Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600-1680

Sharon Cadmon Seelig asks two questions in Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature. The first is the one that Margaret Cavendish posed at the beginning of her True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656): "Why hath this Ladie writ her own Life?"; the second is "Why and how do we read lives like Cavendish's?" (pp. 1, 2). Seelig examines several well-known prose lives in search of answers: Margaret Hoby's diary (1599-1603); Anne Clifford's collection of journal entries and narratives about herself throughout her life (1603-1676); Lucy Hutchinson's autobiographical fragment and accounts of herself in her much longer life of her husband (c. 1665); Anne Fanshaw's and Anne Halkett's self-accounts in their memoirs of their husbands (c. 1676, c. 1677-8); and two of Cavendish's texts, True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life and her fictional Blazing World (1666).

Seelig begins with an admirably inclusive effort to understand texts from both the author's point of view and her own, trying to correct for biases in each. She starts by taking the author's account at face value but also looks for textual patterns that the author may not have noticed or intended. At the same time Seelig tries, as a reader, to avoid her own blindnesses or anachronistic biases about women, life experience, or, especially, genre. Seelig's questions lead to analysis of what women were trying to do by writing, as well as what they were trying to say—establishing their virtue, perhaps, or keeping records, playing roles, leaving a mark for the future, and so on. Women's motives varied, and Seelig, like other scholars of early women's writing, finds that texts often defy contemporary expectations about a single autobiographical genre. Not only does life writing take many forms, but individual writers also draw on a variety of genres as their needs and intentions shift. Hutchinson's text, for example, opens with grand, Johnsonian prose but becomes more like a fairy tale (pp. 77-78); Fanshawe draws on Biblical language, idealized family narrative, tales of mercantile adventure, and exemplary narratives (pp. 96, 99), while Halkett uses melodrama and romance formats (pp. 112, 118).

Seelig offers valuable insight into these much-studied documents, not only in her exploration of genre but also in her attention to detail, which is perhaps her most important contribution. For example, she finds valuable evidence of independent thinking in Hoby's casual reference to the day's sermon—"sermon not worth noting" (p. 29)—a useful corrective to a modern reader's tendency to note only Hoby's sense of duty and obedience. Again, Seelig notes that, although Halkett does not overtly defend her acceptance of Colonial Joseph Bampfield's duplicitous courtship, she implies her innocence by juxtaposition because midway into her account of Bampfield's suit, she interrupts the story with another anecdote about deceit, in which her behavior is above reproach (p. 122).

Although careful readings like these are illuminating, many of the texts are incomplete and thus frustrate any effort to locate meaning solely within the text itself. Material is missing, for example, from the beginning, end, and two "highly sensitive points in the narrative" in Halkett's text (p. 119). In addition, what does remain of them is often frustratingly reticent. As a result, conclusions are difficult. Seelig concludes by tracing a movement in the sequence of narratives from fact to fiction, from a weaker to "a stronger sense of self" (p. 12), and toward a more central role for the writer in her text. However, the book does not provide the historical or literary context a reader needs to know whether this movement reveals something more than Seelig's own choice among and sequencing of texts. Does the movement from fact to fiction say something about historical change? It is hard to tell because the sequence of texts is not strictly chronological. Does it reveal something about gender? It is hard to tell because no autobiographies by men are considered, although comparison with John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, would have been fascinating. Most important in a book so rightly focused on notions of generic fluidity, it is not clear that the same movement would be visible had other autobiographical genres been included by adding, for example, Isabella Whitney and Martha Moulsworth (verse), Elizabeth Cary (drama), Mary Wroth (romance), and Dorothy Osborne (letters). Discussions of individual texts in Seelig's book offer important contributions to the study of early modern women's autobiography, but more information is needed to support its generalizations about the field.