ABSTRACT
In the final years of a very long life, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, spent lavishly to inscribe herself on the exterior walls of Hardwick Hall, the grand manor home she had commissioned from architect Robert Smythson. On each of six turrets Bess had writ large the letters “ES,” her initials resting atop a massive building of alabaster, sandstone, and glass (all materials gathered from Bess’s many properties), such that other residents of remote Derbyshire-or any visitor from court-would see the writing and be suitably astonished, even from several miles away.2 There are other early modern women who strive to place their writings amidst similarly large and luxurious settings, and they take almost the same great pains to extol their surroundings-whether imposing country homes or crowded cityscapes-in clearly loving detail, inventorying the rich contents of houses or stores, counting out these place’s inhabitants and their various stations, and recording, with both precision and understanding, the complicated rules governing the circulation of favors and goods within. It is rare, though, to include Bess of Hardwick among them-either as a writer or as a property-holder-or, indeed, to recognize any of these early modern women as part of a larger accounting project or poetics of possession, perhaps because their representations of material abundance and wealth are frequently estranging ones, just as often marked by isolation, loss, or alienation. This is the case with Bess’s imposing initials, too, the signs of a widow who is moneyed and landed, but also obviously remote from us.
