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. This chapter examines a very late edition of A Mirror for Magistrates, published in 1609–10, a version of famous work much enlarged and reorganized, not always very sensibly, to fill in gaps, and to bring it up to date by covering Elizabethan history – it concludes with Heywood’s long poem England’s Eliza. The crazily compulsive detail of this is entirely consistent with her way of reading her copy of A Mirror for Magistrates. Finally, women were not at all excluded as producers from this system, any more than they were excluded as readers. If Clifford’s library included a copy of Milton’s 1645 Poems, it was available to her through the agency of a printer named Ruth Raworth. Ruth Raworth was an active and well-regarded printer from the 1630s to 1660s.
