Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton's Life

When the Surtees Society published the only edition of Alice Thornton's autobiography, it omitted and restructured parts of this seventeenth-century gentry woman's self-representation. One of the three manuscripts available to the Victorian editor has since disappeared, but the others, now owned by a private collector, provide a significant corrective to the published version. An analysis of the editorial changes that limit Thornton's intent reveals the complex dimensions of this domestic and spiritual memoir. The manuscripts redefine a conventional concern with divine deliverance in their author's affirmation of her faith and family, a validation of personal integrity and divine mercy that further affirms her importance among early modern women writers.