ABSTRACT
This chapter explores maternal attitudes about romance that can be gleaned from a range of textual examples. It considers men's construction of women's reading in their compilations of exemplary women's life writing. The chapter second presents the attitudes about romance conveyed by early modern Englishwomen in their own voice in their life writing, including mother's legacies; and third it considers a few representations of maternal storytellers in romance. The chapter suggests that while women may have read romance and even appreciated it at some level; they seem to have accepted the pervasive cultural attitude against romance when it came to conveying knowledge to their children. Indeed, it is important to acknowledge that romance had its defenders as well as its detractors and that even some adult women treat romance in their life writing in positive way. In a rare example of a seventeenth-century pious woman who actually defends romance reading, the never-married Elizabeth Isham claims in her unpublished autobiographical narrative.
