ABSTRACT
On February 14, 1665, Katherine Austen (1629-1683), a young London widow, composed a love lyric and copied it into her commonplace book, “Book M,” which contains documents ranging from financial accounts, to sermon notes, to over thirty original poems. Since the death of her husband, Thomas, in 1658, Katherine had dedicated herself to managing her children and the family property: she hired lawyers to protect her interests, fought for possession of her estate at Highbury, built new properties, and invested in the East India Company.1 Given how entangled Austen’s widowhood was in property management, it is perhaps no wonder that her love lyric, “On Vollantines day this 14 ffeb: 1665 / My Jewel,” celebrates a miraculous gift of material wealth. Having accidentally found a rich jewel near an old wall, Austen portrays the gem in her poem as a Valentine’s Day gift to herself-from God. In these opening lines, she celebrates her love token:
Unexpectedly finding a precious jewel inspires this young widow to write what is effectively a love lyric to herself. Austen was a prolific occasional poet, so it was not unusual for her to transpose events from her daily life into verse. However, she typically wrote poems concerned with religious meditation and thanksgiving, prophecies, and family matters. While “On Vollantines day this 14 ffeb: 1665 / My Jewel” retains a religious theme, it is particularly interesting because it is Austen’s poem that most closely engages with the commonplaces of Renaissance love lyrics. The poetic scenario Austen creates-Providence chooses her as the special recipient of a valuable, material love token from God-enables her to display her knowledge of secular heteroerotic love conventions and to bend them to her will without disrupting her self-figuration throughout “Book M” as an upstanding, chaste widow of rank.3 In other words, celebrating her jewel, poetically imagining her relationship to a material possession, plays a crucial role in helping her to
move beyond her tendency towards unexceptional religious meditations in verse, into new poetic territory.
