A Single Life of Words and Work

the gentlewoman's remembrance, in the Manchester University Press series Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain, is the first book-length study of a roughly 60,000-word manuscript memoir composed between 1638 and 1639 by Elizabeth Isham of Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, in her thirtieth year. Entitled "Booke of Rememberance," the manuscript was essentially a scribal publication for limited circulation painstakingly produced in a small, clear italic hand, complete with prefatory devotional poem, introductory prayers, and a body of text enlarged with explanatory marginal notes, its thirty-eight leaves tied together to complete its resemblance to a finished book.

When she began its composition, Isham had lost the women with whom she had been raised—her paternal grandmother, mother, and younger sister—women whom her pages bring to vivid life. As she ends her memoir a year later, she is caring for not only her widowed father but also her newly widowed brother and his four daughters; and she will continue to manage their household at Lamport until her father's death in 1651 and her brother's remarriage in 1653, her own death from illness following in 1654, at age forty-five.

Most dramatically, this eldest child and daughter of a socially prominent family among the county's landed gentry chose in her twenties to defy her father and remain single in what she called "a priuet life." Her choice took shape after the Isham and Dryden patriarchs failed to agree on the terms for her to marry John Dryden II of Canons Ashby (a cousin of the Restoration poet), and despite her father providing further opportunities for her to wed. In her "Booke," which she calls "confessions" addressed to God, Isham defends her controversial rejection of marriage by remembering her life from a young age as a story of interior and exterior events leading providentially to her decision. With this "act of repentance and memory" and "godly self-examination" as his centerpiece, and through exhaustive work in the Isham family archives in the Northamptonshire Record Office, Isaac Stephens writes a finely researched, passionate microhistorical exploration of Elizabeth Isham and her writing while drawing attention "to the role of archival custody in shaping historical memory" (10).

The connections between patriarchy, archival custody, and the power to oversee what an archive does and does not include are at the heart of Stephens's argument for the importance of uncovering this life narrative. For what Isham termed "My Cheefest Work" disappeared from the family archives, possibly in the late nineteenth century or twentieth century. When, how, and why are unknown, but her text ended up within the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton's Firestone Library. A Sotheby's sale in 1952 seems to have been "instrumental in the autobiography eventually going to the United States" (7), and Stephens wonders why the mid-twentieth-century baronet and patriarch, Sir Gyles Isham—actor, amateur historian, and custodian of the family papers—would have allowed the manuscript to leave the archives.

Stephens's introduction opens with another mystery: no monument or grave marker for Isham exists inside or outside All Saints, the parish church at Lamport, though monuments memorialize every other member of her immediate family—her father, mother, sister, brother, and the brother's first wife along with that couple's short-lived heir. Only in the inscription on her father's tomb is Isham's existence recorded among his other children's names. Stephens believes that her unswerving challenge to her father's authority, her becoming what Stephens calls "a Puritan nun" at Lamport Hall, may have influenced her brother Justinian, the Isham patriarch at the time of her death, to refuse a monument to her memory in the family church. In addition, her complex textual self-presentation and searching defense of her single state, along with her record of the private anguish of several other female lives at Lamport, may have been judged an uneasy fit among the...