From the Desk of Anne Clifford

The indistinguishableness of who wrote what in a collaboration is to be judged neither by whether or not there subsist for the readers or indeed the collaborators themselves stylistic markers by which they can delineate, in some cases very easily, who wrote what . . . but rather by whether the effects and experiences that gravitate toward what has been written may do so around the person who did not write on their subject (in which case, one can write the whole article oneself, and it would still be a collaboration).

—Jalal Toufic, Over-Sensitivity (1996)

Some recent work in Renaissance studies has tended to idealize collaborative writing practices. To take the strongest example of this tendency, Jeffrey Masten's book Textual Intercourse seeks to place the production of Renaissance dramatic writing within a context of collaboration based on a model of male friendship, as opposed to a context of withdrawal from the world based on a "proprietary-absolutist," post-Cartesian, even post-Romantic model of authorship.¹ Without discounting the usefulness or historical accuracy of accounts such as Masten's, in this essay I am going to argue that the Renaissance does not always or even primarily conceive of collaborative labors as work produced jointly by equal partners of similar social status. The model I'm using in place of egalitarian male friendship is service, and it is suggested by the article "'Studied for Action': How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy" by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, who convincingly show that one of the privileges of being a person of property in the Renaissance is having servants who will do part of the work of reading and writing for you: selecting and interpreting passages, reading vocally, writing manually.² Grafton and Jardine use Harvey's marginalia to document his role as a "facilitator"—a sort of humanist-for-hire who, under the general direction of a patron, would select corresponding passages from a large constellation of books.³

My project is to imagine a role for such facilitators in the production and reception of seventeenth-century diaries. My example in this essay, Anne Clifford's diary and related writings, is intended as a challenge to both conventional notions of how a diary is made (that is, by one person working alone, without contributions from any associates; or in other words, it's supposed to be written both in the midst of the life it documents and apart from its influence) and what kind of information (that is, personal) it's supposed to contain. But I am not simply using Clifford as a convenient example; I am also proposing a reading of her diary. Her activities as reader and writer don't, on the one hand, embody the ideal of egalitarian collaboration; on the other hand, her activities look less like failed attempts to work on her own—in other words, to be a proprietary-absolutist, post-Cartesian, post-Romantic author—than like highly successful attempts to impose controls over the experience of reading and writing not only for herself but for everyone around her.

In emphasizing Clifford's literary authority, I follow a suggestion in Virginia Woolf's essay "Donne After Three Centuries," which is where Clifford first enters modern literary criticism as a representative Renaissance reader:

Lady Ann Clifford, for example, the daughter of a Clifford and a Russell, though active and practical and little educated—she was not allowed "to learn any language because her father would not permit it"—felt, we can gather from the bald statements of her diary, a duty toward literature and to the makers of it. . . . A great heiress, infected with all the passion of her age for lands and houses, busied with all the cares of wealth and property, she still read good English books as she ate good beef and mutton. She read The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia; she acted in Ben Jonson's Masques at Court. . . . She had Montaigne read aloud to...