ABSTRACT

This article introduces and describes a sequence of poems written by a late seventeenth-century female member of the Feilding family, surviving in a manuscript in the Osborn Library, Yale University: a commonplace book in an exceptionally attractive embroidered binding, which juxtaposes original verse with copies of other poems, prayers, recipes and lists (Osborn Collection MS b. 226).2 Dating from just after the writer's widowhood and charting a process of recuperation made more difficult by tensions within her family, these verses represent an unusual and poignant survival; and their intensely private quality calls into question many currently held assumptions about the nature of audiences for women's manuscript verse.