ABSTRACT

Lady Anne Clifford’s serial musings draw attention to two points. First, Clifford’s diary writing actively creates for her an embodied, temporally responsible, and spatially attentive identity; it marks her experiences as both meaningful and productive and suggests the costs that such definition requires over the long haul. Second, Clifford’s autobiographical form in its peculiar iterative patterning delineates a new kind of personal history, one that is future-oriented, unfinished, and peculiarly suited to female needs. The correlation between Clifford’s appropriation of history, the generic shape of her diary writing, and her struggles to reclaim her lands cannot be overstated. A testimonial to the process of historical recovery and a means to explain herself during the most heated moments of her struggle, Clifford’s accounts serve an evidentiary role in the process of self-justification. Clifford’s sense of identity is imbricated in notions of deep history—in an ancestral connection to family origin.