The edition succeeds in rendering the text of the Great Books far more accessible than hitherto, and so represents a significant milestone in the study of the manuscripts created under the countesss direction. Professor Malays hope that it will encourage greater interest in and scholarship on Anne Clifford will surely be realised.
David X. Carpenter, University of Oxford, EHR, February 2018
Anne Cliffords Autobiographical Writing, 1590-1676, Jessica Malays newest contribution to Anne Clifford Studies, is a much-needed, comprehensive edition of Cliffords extensive autobiographical corpus, as well as a perfect complement to Malays 201 edition of Anne Cliffords Great Books of Record. Clifford is a familiar name among scholars of early modern Englishwomens life writing in part because of the sheer amount she produced. Clifford developed a complex, interconnected system of self-accounting that involved daily diary-like entries, yearly memoirs and biographical narratives about family members past and present that worked in tandem with her antiquarian projects and legal battles. Indeed, nearly all of her labor textual and otherwise contributed to her lengthy, and ultimately successful, quest to gain what she believed to be her rightful inheritance (extensive properties that her father, George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, had designated to his brother instead). But Clifford continued to record the events of her and her family members lives long after she secured here inheritance in 1643 and, indeed, right up to the day before she died. Cliffords life writing demonstrates a womans agency in action, provides a snapshot of antiquarian trends and techniquest in seventeenth-century England, sheds lights on elite English culture during this period, and contributes to ongoing conversations about the nature of auto/biography in early modern England.
Julie A. Eckerle, University of Minnesota, Morris, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 2019
'These memoirs, and the diary and daybook that bookend Malay's well-edited and annotated volume, will be invaluable to scholars and students of the period looking for a window into a remarkable life and the deliberate acts of autobiographical preservation-both literary and material-that memorialize that life.'
Seventeenty-Century News
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