ABSTRACT
Lucy Hutchinson’s writing was virtually always a response to three great facts of her life: her witnessing of and participating in the English Civil Wars, her experience of the high-water mark of Puritan influence in England, and her marriage to John Hutchinson. Having been brought to the point of writing by her turbulent historical moment, Hutchinson could not escape considering the increasingly common phenomenon of women writing, and thus interrogating the nature and status of women. Hutchinson’s most compelling comments on both marriage and the nature and status of women, however, are undoubtedly in Order and Disorder. The most striking element of Hutchinson’s meditation on women in Order and Disorder, however, is the poem’s representation of post-lapsarian marital unions. Hutchinson’s writing is often a statement of faith; she repeatedly writes out her religious views. One almost inevitably sees the same attitude in the Memoirs, offered as a ‘monument’ to her husband and therefore as serving an eventually public function.
