ABSTRACT
A Gendered Genre: Autobiographical Writings by Three Early Modern Women ‘My father could not abide to see a woman unstable or light in her carriage, to hold her head one way and her hands another and her feet a third way, her eyes tossing about in every place and the features of her face disfigured by evil countenances,’ writes Lady Grace Mildmay in the later life autobiography that she wills to her grandchildren (1617). ‘But he liked a woman well graced with a constant and settled countenance and good behaviour throughout her whole parts, which presenteth unto all men a good hope of an established mind and virtuous disposition to be in her.’1 Thus emerges an impeccable image of Grace Mildmay herself, a seventeenth-century English gentlewoman with exemplary physical and social containment – perfectly ordered, nothing out of place, all of her features and gestures suggesting a composite harmony.2 In a patriarchal society – one in which many woman read but did not write, and in which a woman’s writings were sometimes managed by a male editorial hand3 – Lady Grace’s voice is strong, bolstered by the confidence that she is writing for the glory of God. Repeatedly seeking for her words to be ‘approved’, she turns first to God – ‘This book of mine is the consolation of my soul, the joy of my heart and the stability of my mind, as they are approved by the word of God’ (p. 25) – and then to her descendants: ‘[T]here is nothing [which] hath happened unto me in the course of my life … but the like may fall out to some other, wherein my comforts and remedies may be approved unto them as they have been unto me’ (p. 25). Anticipating at every turn her temporal and divine audiences, Lady Grace’s autobiography bears the constant weight of biblical allusions and instructional purposes, so that any search for psychological inwardness, in consequence – for a sense of who she was as an individual – yields little more than a patchwork of formalized commonplaces. To simply call such discourse ‘autobiography’ or ‘lifewriting’ raises intriguing and complicated questions. What motivates this gentlewoman, at an advanced age, to record the events of her life? What does she intend her readers to see? Strained by the freight of worldly and eternal concerns, how do her words reveal, or conceal, elements that we might deem ‘autobiographical’? And a larger question hovers over these particulars: how might this private, upper-class gentlewoman speak, if at all, to the category, ‘early modern Englishwoman’?
