ABSTRACT

A firm distinction is made between reason, government, and masculinity on the one hand and passion on the other. This is one of a number of passages which can be marshalled in support of a reading of Lucy Hutchinson as conservative and patriarchal in mentality when compared with bolder contemporary women writers such as Margaret Cavendish. Lucy (1620–81) composed her life of her husband John as a response to his death in prison 1664. In a writer as self-conscious as Hutchinson, perhaps see the impossibility topos as a deliberate rhetorical gesture, memorializing the impossibility of making a full copy of her husband. The reverse of this leaf is blank; it is succeeded by another leaf containing a moving epilogue in which Hutchinson voices her sense of estrangement from the world and bids an anticipatory farewell to her children. If the precise ending of Lucy’s life of her husband is hard to establish, so is its beginning.