'The Life of Me': The Self-Fashioning of Seventeenth-Century Women Writers

FAIN: FT-51437-03

Sharon Seelig
Smith College (Northampton, MA 01060-2916)

A book on self-representation in early modern English women writers, involving a close study of autobiographical texts--diaries, narrative, family history, and fantasy--by six seventeenth-century writers: Margaret Hoby, Anne Clifford, Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Halkett, Ann Fanshawe, and Margaret Cavendish. Taken together, these demonstrate the development of self-fashioning, from the factual accounts of Hoby and the terse diary entries of Clifford, through the extended narratives of Hutchinson, Halkett, and Fanshawe, to the flamboyant imaginings of Cavendish. In giving these texts the formal and generic scrutiny afforded to canonical texts, I gain a more accurate understanding of them in their historical and literary context than we now have.