Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600–1680

by Sharon Cadman Seelig

• ISBN13: 9780521856959
• ISBN10: 0521856957
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Early modern autobiographies and diaries provide a unique insight into women's lives and how they remembered, interpreted and represented their experiences. Sharon Seelig analyzes the writings of six seventeenth-century women: diaries by Margaret Hoby and Anne Clifford, more extended narratives by Lucy Hutchinson, Ann Fanshawe, and Anne Halkett, and the extraordinarily varied and self-dramatizing publications of Margaret Cavendish. Combining an original account of the development of autobiography with analysis of the texts, Seelig explores the relation between the writers' choices of genre and form and the stories they chose to tell.

Table of Contents

Preface	viii
Introduction: mapping the territory	1	(14)
Margaret Hoby: the stewardship of time	15	(19)
The construction of a life: the diaries of Anne Clifford	34	(39)
Pygmalion's image: the lives of Lucy Hutchinson	73	(17)
Ann Fanshawe: private historian	90	(20)
Romance and respectability: the autobiography of Anne Halkett	110	(21)
Margaret Cavendish: shy person to Blazing Empress	131	(23)
Conclusion: ``The Life of Me''	154	(6)
Notes	160	(35)
Bibliography	195	(16)
Index	211