ABSTRACT
The benefits of deploying romance in narrative self-construction were as we have seen significant, especially in the creation of sympathetic versions of self. Many of the examples considered in secular auto/biographical texts that share many romances prose narrative structure as well as some of the genres content. But the specter of romance haunts very different forms of life writing as well, including the meditation genre with which many early modern Englishwomen engaged. This spiritual genre contained significant autobiographical potential in addition to its obvious devotional value. Like many Englishwomen caught up in the chaos of the Civil War period, Delavals early life reads like a plot in a romance. Romance came to embody a range of cultural anxieties such as wayward tongues and bodies, idleness, and rhetorical excess that accrued distinctly over time. As such, a woman seeking to embody herself in textual form looked directly into the face of the force that was Romance.
