ABSTRACT
“The heat of his youth a little inclined him to the passion of anger, and goodness of his nature to those of love and grief, but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governor and moderator in his soul.” The lack of a distinctively gendered authorial voice has been much remarked: where Lucy Hutchinson writes of herself in this text, it is always in the third person. The manuscript of the 1660s does at some points strike a more personal note than “Defence,” when Lucy Hutchinson chronicles her husband’s marriage and some other aspects of his family life. In many ways Julius Hutchinson’s edition did Lucy Hutchinson justice: handsomely produced and extensively annotated, it was a labor of love. Some of Julius Hutchinson’s changes to the manuscript may have been motivated by a certain caution about dealing with a highly politicized woman writer. His ancestors had been still more cautious, refusing republican historian Catharine Macaulay access to the manuscript.
