132), Mopsa herself is prepared “to say, ‘In neither’” (133). It is Pamela who takes over at this point and requests proof of Dorus’s virtue as the courtly code demands, thus leaving Mopsa a somewhat confused and unwilling auditor, one who did not request the tale, does not require it, and does not in the least understand its necessity. Furthermore, Mopsa has no knowledge of the events her shepherd describes, since she has not, until quite recently, been privy to the goings-on of royal figures like the heroic Musidorus. Therefore, the characters she hears about have no meaning for her other than as fiction, which is exactly what her seeming suitor intends. As Pamela describes the scene later, Musidorus “had told his own tale in a third person, making poor Mopsa believe that it was a matter fallen out many ages before” (152). Indeed, Mopsa obligingly accepts the fiction at face value and does not attempt to engage with the text at all, much less to connect its characters to the real world in any substantial way. Thus, as Mary Ellen Lamb notes, “Musidorus’s skillful manipulation of his narrative material successfully divides his audience according to their own location in class” (“Exhibiting” 57). It is the combination of Mopsa’s poor reading skills and Musidorus’s superb authorial ones that allow the scene to

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unfold as it does, for everything about Musidorus’s tale—its language, character, and genre—exclude readers like Mopsa from its most important meaning. Nonetheless, Sidney’s construction of Mopsa assigns her the lion’s share of the blame, much as increasingly common representations of similar characters in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts blame the female reader for a variety of social ills. Although, as we have seen, such readers were largely a fiction, a result of just this sort of aristocratic authoring, Mopsa’s behavior was replicated in fiction and manipulated in life as a warning against certain kinds of individuals having access to certain kinds of texts. Most alarming from the perspective of her critics is that she accepts everything she reads at face value and truly believes that the fairy-tale world she is exposed to applies to her in the same way it does to her royal counterparts. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, and this critical mistake accounts for many of Mopsa’s subsequent misadventures. Indeed, she is so eager to embrace all that romance has to offer that she actively pursues the fairy-tale life. When in Book 4 of the Old Arcadia (and the appended ending of the hybrid), Musidorus once again takes advantage of her by using a story of three magic wishes to convince her to sit in the top of a tree until he has had time to escape from Arcadia with Pamela, she dutifully complies. And after waiting for her name to be called three times, Mopsa makes the most traditional of wishes: for a husband who is a king, “good” and “lusty” (Evans 718). This comedic plot is highly entertaining, but its implications are deadly serious. For this too-literal acceptance of fantastic tales that, so contemporary logic goes, leads naïve readers to mimic characters’ behavior is at the very least subversive and at the worst a threat to social order. The fear, Helen Hackett explains, is “that fantasy might not be enough to satisfy [the low-class female reader], that the adventurous roles of women in romance might influence her behavior and encourage her to ‘run out of’ her socially determined role” (“‘Yet’” 47). Thus parodies like this early example “pre-emptively moc[k]” Mopsa’s brand of reading “as over-literal and naïve” (74). But her reading habits are also potentially dangerous, thus demanding the brutal treatment she ultimately receives at Sidney’s hand. For example, her misguided belief in romance-like tales leads to confused priorities in her personal life: when faced with the possibility of her father being hanged for Pamela’s absence, Mopsa cries, “It is no matter though he be hanged, … Do but thou make Dorus a king, and let him be my husband” (Evans 718). Furthermore, and likely of great concern for an aristocratic author like Sidney, her naïveté contributes directly to the disorder that nearly ruins Arcadia. For while Mopsa barters her father for a husband, Pamela runs away with Musidorus, and Pamela’s sister, Princess Philoclea, opens her bedroom to the other Arcadian interloper, Prince Pyrocles. Chaos ensues, it could be argued, as a direct result of Mopsa’s inability to read.26 26 The obvious counter-argument is that Basilius’s original misreading is responsible for Arcadia’s crisis, but Sidney’s narrative contempt is directed much more forcefully at Mopsa.

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Not surprisingly, Mopsa’s failure to accurately read numerous social and textual clues also makes her a dangerous storyteller, or author. This becomes woefully apparent in the second scene I consider here: an aristocratic storytelling circle that is co-opted by her mother, Miso, who insists that everyone present has an opportunity to tell a tale. Mopsa’s story, a rambling, convoluted fairy tale about a maiden who breaks her promise not to ask her lover’s name and then must search for him when he disappears, is frequently compared to Apuleius’s tale of “Cupid and Psyche,” which is built around a similar prohibition and search.27 But in the end, Mopsa’s story “is altogether original to the New Arcadia” (Kinney, “Margins” 148), for it combines many familiar plots and characteristic fairy tale motifs in an entirely unique, if incoherent, narrative. It begins, appropriately enough, with the formulaic “In time past” (214) and would probably end with the typical “happy ever after” were she given the chance to finish. But instead Mopsa rambles through a series of vaguely familiar elements, including a male character who cannot reveal his name as a result of a curse; a male character raised by mysterious water creatures; a maiden who is unable to keep her promise to her lover; a maiden’s quest for her beloved; a maiden who receives advice from older and wiser women; and the use of magic nuts or acorns.28 Whether Mopsa is trying (and failing) to repeat a precise tale she has heard, inadvertently confusing many tales, or intentionally blending motifs to create her own original tale is ultimately unclear. But her generally confused state and tendency toward talkativeness make one of the former options most likely. Indeed, Mopsa’s rambling does not even get her heroine to her third helper figure (assuming, of course, that the tale will be at least this logical), before “the sweet Philoclea” (214) interrupts and promises to give Mopsa “the best gown” she wears on her wedding day (214) if she will save the rest of her story for that time. Many of the same flaws that contribute to Mopsa’s reading failures with Musidorus contribute to her narrative failure here. Her gullibility and unwavering faith in fairy tales, for example, easily explain why she so quickly agrees to Philoclea’s proposal; after all, poor maidens are commonly given such Cinderella Although Mopsa’s tale is far from an exact match of Apuleius’s, it is tempting to tease out the implications of the comparison. For example, the fact that the narrator of “Cupid and Psyche” is also an uncouth woman (in this case a drunken, seemingly crazed old woman) only reinforces the Arcadia’s intentional linking of undesirable women and fantastical tales. 28 The primary thread of her story is clearly of Aarne-Thompson Type 425: The Search for the Lost Husband. Two aspects of this type include “Loss of the Husband” due to the maiden’s disregard of a prohibition and “Search for Husband,” both of which figure prominently in Mopsa’s tale. Numerous other aspects of this traditional tale type are also echoed in Mopsa’s tale, including magic objects. For more information, see Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, 2nd ed., which contains the type and motifs listed here. For a detailed analysis of how the folkloric elements of Mopsa’s tale link to the New Arcadia’s primary plot, see Elizabeth Porges Watson, “Folklore in Arcadia: Mopsa’s ‘Tale of the Old Cut’ Re-cut and Set.” 27

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opportunities in the world of fairy tales, and magic nuts commonly yield rich gifts.29 Confusing the reality of her life with the details of her fiction is quite in keeping with Mopsa’s character. Furthermore, Mopsa proves herself once again unable to read character. In this case, she misreads her audience by choosing to tell a fictional story of love and adventure (i.e. a romance) to women who are living a romance plot themselves. In comparison to the urgent, “real-life” trials of Queen Erona, whose story Philoclea was sharing when Miso interrupted with her own rules for the session, Mopsa’s tale of a foolish young bride must appear trite and tedious. It is, as Clare Kinney puts it, an “open-ended travesty of romance” (“Margins” 143). Indeed, Mopsa’s narration lacks skill and the most basic understanding of presentation. Not only is she crass, “wiping her mouth (as there was good cause)” (214) before she begins, but she also relies on low-class language. Her references to “the fairest daughter that ever did eat pap” and the lovesick knight who “grew not worth the bread he eat” (214), for example, stand in stark contrast to the eloquence of her noble companions, especially Pamela. The narrator highlights this contrast even more by noting that Pamela’s tale, a continuation of Erona’s story that immediately follows Mopsa’s, is told “with so sweet a voice, and so winning a grace, as in themselves were of most forcible eloquence to procure attention” (215). That Pamela’s eloquence is enough in and of itself to gain and sustain listeners reminds us that Mopsa’s auditors must be forced to listen to her rambling speech and that even her mother’s supervision of the conversation cannot prevent an interruption. However, as with the storytelling scene in which Musidorus so skillfully manipulates both of his auditors, Mopsa’s obvious failings as a storyteller do not go far enough to explain her harsh treatment. In addition to being interrupted, Mopsa is never given the chance to finish her tale and retrieve her reward, and the Old Arcadia ending is even more brutal.30 Therefore, to make sense of her fate, one must consider once again what Mopsa represents in her authorial role that is so threatening to her aristocratic companions. This, I argue, is the attempt of a peasant woman to “author” romance, even if a fittingly low-class fairy-tale version, and thus to intrude into the solidly aristocratic realm of literacy and authorship. Seen in this light, Mopsa poses a threat that must be contained (Philoclea stopping the tale) and controlled (Philoclea determining the circumstances under which it can be continued). As Watson points out, magic nuts in such tales would typically “open at need to reveal rich and marvelous gifts. In the widespread version which Mopsa and her hearers evidently have in mind, these are glorious dresses, often ‘like the sun, moon and stars,’ which will be used to bribe the false bride” (13). Significantly, Philoclea’s offer of a dress suggests her equal knowledge of these tales and a greater degree of manipulation on her part. 30 As the Old Arcadia does not include the scene of Mopsa’s aborted tale-telling, Philoclea gets married at the end with no need to give away her dress, and Mopsa is last mentioned as being held in a “most cruel prison” for her role in the Arcadian turmoil and being forced to testify during the Princes’ trial (OA 348–9). This same ending tacked onto the hybrid version (834) likely known by Weamys creates one of many narrative dissonances that result from appending an old ending to a revised beginning. 29

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The tension that here becomes apparent between the aristocratic and peasant characters in the scene is of course not new to Arcadia. From the minute Basilius makes the ill-advised decision to place part of the royal family in Dametas’s care, right order can no longer be counted on. But Mopsa and Miso’s contributions to the storytelling circle pose the first real threat to literacy. Indeed, Miso literally engages in the struggle for a narrative voice when she aggressively takes charge of the storytelling just as Philoclea attempts to pass the narration of Erona’s adventures to her sister: “‘Nay, I beshrow me then!’ said Miso. ‘I will none of that; I promise you, as long as I have the government, I will first have my tale—and then my Lady Pamela, my Lady Zelmane, and my daughter Mopsa … may draw cuts, and the shortest cut speak first.’” Although initially “[t]he ladies laughed,” ultimately “there was no remedy; they must obey” (210), and a series of struggles for control ensues. In one instance, Philoclea tries to cut Miso’s story short by requesting to read her poem about Cupid before she has had a proper chance to introduce it. Much more assertive than her daughter, Miso insists on her right to speak, saying, “‘No haste but good, … you shall first know how I came by it’” (210). And yet, as soon as her story is finished, Philoclea and Zelmane once again attempt to circumvent another similar speech by encouraging Pamela to take her turn out of order. Only when Philoclea aggressively wrenches narrative control from Mopsa does the scene get back on track and the aristocratic tale of Erona resume. The tensions and struggles for authority exhibited in this scene thus make evident that Mopsa and her mother are unwanted intruders, not only in the royal social circle but also in the realm of fiction-making itself. Miso’s blasphemous material about a scandalous version of Love and Mopsa’s intolerable narrative method pointedly contrast with the eloquent narrations of Pamela and the other aristocratic women in the text. But Mopsa’s general approach to fiction also runs directly counter to Sidney’s, for her tale neither delights, moves, nor teaches, thus neglecting the elements that Sidney and other aristocratic practitioners insisted on. Rather than adopting their high-minded approach to literature, Mopsa uses her tale both as a form of escape and as a means to an end, as a base and material transaction. Therefore, she is not at all upset by the interruption that actually ends her tale mid-narrative but “very glad of the bargain, especially that it [her story] should grow a festival tale” (215). Mopsa, it seems, values storytelling for what it can get her, whether three magic wishes or a beautiful dress. And in the realm of Arcadia, such misguided intrusions into aristocratic circles, including literary ones, do not go unpunished. Indeed, Mopsa is depicted as an outsider and as someone deserving of criticism from her very first mention in the text in a poem recited by the otherwise dignified and well-mannered Kalander. According to this mock blazon, Mopsa “[w]ith Cupid … foresees,” has the grace of the gods’ jester Momus, and is particularly notable for her “mouth, O, heavenly wide” (18). Although all of these assertions, however unkind, are borne out by the text, it is the “O” of her mouth that is ultimately revealed as the greatest concern for a culture that puts a high premium on women’s silence and that makes her threatening rather than just entertaining.

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It is this characteristic, in fact, that led Patricia Parker to argue that Mopsa represents “the supposed copiousness of the female tongue” that informed early modern thinking on women and speech (Literary 26). Indeed, although it is quite possible that Mopsa would have completed her tale if given the opportunity to do so, Philoclea’s interruption leaves her forever frozen in the act of narration, literally posed with an open mouth. Other aspects of her characterization support this potential for endless and pointless chattering. She rambles through her story with no clear end in sight. She is described as “tumble[ing] into her matter” (214), as if in perpetual motion. And she is entirely self-absorbed, greedy, and grasping in nearly all ways. Thus she is a perfect example of Parker’s theory of the literary fat lady—the common textual figure of dilation, expansion, and referral that is traditionally manifested in a feminine and/or physically grotesque body and that must ultimately be controlled or mastered.31 In other words, in every way, Mopsa embodies the worst-case scenario for a culture anxious about the influence of romance on its female readers. Although a woman of Mopsa’s status and background would likely not have been able to read, she would have had access to traditional romance themes in their oral forms, like folk- and fairy tales. Certainly, Mopsa’s authorial choices suggest someone who has not only been exposed to such far-fetched themes but also highly influenced by them. Thus she receives the disdain and scorn of her fellow Arcadians, Arcadia’s narrator, and Arcadia’s readers.32 But this is precisely the point. To accept Mopsa’s treatment in the Arcadia, one must at the very least view her as an annoyance to a wittier, more sophisticated, scene, if not a threat to the genre of romance itself. Through this kind of scapegoat, Sidney is able to cipher the most ridiculous and seemingly irrational romance motifs into Mopsa’s experience and rhetorical failings. He thus contains the moral threat posed by romance in her body and mouth. Consequently, although Pamela and Philoclea are similarly attracted by the adventure and happy-ever-after of romance (nearly all of the stories they tell, in addition to their own experiences, are quintessential romance texts), they escape the critique of romance, and Arcadia’s aristocratic female readers are left similarly unscathed.33 The message, Mopsa’s textual fate suggests, is that romance itself is not the problem; rather, it only becomes a problem when placed in the wrong (i.e. lower-class) hands. For Sidney and other aristocratic writers of the time, concerns about romance and who See Literary Fat Ladies, esp. 8–35. Even critics have not had the kindest remarks for Mopsa. For example, Hackett

31 32

describes Philoclea’s interruption of Mopsa’s tale as “courteous,” since it “saves the audience from further pointlessness and tedium” (Women 113). And David C. McPherson, “A Possible Origin for Mopsa in Sidney’s Arcadia,” explains her role as a “stupid country wench” (420) as foil to Pamela and “to the high sentiments of the noble characters” (424, emphasis added). 33 See Kinney, “On the Margins of Romance, at the Heart of the Matter: Revisionary Fabulation in Sidney’s New Arcadia,” for an alternative perspective, one that views “Miso and Mopsa’s parodic fictions” as “subver[sions of] the more canonical narratives of desire which frame them” (143).

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might be reading it were distinctly nuanced by concerns about class and a palpable distaste for how lower-class ways of knowing could not only intrude upon but also infect noble spheres of activity. Therefore, although Weamys maintains Mopsa’s crass mannerisms and generally unlikable, self-absorbed approach to the world in her Continuation, what matters most about her depiction is that she lets Mopsa finish her tale and even cash in on Philoclea’s promise to give her the wedding dress. Weamys’s Mopsa is a bit silly and a bit desperate, but she is not threatening. And her behavior in this brief reincarnation provides a quite different frame of reference for interpreting her. Indeed, from this perspective, Mopsa scores a victory for non-aristocratic early modern women who would be authors, perhaps women like Weamys herself. And it is in this way—in addition to the narrative satisfaction of creating closure for so many characters and plots—that Weamys’s romance most revels in wish fulfillment. Although we have minimal information about Weamys, we can gather that she was a young woman from an educated, untitled family with deep Royalist leanings,34 “perhaps on the margins of the aristocracy” though not noble herself (Cullen xix).35 The front matter of her text is duly humble, designating its author with initials only and consistently suggesting her role as “midwife” to Sidney’s text rather than a creator in her own right. And her narrative method is quite basic, if not entirely derivative, since she concludes many of Sidney’s complex storylines in a remarkably direct manner (her entire text is a mere 89 pages compared to Sidney’s hundreds). And yet, as a woman of obscure origins who has not only read the noble Sidney’s work but also taken the liberty of completing it for him, Weamys’s authorial debut can be seen as nothing short of audacious.36 Most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, her depiction of Mopsa in particular underscores both the class demarcations in seventeenth-century women’s struggle for literacy and the techniques required to gain agency through literacy. The implication is that when non-elite female readers like Weamys and Mopsa turned their attention to authoring, they found in romance a means of literary experimentation, a venue for wish fulfillment, and an inevitable contest of wills with their authorial superiors. Weamys’s Mopsa is not shy about engaging this fight. In the final pages of A Continuation, during the extravagant celebration of a quadruple aristocratic wedding ceremony, Mopsa boldly appears to remind Philoclea of her promise and to take what she believes to be hers: Indeed, both Elizabeth Spiller, “Speaking for the Dead,” and Edward Wilson, “New Biographical Information on the Author of ‘A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,’” approach Weamys as a Royalist reader and writer. 35 For the slight but growing biography of Weamys, see Patrick Colborn Cullen’s introduction to his edition of the Continuation and Wilson. 36 The extensive prefatory apparatus to Weamys’s Continuation testifies to the boldness of her project. 34

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Fair Princess, I intend not to forget the promise you made me, when I told you a part of a curious tale, how you assured me your Wedding Gown, if I would afford to finish my Storie on that welcom day: but now the greatest part of the day is run away, and you are raised so high on your tip-toes, that you do not vouchsafe me to be in your books, but choose rather to gaze upon these strange sights, than to remember me, or your Gown. (166)

Soon after this speech, however, Mopsa’s confidence deteriorates into desperation as she first hears Philoclea delay once again and then witnesses the appearance of several distraught shepherds and shepherdesses that threatens to postpone her tale even longer. Thus she “laid hold on Philoclea, and with many a vineger look, besought her to hear out her Tale: and for fear she should be deprived of her Gown, without depending on a replie, she pursued her Storie” (168). Several details about this scene are important. First, we learn that—just as in Sidney’s text—Mopsa’s primary reason for narration seems to be based in material reward; she does not author for the edification of anyone but herself, and this particular kind of edification—a princess’s wedding gown—suggests an alarming desire for personal and social advancement. Like the figure of the low-class female reader who neglects her labor and develops inappropriate class aspirations when she immerses herself in romance, Mopsa pursues a romance-like tale in order to gain purely symbolic capital that—according to all standards of the day—does not and should not belong to her. Second, Mopsa’s desperate plea reinforces her selfishness as she insists on speaking despite the obvious despair of the newcomers. Third, Mopsa’s increasingly bold behavior and the telling phrase “pursued her Storie” suggest that she is aware (as she was not in Arcadia) that she is losing control of both the situation and her narrative. That Mopsa must be so aggressive as to actually grab Philoclea and demand priority over her pastoral rivals—who traditionally do have a place in romance—highlights the class structures that have so far impeded her authorial efforts, as well as her surprising awareness of her low-priority position in this setting. Finally, even though all signs suggest that she is not supposed to succeed, her newfound urgency and aggressiveness enable her to eventually finish her tale once and for all. Therefore, despite the fact that neither her narrative abilities nor her personality traits have improved since her appearance in the Arcadia, Mopsa’s tale can only be read as a success: she not only achieves narrative closure (even under duress) but achieves her own happy ending as well, for she finds her voice long enough to insist on her rights, to put Philoclea in her place,37 and to get her dress. Whereas Mopsa’s mother had to arrange her daughter’s storytelling opportunity in Sidney’s text, here Mopsa uses her own voice to manipulate her courtly auditors into allowing her the narrative spotlight; these narrative skills—if we can call them that—in turn gain her access to Philoclea’s wedding gown, an obvious material fragment of aristocratic culture. 37 Indeed, after Mopsa’s first reminder, Philoclea blushes “to hear Mopsa reprove her so sharply” (166).

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And yet, this is not quite the end of Mopsa’s story, for Weamys would have undercut her own authorial venture had she left Mopsa on this note of unqualified success. Again, Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s analysis of how the construction of popular reading in seventeenth-century England redefined the reading and writing habits of the elite is particularly helpful: By mid-century, Stuart imaginings of women’s romance reading identified two very different kinds of pleasure, one old-fashioned and gullible, the other fashionable and knowing. The downmarket practice was identified with chivalric romances, … the latter reading practice was newly invented and pertained to the Arcadia alone of the romances left from the last century. (Reading 105–6)

When set in this context, Weamys’s authorial choices take on new significance. Not only does she choose a safely elite text on which to base her own romance, but she also develops a knowing narrative voice that rivals Sidney’s in its condemnation of low-class ways of reading. For after Mopsa finishes her “tedious” and “ridiculous” tale and greedily accepts the celebrants’ applause and Philoclea’s bridal robes, Weamys’s narrator pointedly notes that Mopsa’s “partial senses were subject to believe all such rare realities; in which blind opinion I will leave her” (169, emphasis added). Although it is tempting to read this as a kind, even affectionate touch—a sympathetic desire on the part of Weamys not to burst the poor girl’s bubble and instead to let her enjoy the glow of authorial success—the reality is likely much different. After all, Weamys was confined by Sidney’s text as well as by social codes that clearly equated low-class reading with gullibility and inappropriate class aspirations, and it was essential that she make quite clear to which reading membership she belonged, or aspired to belong. Rather than write the unqualified happy ending that would align her with Mopsa’s type of reading and thus reveal something less-than-desirable in her own status, then, Weamys demonstrates her understanding of the literary convention that inappropriate female speech must be silenced and creates a narrative voice that follows this convention by undercutting the nature of Mopsa’s success. It is a highly complicated narrative moment, especially when one speculates about what drew Weamys to this particular character in the first place. She was the only one of Sidney’s continuators to revive Mopsa, much less give her so much narrative space. And even within her own text, the attention she gives Mopsa is unique, for all of the other Arcadia plots concluded in A Continuation are romantic ones. In other words, something about Mopsa caught Weamys’s attention, and it is my contention here that she recognized something of her own experience in the beleaguered girl’s story. This is not to say that anything in Weamys’s biography corresponds with Mopsa’s; as already noted, we simply do not know enough about Weamys to make such conjectures. But there are nonetheless several parallels between Weamys as the author of A Continuation and Mopsa as the author of an admittedly unsatisfying romance narrative. First, as already noted, both Weamys and Mopsa triumph narratively in aristocratic settings to which they do not belong: Weamys in a textual world

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created by and thus identified with England’s most elite literary family and Mopsa in an upper-class world that had no time or interest for those of her ilk. Yet both persist, and both finish their stories. Second, both Weamys and Mopsa exhibit a few similarities in their narrative method, most obviously their rush to closure and preference for stereotypical happy endings. In Weamys’s case, she accomplishes an extraordinary amount of action in a short space, incorporating the rescue of a princess, several instantaneous changes of heart, miraculously healed wounds, and—most importantly—the resolution of any obstacles in the way of the main characters’ marriages with nary a pause for typical romance digressions. In Mopsa’s case, the narrative is rushed not because of a desire to conclude plots in the most direct fashion but because of a desire to finish her tale and reap her reward before she loses Philoclea’s attention. Thus, after a slow re-start that finds her drifting into reveries—especially when looking at Philoclea’s gown and imagining herself in it—and once again blending multiple traditional fairy-tale motifs in a disorganized and inconsistent manner, Mopsa so rushes the tale’s conclusion after the near pastoral interruption that it is almost incomprehensible. This is best seen when she tells of how a treasure leads her story’s heroine to a cave in which she discovers her beloved: her Knight vented a thousand grievous groans, then in her hearing, she might then joyfully sing, fast bind, fast find, for there the Witches bound him, and there his Sweet-heart found him, where they pleasured one another with their sugar-kisses; and after a good while, she unchained him and then they lovingly set them down and slept all night in the Cave, because haste maketh waste; but the next morning, she shewed him her monstrous vast sums of money, which so affrighted him, that he clinging his eyes fast together, was not able to say Boh to a Goose hardlie. (168–9)

For both Weamys and Mopsa, one might argue, narrative closure matters more than narrative delight and, perhaps, narrative skill. Finally, in the same way that Mopsa’s narrative choices are informed by her exposure to a certain kind of tale, so is Weamys’s own narrative informed by her exposure to the romance genre and its idealistic themes. For example, although Sidney’s highly experimental revised Arcadia resists narrative closure in all ways, most romances of his day—especially the ones with more popular appeal—did not. Thus it is not surprising that both Mopsa and Weamys’s stories read like fairy tales, in the latter case beginning with the phrase “[i]n the time that” (117) and ending with the primary characters living “their days in Peace and Quietness” (196). Perhaps recognizing in Mopsa a less privileged character who had experienced a narrative injustice, Weamys sets out to right it and to recognize, however obliquely, Mopsa’s fondest desires. But she also creates a world in which all the heroines find happiness in love and via which she herself joins the aristocratic Sidneys as an author of an Arcadian fantasy. In this way, no matter how she might reject Mopsa in the end, Weamys’s text defends her right to narrate. In the process, Mopsa experiences momentary

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narrative triumph and momentary access to royal culture (the souvenir of which will be Philoclea’s wedding gown), Weamys uses Mopsa’s character to elevate her own readerly status and to place herself firmly in the category of elite reading women, and both Mopsa and Weamys prove that aristocratic narrative can be manipulated for their own happy endings.38 The Moral of the Story The romance genre in early modern England was endlessly flexible, serving a range of authorial needs. The examples considered in this chapter are only the most obvious—the most direct manifestations—of the impulse to “romance the self” in early modern England. Whether William Temple “expressing the passions of the different characters to find a vent for his own” (Moore Smith xvii), Mary Wroth imagining different solutions for her own romantic problems via a variety of characters and plots, Dorothy Calthorpe recording family history via romancelike names and motifs, or Anna Weamys enjoying authorial fulfillment by picking up the dangling narrative threads of the ever-admired Philip Sidney, all found ways of manipulating the genre for unique self-expression. But for early modern women especially, whose means of emotional and intellectual fulfillment were inevitably constrained by societal norms, the romance genre enabled writing themselves or their families “in the conditional or subjunctive mode,” as they “could have, should have, or might have been” (Roberts, “‘Knott’” 126).39 Whereas life writing entailed its own forms of self-serving representation, fictional romance allowed even more freedom to embellish or imagine beyond the limits of reality. And this is exactly what early modern Englishwomen did, in endless variations and forms.

Alternate readings of Weamys’s manipulation of plot into a happily-ever-after conclusion include Kinney, “Endgames: Gender, Genre and Closure in Anna Weamys’s Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,” who argues that Weamys not only “pursues her own ends” rather than Sidney’s (60) but also that her particular narrative goal in granting so many happy endings is to bridle, or contain, desire; Spiller, who reads Weamys’s romance as a commemoration of Sidney and—more specifically—a means of putting the literary Sidney to rest; and Wilson, who argues that the Weamys family’s commitment to the Crown in part explains her “vision of resolved conflict” that so emphatically and repeatedly conveys “assurances of dynastic stability” (62). 39 Josephine Roberts speaks specifically of Wroth here. 38

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Index advices 14n34, 64, 137n8, 150n35; see also mother’s legacy and Rich Aleman, Matheo 45 allegory 168, 171–2 Allen, Hannah 13 annotation/s, 40–41, 45, 48–50, 48n85, 49–50; see also marginalia Anselment, Raymond A. 3n5, 16n41, 46n78, 90, 92n19, 93n22, 94, 95, 111, 112n63, 113, 136n6, 137, 138n9, 148n25, 149, 150n33, 156 Apuleius 178 Arcadian romance 44n65, 160n4; see also Sidney, Sir Philip Ariana 37, 38n42 Ariosto, Ludovico 131n2, 160 arranged marriage, see marriage Austen, Katherine 17–18, 30, 80, 108–9, 108n60, 111–12, 122, 137n8 and widowhood 108–9, 111–12, 122 autobiography 23–4, 25, 150; see also Beaumont; Cavendish; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; Halkett; Hutchinson; Isham; Jackson; Mildmay; Rich; and Thornton in fiction 23, 55–84, 159, 163n12 and gender 9–18, 54n103, 62, 76–81, 97, 118 as genre 2n2, 9–18, 9n19, 10n21, 126, 157 secular 10n23, 15, 20, 88 spiritual 10n23, 15, 19–20, 36, 39n46, 118, 153–4 Babcock, Robert G. 48n84, 50 Barclay, John 44, 46, 49–50 Baxter, Margaret 2n4, 29n13, 34, 34n40, 35 A Breviate of the Life of Margaret … Wife of Richard Baxter, see Baxter, Richard and romance 52, 131

Baxter, Richard 28–9, 149 A Breviate of the Life of Margaret … Wife of Richard Baxter 2n4, 14n35, 29n13, 34, 34n40, 35, 52, 131n1 Reliquiae Baxterianae 29n13, 103n47, 131 and romance 34, 131 Beadle, John 148–9 Beale, Mary xi Beaumont, Agnes A Narrative of My Persecutions 118–21, 121n82, 122, 124 and romance 118–21, 121n82, 124 and self-defense 118–21, 124 and spiritual writing 118–21, 121n82, 122 Bedford, Ronald 15, 16, 16n39, 20 Berger, Harry, Jr. 57–8 Beling, Richard 42 Bevis of Southampton 86n2 Bible 37, 46, 132 and religious education 27, 28, 35, 36, 37, 110, 131n2 as sanctioned reading 28, 34, 35, 36, 37, 140, 141 women’s reading of 28, 35, 36, 37, 50n91, 137, 140, 149 biography 2n2, 3, 10n21, 12, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 69n26, 85–6, 111, 115, 126, 137, 162; see also Baxter, Richard; Boate, Arnold; Bury, Samuel; Calthorpe; Cary; Cavendish; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; Giffard; Hutchinson; memoirs; and Walker, Anthony and fiction 2n4, 23, 111, 174 and history 2n4 and romance 2, 8, 19, 23, 85–6, 111, 114, 116, 124, 136, 160, 163 as sanctioned reading 30 Biondi, Giovanni Francesco 46n73

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Blackadder, Elizabeth, Mrs. Young 30, 131–2 and romance 53, 131–2, 132n4 Blanchardyn and Eglantine 32n32 Boate, Arnold The Character of a Trulie Vertuous and Pious Woman 14n35, 20, 29n14, 30n27, 37–8, 51 Boate, Margaret 14n35, 20, 30n27, 37, 40 The Character of a Trulie Vertuous and Pious Woman, see Boate, Arnold and reading 29n14, 37–8, 51 and romance 37–8, 40, 51 Boccaccio 44, 45, 114 book inscriptions 40, 41, 41n54, 44–9, 50, 168 book lists, women’s 28, 40, 44n62, 46n78 book ownership 40, 41, 43, 44–9, 50 books, as gifts 38, 41, 44, 45n71, 46–8 Bowden, Caroline 31–2 Bowerbank, Sylvia 18 Boyle, Richard 148n23, 148, 151n37; see also Rich, Mary Boyle, Robert 42 and autobiography 148, 151 and meditations 30, 136–7, 148 and romance 7n14, 51, 52n94, 151 Boyle, Roger 42, 52n99, 151n37 and autobiography 148, 151 Parthenissa 42, 83n49, 148, 151 Brayman Hackel, Heidi 7n12, 31, 34, 37, 40n51, 40n52, 41, 42n56, 43, 44, 46, 47n83, 49, 49n89, 50, 51, 54, 54n104, 81n42, 93, 131n2, 159, 175 Briver, Mrs. 17, 117n74, 124n87 Bunyan, John 86, 118–20 Burke, Peter 15 Burton, Catherine, Mary Xaveria of the Angels 14n35, 30, 61n15, 105n51 Bury, Elizabeth 14n35, 28n9, 29, 30, 69 An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury, see Bury, Samuel Bury, Samuel An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury 14n35, 28, 29, 30, 69 Calahorra, Diego Ortuñez de 7, 7n16, 42, 161, 162

Calprenède, Gaulthier de Coste de la 37, 38n42, 52n98 Cassandra 38n42, 46, 53, 94, 140 Cleopatra 38n42, 52, 53, 140 Calthorpe, Dorothy 1–3, 29, 104, 106, 107, 114, 159, 161, 162, 164–74, 186 and biography 164, 168, 172 and exemplarity 104, 125, 170–74 and family romance 17n45, 163–74 and history 1–3, 125–6, 170–71, 186 and memorialization 164–8, 172–4 and marriage 104, 106, 107, 174 and romance 3, 4, 24, 104, 114, 125–6, 159, 161, 163–74, 186 A Short History of the Life and Death of Sr Ceasor Dappefer 1–3, 17n45, 23–24, 104, 106, 107, 114, 125–6, 159, 163–74, 186 and spiritual writing 168–74 Calvin, John 29, 30 Camden, Vera J. 118, 119, 120, 120n79, 121 Camus, Jean-Pierre 45–6 Carleton, Mary 75n34, 85n1, 114–15, 126, 160n5 The Case of Madam Mary Carleton 114–15, 129, 160n5 An Historical Narrative of the German Princess 114n69 and history 88n1, 115 and romance 88n11, 114–16, 124, 126, 129, 160n5 and self-defense 85n1, 114n69, 115, 124 Cary, Lady Elizabeth 14n35, 29n15, 29n22, 42, 106n53 The Lady Falkland: Her Life 14n35, 29n15, 105–6 and marriage 105–6 catechisms/catechizing 27–8, 35 Catholicism 106n53, 121n82, 145; see also lives Cavendish, Margaret 17, 17n46, 17n48, 18, 118, 125, 134 and autobiography 18, 159 and biography 2n4, 125, 132, 172 The Blazing World 133, 134, 159 and history 2n4, 132 The Life of William Cavendish Duke of Newcastle 2n4, 132 and marriage 16n39, 132, 133–6, 141

Index Nature’s Pictures 135–6, 159 and romance 5, 86, 115–16, 118, 122, 126, 132–6, 141, 159 and self-fashioning 18, 136 Sociable Letters 5, 115–16, 132–5 A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life 18, 86 Cervantes, Miguel de 31n30, 44 chapbooks 38n43, 105n50 Charlton, Kenneth 13, 14n34, 15, 26, 27, 28, 29n13, 29n15, 29n20, 30, 35–6, 80 Chaucer, Geoffrey 48n85, 49, 63–64 chivalric romance 7n16, 31n30, 38n42, 39n46, 86n2, 160, 174, 184 Civil War period, life writing of 85, 86–7, 96, 100n36, 103n47, 116, 117–18, 132, 138; see also Cavendish; Delaval; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; Halkett; Hutchinson; Thornton; and Wyndham Clarke, Elizabeth 1n1, 10, 39n45 Clifford, Lady Anne 17n45, 49–50, 63n19, 90 and marriage 89, 90, 93, 112 and romance 49–50, 93 Collins, An 53, 133n5 commonplace books 8, 32, 44n62, 50–51, 137n8; see also Austen and Freke companionate marriage, see marriage conversion narratives 10n23, 12, 15, 17, 39, 118–19, 120–21, 153–4; see also Beaumont and Rich Cook, Susan 100n38, 102 courtship 23, 36, 62, 64, 66, 67, 71, 72, 75, 76–81, 89–104, 105n50, 111–112, 152, 158; see also Austen; Delaval; Halkett; Osborne; Rich; and Thornton Cowper, Sarah 17 Cressy, David 79n39, 111 Davis, Lloyd 15, 16, 16n39, 20 dedications to women 4, 6–7, 42–4, 54n104, 162 defenses of women 7, 129, 85n1, 161–2 Delaval, Lady Elizabeth 138–48, 156n41 and courtship 138, 141–5 and fairy stories 140–41, 144 and marriage 138, 139, 141–7, 157–8

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and meditations 138–48 and reading 28, 29n21, 52–53, 131, 138, 139, 140–41, 157, 158 and romance 52–3, 130, 131, 138–48, 157–8 and self-defense 138, 143–8, 158 Denny, Sir Edward 43n60, 162 diaries 12–13, 14–15, 21, 22, 38n43, 65, 79n41, 80, 85, 108n57, 138, 148– 59, 159; see also Austen; Baxter, Margaret; Bury, Elizabeth; Clifford; Freke; Hoby; Isham; Mildmay; Pepys, Samuel; Rich; travel writing; and Walker, Elizabeth as reading material 28, 30 Dolan, Frances E. 21 Donovan, Josephine 83, 84, 86n1 Dowd, Michelle M. 9n20, 13n33, 15 d’Urfe, Honoré 37, 38n42, 44, 53, 140, 151n37 education 5, 22, 26–8, 31–2, 34–7, 39; see also Bible; catechisms/catechizing; household education; and literacy of females 5, 22, 26–8, 29n16, 31–2, 35, 36–7, 38n44, 40–41, 53, 62n16, 133–34, 140, 161–2 and fiction 6, 31–2, 38n44, 59, 75, 133–4, 180 and meditation 36, 149 and romance 2–3, 31–2, 36, 38n44, 41, 64, 133–4 of servants 27, 35–6 and social status 21, 26, 27, 105 Egerton, Lady Frances 37, 44, 50 embedded narrative technique 23, 55–84, 93, 127, 176–7 and female storytellers 23, 44n66, 55–6, 58, 60–65, 67, 68, 69, 70–81, 84, 86, 114, 116, 119, 120, 124n87, 178–86 entrelacement 56n4 epic 29, 43n59, 44n64, 57, 57n7, 59n10, 73, 160n3, 176 epistolary genre, see letters exemplary reading 15, 31, 32 exemplarity, see also Boate; Calthorpe; Cavendish; Fitzherbert; Hoby; Hutchinson; Mildmay; and mother’s legacy

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as auto/biographical motive 13, 14–17, 19, 20, 23, 37–8, 99, 104, 113–23, 125, 126, 130, 150, 153, 170–72, 174 in reading material 8, 13, 15, 16n39, 28, 30, 32, 35, 38, 47, 51 and romance 8, 20, 32, 37–8, 47, 51, 104, 113–23, 125, 130, 150, 170 exemplum 64, 77, 93, 126–7, 171 Ezell, Margaret J.M. 139, 147n21, 148 fairy tales 39n50, 62n16, 69, 140–41, 177, 178–85 family history 1–2, 17, 160, 162, 170; see also Calthorpe; Clifford; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; and genealogy family romance 163–74; see also Calthorpe and Wroth Fane, Rachael 31–32 Fanshawe, Lady Ann 48, 118, 125 and autobiography 3, 48, 80, 96–100, 109, 116 and biography 96–100, 125, 172 and exemplarity 96–9, 125 and family history 96–100 and marriage 3, 80, 96–100, 104, 109, 122, 125, 172 and memorialization 48, 96, 97n31, 100, 109, 125 and motherhood 48, 96–9, 109 and romance 3, 48, 96–100, 114, 116, 122 and war narrative 98–99, 116 Fanshawe, Sir Richard as husband, see Fanshawe, Lady Ann as writer and translator 46, 48, 97n30, 147n21 Findley, Sandra 16 Fitzherbert, Dionys 16n39, 17, 17n46 Fitzmaurice, James 134 Ford, Emanuel 46–7 Foxe, John 29, 30, 35 Freke, Elizabeth 93n22, 126 and book ownership 46, 94 and marriage 89, 93–5, 104, 106, 113, 124 and romance 46, 93–5, 104, 113, 124 and self-defense 17, 89, 124, 126

and widowhood 94, 95 Frith, Mary 85n1, 114 Fuchs, Barbara 4, 31n30, 44n64, 88, 101n40, 114, 125, 144n17 funeral sermons, see sermons Gainsford, Thomas 44 genealogy 17; see also Calthorpe; Clifford; family history; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; and Hutchinson Giffard, Martha, Lady 83n47, 113 Gomberville, Martin le Roy de 52 Graham, Elspeth 11 Green, Ian 27 Greene, Douglas G. 17n43, 138n11, 138n12, 141n14, 145n20 Greene, Robert 6–7, 42 and female readers 7n12, 42 and romances 6–7, 46, 50n92, 78n38 Grymeston, Elizabeth 17n44 Guarini, Giovanni Battista 46n80, 147 Gusdorf, Georges 9 Hackett, Helen 5, 7, 7n12, 21, 22n51, 64, 177, 181n32 hagiography, see spiritual life writing Halkett, Lady Anne and autobiography 3, 30, 78n38, 86–8, 91–2, 105, 110–11, 113, 114, 116, 118, 124, 124n86, 125, 126–7, 137n8 and courtship 16, 78n38, 87–8, 89, 91–2, 110–11, 114, 126–7 and exemplarity 14, 110–11, 126–7 and marriage 87–8, 92, 105, 110–11, 126–7, 137n8 and meditations 30, 136n6, 137n8 and reading 29n23, 30, 91 and romance 3, 86–8, 89, 91–2, 113, 114, 116, 118, 124, 124n86, 125, 126–7 and self-defense 16, 87, 91–2, 110–11, 124, 126–7 and spiritual writing 14, 88n10, 126–27, 137n8 and widowhood 126–7, 137n8 Hall, Joseph 30 Hallett, Nicky 105n51, 121–2 Hammons, Pamela 17–18

Index Harley, Lady Brilliana 29n15, 29n20, 30 Hatton, Mary (later Helsby) 53 heroic romance 38n42, 42n58, 52, 52n95, 57n7 heroism, female 12, 85, 89, 110, 113–23, 125, 129, 130, 158; see also Carleton; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; Frith; Halkett; Hutchinson; and Wyndham Hirst, Derek 118, 125 history, see also family history as genre 1–2, 56n4, 100n36, 101, 113, 115, 125–6, 132, 150 as reading material 34, 36, 39n50, 46n78, 123 Hobby, Elaine 16, 19, 52 Hoby, Lady Margaret and diary 15, 33n35, 80 and marriage 80, 106n54 and reading 29n20, 33n35 Horace 6, 7n14, 31 household education 15, 27–8; see also education housewifery 15, 28, 34, 54 Humanism 27, 27n6, 54 Hunter, Thomas 14n35, 61n15 Hutchinson, Lucy 125 and autobiography 33, 100, 101–2, 105 and biography 96, 100–103, 110, 117–18, 126, 136 and courtship 101, 102–3 and history 100n36, 101 The Life of John Hutchinson 96, 100– 103, 110, 117–18, 125, 126, 136 and marriage 96, 100–103, 105, 110, 117–18, 125 and memorialization 100–103, 110, 125 and reading 33–4, 101 and romance 100–103, 105, 110, 117–18, 125, 126, 136 and spiritual writing 100n36, 102, 103 and war narrative 100n36, 102n46, 103n47, 110, 117-18, 125 Hyde, Lady Anne 52 inscriptions, see book inscriptions Isham, Elizabeth 39n45 and autobiography 11n29, 12, 13–14, 16, 33, 39n45, 51–2

213 and exemplarity 13–14, 16 and marriage 13–14, 16, 33, 80, 111n62 and reading 30n27, 33, 38, 51–52 and romance 38, 39n45, 51–52 and self-defense 13–14, 16 and self-examination 12, 14 and spiritual writing 12, 13

Jackson, Anne 29n20, 29, 36–7 journals 13, 17n43, 22, 28, 38n43, 138, 148–9, 157n42; see also diaries Kadar, Marlene 2n2 Kearns, Judith 9n20, 86–8 Keeble, Neil H. 34n38, 100, 102n44, 102n45, 103n47, 118 Kelly, Philippa 15, 16, 16n39, 20 Kinney, Clare R. 71, 76, 163n12, 178, 179, 181n33, 186n38 Kirkman, Francis 126, 129 Lamb, Mary Ellen 39n50, 57n7, 176 Laoutaris, Chris 125n88, 174 Leigh, Dorothy 36 leisure time and life writing 21, 22 and romance 28, 33, 40, 49, 51n93, 141, 147, 157, 158 letters 12, 22n52, 41, 51, 66, 111, 133, 139n13, 150n35; see also Briver; Cavendish; Delaval; Osborne; Philips; and Young as reading material 30 literacy 3; see also catechisms/catechizing; education; and Humanism practices 21, 25–54 rates 8n17, 26, 27 and romance 8n17, 21, 25–54, 175–86 and social status 8n17, 21, 26, 27, 28, 33, 38n43, 105n50, 175–86 specific to women 18, 21, 22, 25–54, 175–86 lives (genre), see also autobiography and biography exemplary 28, 35 as reading material 28, 30, 32–3, 34, 35 spiritual 28, 30, 32–3, 34, 35, 51, 121n82 Lodge, Thomas 46

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Longfellow, Erica 10 Lynch, Kathleen M. 42, 151n37 McKitterick, David 27, 46, 49–50 Mair, Le 52 marginalia, see also annotation/s as material evidence 40–41, 45n68, 49, 50, 81n42 as printed paratext 32, 42n56 as reading pedagogy 40, 49–50 by women 22, 40, 41, 49, 50 marriage 18, 35, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86–7, 89–104, 106, 111–12, 116, 118, 133–4, 136, 143 arranged 19, 23, 64, 76–7, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 89, 105, 111, 112, 123, 142, 143, 145–6, 152 companionate 76–7, 79, 80, 93, 105, 111, 124 critique of 64, 76–7, 79, 80, 84, 89, 90, 92–3, 106–9, 123, 126, 136, 138, 141, 142, 143, 145–6, 152, 157 de praesenti 79n40 rhetoric of 80, 89, 104–13, 158 in romance 23, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70, 76–81, 84, 85, 86–7, 89–113, 116, 118, 123, 126, 133–4, 141, 143, 147, 152, 157, 158 martyrdom, in life writing 95, 113, 120–21, 174 meditation/s 17; see also Austen; Boyle, Robert; Delaval; Halkett; Mildmay; and Rich deliberate/solemn 137 as devotional practice 12, 15, 17n47, 30n26, 30, 36–7, 50n91, 131n2, 136–8, 139, 147, 149–50 as life writing 12, 15, 17n47, 22, 28, 63, 90–91, 136–8, 139, 149–50, 159 occasional 12, 17n47, 30, 136n6, 137–8, 148n25, 149–51 as reading material 28, 28n12, 30, 149–50 memoirs 10n21, 12, 15, 22, 79n41, 137n8, 156; see also Austen; autobiography; biography; Calthorpe; Dunbar; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; Halkett; Hutchinson; and Rich

memorialization 125, 174, 186n38; see also biography; Calthorpe; Cavendish; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; Hutchinson; and Walker, Anthony Mendelson, Sara Heller 17n46, 18, 79n39, 79n41, 137n8 Mendoza, Antonio Hurtado de 48n86 Mildmay, Lady Grace 31 and advice genre 31n29, 32n33, 36 and autobiographical writing 16n39, 17, 90–91, 106n54, 136n6, 137 and marriage 90–91, 106n54 and meditations 90–91, 136n6, 137 and reading 29n20, 36, 137 miscellanies, see Austen and commonplace books Montalvo, Garci Rodríguez de 31–2 Montemayor, Jorge de 83n47 Moody, Joanna 80 Moore Smith, G.C. 82n45, 83n47, 160, 186 motherhood 39, 62n16; see also mother’s legacy and Delaval and arranged marriage 106n54, 112; see also Clifford; Delaval; Halkett; Rich; and Thornton and household education 15, 17, 27–8, 34–7, 39 and romance 37–40 mother’s legacy 13, 15, 17n44, 64; see also advices; Jackson; and Leigh Mullan, David George 29n18, 29, 132n4 narrative delight/pleasure 2–3, 6–7, 8, 31, 60n12, 64–5, 101, 125, 135–6, 146, 174, 180, 185 narrative digression/multiplicity 57, 58–9, 62, 67, 101, 102, 129, 144, 174, 185 narrative skill 60, 71–2, 73, 75, 99, 119n76, 168, 176–7, 179, 183, 185 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey 5, 8, 9, 21, 22n51, 25, 26n4, 31n30, 38, 39, 44n62, 50n92, 50, 78n38, 151n37, 162, 184 novel, development of 59n10, 84, 85n1, 113, 119, 121 novella 84, 154 occasional meditations, see meditation/s

Index old wives’ tales, see fairy tales Osborne, Dorothy 22, 160 and letters 21, 22n52, 52, 81–4, 93n21, 96, 106–7, 111, 113, 122–3, 126 and marriage 81–4, 93n21, 96, 107, 111, 113, 122–3, 126 and romance 21, 52, 81–4, 96, 113, 122–3, 126 Palgrave, Mary E. 30n26, 35, 148n23, 148n25, 150n35, 156n41 Parker, Kenneth 38n42, 52n96, 52n97, 52n99, 113 Parker, Patricia 4n7, 61–2, 181 pastoral romance/tragicomedy 38n42, 46n80, 47, 147, 183; see also Old Arcadia patronage by women 42–4 Patterson, Annabel 79n40, 160 pedagogy, see education Penington, Mary 80 Pepys, Samuel 52, 132 Peter, Hugh 13 Philips, Katherine 52 picaresque romance 45n71 Ponsonby, Arthur 13, 95n26, 95n27 Potter, Lois 160 Powell, Vavasour 131 prayer/s as devotional practice 28, 31, 147, 149–50; see also Rich and reading 28, 31, 36, 37, 149–50 and religious education 27, 28 textual 41; see also Allen; Austen; and Delaval Préchac, Jean de 47 prefaces, as life writing 12, 105n51, 114, 135; see also dedications to women Principe, Lawrence 7n14, 42n58, 51n93, 151n37 Protestantism 29n20, 132n4 and life writing 12–13, 15–16, 121n82 and self-examination 12–13 Puckering, Elizabeth 45–6, 48 Pulter, Hester 159–60 Puritanism 12; see also Beaumont; Baxter, Richard; and Protestantism and life writing 12, 29n13, 121 and romance 121, 131n2, 132

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Quakerism 29n19, 121n82 Quinault, Philippe 47 Ranew, Nathanael 149 res gestae 10n23 Rich, Mary 42, 126, 136–7, 148–58 and autobiography 3, 124, 148–9, 150, 151–4, 156–8 biographies of 150, 151, 153 and courtship 151–3 and diaries 3, 29n13, 30, 151, 153, 154–8 and exemplarity 35, 39–40, 150 and marriage 3, 94n24, 112n63, 124, 138, 148, 150, 151–8 and meditation/s 30, 136n6, 138, 148n25, 149–50, 151, 153, 155–6 and reading 28n10, 29n13, 29n20, 29n21, 30, 35, 38, 39, 51, 52–3, 131, 138, 148–9, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158 and romance 3, 38, 39, 51, 52–3, 124, 130, 131, 138, 148, 150, 151–8 and self-defense 138, 154, 156–7 Rippl, Gabriele 65, 88n9 Rivall Friendship 160 Roberts, Josephine A. 31n30, 79n40, 162, 186 roman à clef 1, 8, 44n63, 47, 52n101, 159, 160, 163–74 romance critiques of 3, 4–6, 7, 8, 19, 23, 25, 43, 51, 53, 54, 84, 115, 130–36, 138–9, 140–43, 151n37, 157–8, 159, 181–2 defenses of 2–3, 6–9, 25, 32n32, 37–8, 42–4, 51–3, 81–4, 130, 135–6, 151n37, 158, 161–2 Rose, Mary Beth 87 St. Augustine 10n23, 12, 15 St. Catherine of Siena 30 St. Teresa of Avila 30, 39n46 saints’ lives, see lives Scudéry, Madeleine de 52n98 Artamènes, or The Grand Cyrus 52, 53, 82–3, 140 Ibraham, or the Illustrious Bashaw 37–8, 52 Seelig, Sharon Cadman 11, 100n36, 102n44

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self-construction 4, 16, 18, 19, 20–21, 24, 25, 34, 53, 56, 64–5, 75, 83, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 136, 154, 157, 158, 159 self-defense 12, 16–17, 19, 23, 80, 89, 115, 119, 124–5, 126, 147; see also Beaumont; Briver; Carleton; Cavendish; Delaval; Fitzherbert; Freke; Halkett; Isham; Mildmay; Rich; Thornton; and Wentworth self-effacement 15–16, 100n39, 110, 111 self-examination 12–13, 14, 17, 21, 23, 65, 90, 121, 124, 132, 139, 156, 157; see also Allen; Delaval; Isham; Rich; and Thornton self-expression 12, 18, 19, 23, 25, 54, 75, 79, 82, 84, 89, 124, 156, 186 self-narration, see autobiography and embedded narrative technique self-preservation 55, 76, 109–10, 120, 130 Semler, L.E. 15 Sermons 28, 149 funeral 35; see also Staunton and Walker, Anthony Sidney, Mary 42, 159, 162 Sidney, Sir Philip 104n48, 162 Arcadia 34, 37–8, 40n52, 43, 49, 50–51, 57n5, 60, 63, 71, 72, 78, 81n42, 93, 131n2, 151n37, 159 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia 34n39, 41, 42, 44–5, 47, 50, 57n7, 159, 174–86 A Defence of Poetry 6, 59n11, 133n5 New Arcadia, 34n39, 57n5, 58, 159, 175n25, 174–86 Old Arcadia 34n39, 42, 50, 57n5, 58n9, 68n25, 175n25, 176, 177, 179 Smith, Nigel 8–9, 52, 82n46, 83, 84, 85, 87 Smith, Sidonie 10n23, 11n28, 17n48 Smyth, Adam 9, 32n34 Spearing, Elizabeth 75n34, 114, 114n69, 126, 129, 132 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene 44, 49, 57n5, 57n6, 57–8, 69, 72–3, 74, 78, 122n83, 131n2 spiritual life writing 4, 10, 11n26, 12–21, 28, 29n13, 30, 32–3, 85, 86, 109–10, 113, 118–22, 124, 131–2,

136–8, 148–50, 156; see also Beaumont; Blackadder; Calthorpe; Cary; Delaval; Fitzherbert; Halkett; Hutchinson; Isham; Jackson; St. Teresa of Avila; Rich; Wentworth; and Young spiritual lives, see lives Spufford, Margaret 21n50, 26, 34n40, 38n43, 86n2, 105n50, 131 Staunton, Edmund 29n14, 29 Stone, Lawrence 79n39 Temple, Sir William 52, 81, 82, 83, 84, 113, 122–3 as addressee, suitor, and husband, see Osborne, Dorothy as writer 82n45, 83, 160, 186 Thomas, Patrick 51, 52n101 Thornton, Alice 30n27, 116 and autobiographical texts 90, 92, 107–8 and courtship 78n38, 92 and marriage 16, 89, 90, 92, 107–8, 112 and romance 116, 124 and self-defense 16, 90, 124, 128 Todd, Janet 30, 75n34, 80, 114, 126, 129, 132 translation/s 30, 43, 45; see also Tyler as pedagogical technique 8, 31–2 of romance, into English 7, 31–2, 32n32, 38n42, 42, 44, 45, 46n80, 47, 48, 52n98, 52n99, 54n104, 83n47, 147n21, 160n3, 161–2 by women 7, 29n15, 31–2, 42, 44, 54n104, 83n47, 161–2 travel writing 17n47, 96, 99–100; see also Fanshawe, Lady Ann Travitsky, Betty S. 27n6, 36 Trill, Suzanne 17n47, 29n23, 30, 86n4, 88n10, 126–7, 137n8 Tyler, Margaret 7, 21–2, 42, 44, 54, 161–2 Vaumorière, Pierre d’Ortigue de 45–6 violence, against women 8, 70, 78n38, 92n19, 94–5, 109, 114, 120–21 Vives, Juan Luis 5, 35 Walker, Anthony 107, 149, 150, 157n42 Eureka, Eureka 150–51, 157n42

Index The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker 14n35, 20, 29n20, 30, 35, 37, 39–40, 107, 110, 130–31, 132, 134, 150 Walker, Elizabeth diary 30, 107n55, 130–31, 149, 157n42 and exemplarity 14n35, 20, 35, 37, 130 The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, see Walker, Anthony and marriage 107, 110, 130 and motherhood 29n20, 30, 35, 37, 39–40, 110, 130 and reading 29n20, 30, 37 and romance 20, 39–40, 130–31, 132, 134 Wall, Wendy 43n61 Waller, Gary 160, 163, 174 Warren, Nancy Bradley 32–3 Watson, Elizabeth Porges 178n28, 179n29 Weamys, Anna 182, 184 A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia 23–4, 59, 80, 160, 161, 162, 174–5, 182–6 and wish fulfillment 174, 182 Wentworth, Anne 63 and exemplarity 109–10 and self-defense 16, 109–10, 124 and marriage 16n40 78n38, 109–10 and romance 109–10 and spiritual life writing 109–10 A True Account 16n40, 78n38, 109

217

The Vindication of Anne Wentworth 16n40, 78n38, 109 widowhood 89, 108, 111–12; see also Austen; Clifford; Fanshawe, Lady Ann; Freke; Halkett; and Thornton Wiggins, Alison 45n68, 48n85, 49 Wilcox, Helen 15, 17n48, 88, 115n70, 161n5 Wilkinson, Elizabeth 29n14, 29n15 Willen, Diane 27n6, 31n29 wish fulfillment 23, 64, 85, 125, 126, 160, 162, 174, 182; see also Carleton and Weamys Wolfreston, Frances 29n13, 45–7, 49 Wray, Ramona 54, 124, 152, 154n39, 154, 157–8 Wroth, Lady Mary 43, 63n19, 77n35, 163 The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania 23–4, 42, 44, 45, 46, 55, 57n5, 58–9, 59n11, 62n17, 64, 65–81, 83, 84, 104, 159, 160, 162, 163, 171–2, 174, 186 and romance 23–4, 43, 59, 162, 174 and wish fulfillment 160, 186 Wyndham, Anne Clavstrvm Regale Reseratvm or The Kinges Concealment at Trent 116–17, 125, 126 and romance 116–17 Young, James 121n81, 132