ABSTRACT
Many authors who have chosen to tell the life of Bess of Hardwick have offered book-length versions of a remarkable life that spanned more than 80 years (1527?–1608). There is so much about Bess to tell, and necessarily to imagine, that within biographies or more openly fictional accounts, writers lose sight of the fact that Bess told her own story repeatedly, in what Judith Butler has called “an open assemblage” of texts. Bess’s many texts culminate in her embroidered, room-sized hangings, featuring eight female rulers. These hangings are a legacy that provides access to the wide range of Bess’s feelings and aspirations, a legacy that provides evidence that she was the most ambitious female artist in sixteenth-century England.
