ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the desire to script oneself as more or different than the real version appealed especially to women. It provides evidence of romances influence on a wide range of women's personal writing: secular and spiritual, private and public, fragmentary and continuous, political and non-political. The chapter reviews the quite varied ways in which romance motifs in particular enabled sixteenth and seventeenth-century women to articulate their individual agendas. The numerous traces of romance in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Englishwomen's life writing include both structural and non-structural elements. Romantic plots are the heart and soul of romance and also often take center stage in women's life writing. In addition to telling tales about love and marriage with a consistently passive yet conflicted rhetoric, the female life writers who were most obviously influenced by the romance genre also speak and act like romance heroines and sometimes even acknowledge this point themselves.
