ABSTRACT
Lady Anne Clifford was an articulate and powerful figure who gives the lie to a whole complex of modern assumptions about what was possible for women in seventeenth-century English society. She was also a voracious reader and bibliophile. The marginal commentary opens, however, with a particularly interesting family error. In her maturity her surviving correspondence shows it as a swift and forceful hand, significantly less elegant. As soon as a book has a reader it has been changed, and it is a rare book from this period that does not bear the imprint of ownership. To begin with, books were sold unbound, and the purchaser decided on the binding; and this was only the first of many proprietary decisions. Upon his death in 1649 she was, by virtue of her marriages, the Dowager Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and the Montgomery.
