ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some issues surrounding the ownership of, and investment in, a selection of texts by early modern women. It also explores connections between the way certain early modern aristocratic women allowed their texts to circulate while maintaining a particular kind of possession of them, and the possession and recirculation of them after they were first written. The chapter argues that both women had a strong sense of audience and that Anne Clifford, while not searching for a wholly public audience, was indeed writing for a set of readers. The diary has attracted modern scholars because of its intimacy and its glimpses of what Lewalski has described as ‘the relation between authoring a text and authoring a self’. Clifford and Margaret Cavendish offer telling examples of how early modern aristocratic women might tackle the issue of how their potential readership could be controlled, of how their texts could remain in their possession even as they went into circulation.
