ABSTRACT
One of the most telling instances of Lucy Hutchinson’s revision of her material as she moves from Notebook to Memoirs is in her two treatments of a battle in and around the city of Nottingham in January of 1644. Her account of this contest in the Notebook is lively, clear, and concrete. Vivid as this is, Hutchinson uses this material to greater effect when she represents these same events in the Memoirs. Hutchinson also comments on this action in the Memoirs in some new and striking ways. Hutchinson’s Elegies, furthermore, need to be seen as a move beyond the early poetry she mentions rather dismissively in both her autobiographical fragment and the Memoirs to a newly serious verse. Hutchinson, by contrast, presents herself in the Memoirs as a submissive wife who barely exists apart from her husband, but nevertheless moves beyond the writing of a husband-biography to the writing of the history of her time in authoritative fashion.
