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

This important contribution to early modern literary studies and gender studies illuminates the interactions between literature and autobiography.

Sharon Cadman Seelig (Author)

9780521856959, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 March 2006

226 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

Review of the hardback: 'The curious strength of Seelig's book lies in its abstention from further generalisation and speculation. … with a fine and accurate eye for structure, textual and historical detail, Seelig discusses how diverse conceptual models work in the individual texts …' Anglia Newspaper for English Philology

Early modern autobiographies and diaries provide a unique insight into women's lives and how they remembered, interpreted and represented their experiences. Sharon Seelig analyses 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-dramatising publications of Margaret Cavendish. Combining an account of the development of autobiography with close and attentive reading of the texts, Seelig explores the relation between the writers' choices of genre and form and the stories they chose to tell. She demonstrates how, in the course of the seventeenth century, women writers progressed from quite simple forms based on factual accounts to much more imaginative and persuasive acts of self-presentation. This important contribution to the fields of early modern literary studies and gender studies illuminates the interactions between literature and autobiography.

Introduction: mapping the territory
1. Margaret Hoby: the stewardship of time
2. The construction of a life: the diaries of Lady Anne Clifford
3. Pygmalion's image: the lives of Lucy Hutchinson
4. Ann Fanshawe, private historian
5. Romance and respectability: the autobiography of Anne Halkett
6. Margaret Cavendish: shy person to blazing empress
Conclusion: 'the life of me'
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]