ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the keys concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. When an early modern woman picked up the pen to write of her self, she almost immediately confronted romance. To move forward with her text, then, the female life writer had to make a choice about how to respond to this complex cultural form that had so much to say for good and ill about female identity as it was then understood. The book argues that women do not simply imitate or repeat what is found in the genre but instead put it to entirely new purposes when they incorporate romance motifs in life writing and manipulate romance strategies to articulate a self or, in some cases, multiple selves. However, men were of course the primary readers, writers, and publishers of romance at this time, and they, too, understood the genres power for constructing particularly favorable versions of self.
