ABSTRACT
As critics have noted, both the late writings and the architectural projects of Lady Anne Clifford were parts of an elaborate plan to prove she had been wronged more than forty years earlier. Architectural historians have puzzled over why her architectural choices provide no evidence of her earlier experience at the Jacobean Court, which must have led her into contact with the Palladian tastes of Inigo Jones. Clifford’s architectural structures thus inform the narrative structures of the diary. The diary does relate sequences of events, but they are often not organized, as we might expect, according to the chronology of Clifford’s own experience. The similarity of the diary passage to the public inscription on the castle encourages us to read autobiography and architecture simultaneously by collapsing the formal distinctions between the two. Clifford’s epitaphs, like her other architectural inscriptions and her diary, are again following the model of her favorite verse from Isaiah. They are constantly explicating complex temporal intersections.
