ABSTRACT
An Collins’s only known work, her small collection of devotional lyrics, Divine Songs and Meditacions, first appeared in 1653. Tracing her inward journey from physical sickness and emotional crisis to spiritual health through union with God, her diverse body of poetry offers a form of spiritual autobiography.1 It intertwines personal experience and self-examination with general application, shaping the life it inscribes “for the benefit, and comfort of others.”2 This essay will examine how the formation of Collins’s speaker is connected to concepts of dissent and how dissent provides an intersection between her devotional and feminine identities. It
1 This is a revised and updated version of a journal article. See Bronwen Price, “‘The Image of Her Mind’: The Self, Dissent and Femininity in An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions,” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 249-65. Many scholars place Collins’s work within the tradition of spiritual autobiography. The most well-known example of this genre from the period is, of course, John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding (1666). However, numerous women writers adopted this mode of self-presentation; for example, Jane Turner, Choice Experiences of the Kind dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion (1653); Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone (1654), which combines autobiographical detail with prophecy; Sarah Davy, Heaven Realiz’d (1670); and Hannah Allen, Satan his Methods and Malice Baffled (1683). It is worth noting that spiritual autobiography was often used in a loose and hybrid form, as in the case of An Collins. For discussions about women writers’ use of this genre, see Elspeth Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self,” Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 217-26; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 12-14, 56-8, 76-9, 152-4, 174-6; Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, “Introduction,” Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham et al. (London: Routledge, 1989), 1-27; and Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649-88 (London: Virago, 1988), 66-75.
