Coming to Knowledge: Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiography and the Self-Construction of an Intellectual Woman

For those concerned with early modern autobiographical studies, one of the more exciting discoveries of recent years has been the work of Elizabeth Isham,an unmarried and well-educated Englishwoman of the landed gentry who lived from 1609–1654 and produced two autobiographical manuscripts: a “diary” covering her childhood to age forty¹ and a prose autobiography written around 1639 (when Isham was about thirty) that she refers to as My Booke of Rememberance (2v).² Isham’s autobiography, which only came to light in 2004,³ is one of the earliest female-authored prose narratives about the self,⁴ a category that also includes Margaret Cavendish’s A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life (published 1656); The Autobiography of Mary, Countess of Warwick; The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe; and The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett (all written in the 1670s); and Alice Thornton’s A Book of Remembrances (also written in the late seventeenth century). As the work of an eldest daughter in a prominent Northamptonshire family, Isham’s Booke also sheds significant light on many aspects of early modern life, including women’s medical practice (see Dimeo and Laroche), the trials of courtship and arranged marriage negotiations (see Stephens), and the literacy habits of women in the early modern English household. Indeed, Isham provides extraordinary insight into her own reading and writing habits, constructing in the process an early form of literacy narrative. This text thus has much to contribute to early modern studies and autobiographical studies in general. In this essay, I explore the generic complexity of Isham’s text, first by explaining how it proves many of the claims that have been made in recent years about the genre of early modern life writing and second by demonstrating the value of approaching Isham’s text as a literacy narrative.

Isham’s Autobiography

Isham’s autobiography offers a rich example of the generic innovation that we now know to be the defining characteristic of early modern autobiographical writing. Despite the rather rigid approach to autobiography that dominated critical thought for much of the twentieth century—an approach that defined autobiography as a very particular birth-to-death narrative that presented a unique and coherent life to its readers from a perspective of self-reflective maturity—the work of recent decades has both debunked this approach for its many erroneous assumptions and replaced it with a much more flexible and nuanced understanding of self-writing.⁵ Although I need not rehearse this critical history here, a brief review of those points most pertinent to early modern autobiography will provide a useful context in which to place Isham’s work.

Most importantly, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life writing evolved before generic conventions for autobiographical writing had solidified and before the term “autobiography” itself was even used.⁶ Understandably, then, life writing in this formative period adopted a range of structural frameworks and often combined multiple genres. As Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow explain, all early modern life writers were “inventing the genre anew, and the way their manuscripts juxtapose genres, sometimes even on a single page, conveys a tangible sense of grappling with the form, struggling to find ways of structuring and containing their experiences in writing.”⁷ Furthermore, all of these forms coexisted, and despite the fact that spiritual forms were most prevalent, there was no real hierarchy by which some genres were seen as superior to others.⁸

This generic variety, moreover, informed texts by both men and women, even though material conditions and life experiences—often determined by gender—were more conducive to certain forms. Here the work of feminist critics has been particularly useful for a number of reasons.⁹ First, it helped to expose the flaws in the traditional approach to autobiography, in part by drawing attention to this model’s assumption of a male writer, a public life, and notions of individualism and autonomy that are more in keeping with the “Romantic notion of selfhood” (Anderson, Autobiography 5) that was prevalent when autobiography solidified as a distinct genre...