ABSTRACT
Lady Anne Halkett's Memoirs afford readerly pleasures more frequently encountered in fiction than in autobiography, and indeed numerous scholars have consistently compared Anne Halkett's autobiography to novels. This act led to her romantic involvement with one Colonel Joseph Bampfield, whom she later discovered to be married. These romantic and political elements have understandably led recent scholars to take issue with representations of Anne Halkett's Memoirs as an exemplum of Christian piety. Halkett's construction of a Royalist selfhood thoroughly permeates her spiritual sensibility. Her autobiography demonstrates the extent to which her political interests, and especially her loyalty to the king, became inseparable from her religious duty. Halkett's Memoirs make explicit an essential difference in religious sensibility between the seventeenth century and modern times. In this and in other incidents described in the Memoirs, Halkett constructs for her earlier self, Anne Murray, a form of selfhood that conflates the apparently opposing demands of religious and secular genres.
