'Scruples and Ceremonies': Lady Brilliana Harley's Epistolary Combat

Lady Brilliana Harley's valiant defence of Brampton Bryan during its royalist besiegement in the summer of 1643 has been widely celebrated in women's history. However, her deliberate, strategic, and highly rhetorical use of letter writing to conduct this military resistance deserves wider literary attention. Harley was already a prolific writer of letters by 1643, but in these understudied letter exchanges during wartime she activates a more precise knowledge of the rhetorical apparatus underlying the epistolary genre than seen previously, effectively transforming her letters and sense of authorship into her own militarized mode of Civil War combat.