Abstract
From the amount of her extant work, it is evident that Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, devoted considerable time to the process of writing and rewriting her own life.2 Her diary runs to thousands of manuscript pages, with almost daily entries beginning on 25 July 1666 and continuing until eighteen months before her death in 1678.3 Rich also composed a short autobiography.4 Only 40 pages in length, it dates from around 1671 and recounts an entire personal history from birth to old age. Both narratives have as their main thrust Rich’s story and both are ostensibly private, although traces of revision, a refusal to detail particularly sensitive issues and signs of self-censorship may suggest that, at some level, a reader was borne in mind.5 The distinction between the texts is additionally blurred since, at one point, at least, Rich was writing them both simultaneously.6
We must recognise what the past suggests: women are well beyond youth when they begin, often unconsciously, to create another story. Not even then do they recognise it as another story. Usually they believe that the obvious reasons for what they are doing are the only ones; only in hindsight, or through a biographer’s imaginative eyes, can the concealed story be surmised.1
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Notes
Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (London, 1989) p. 109.
Mary Rich has also been the subject of several biographies. See Charlotte Fell Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, 1625–1678 (London, 1901), and Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton, 1987). For contemporary accounts of her life, see Anthony Walker, Eureka, or, The Virtuous Woman Found (London, 1678), and Thomas Fulwar, A Funeral Elegy upon the much lamented death of …Mary, Lady Dowager, Countess of Warwick (London, 1678).
Mary Rich, Memoir of Lady Warwick: Also her Diary (London, 1847). All further references appear in the text. At those points where this edition of the diary is incomplete, I cite from the complete diary version, which is still in manuscript.
Mary Rich, Autobiography of Mary, Countess of Warwick, ed. T. Croker (London, 1848). All further references appear in the text.
For a discussion of the simultaneously public and private nature of seventeenth-century women’s autobiography, see Helen Wilcox, ‘Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen’ in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Hemel Hempstead, 1992) pp. 47–62.
Other commentators have noted the disparity between the two texts. See A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers, 1580–1720, ed. Maureen Bell, George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd (Hemel Hempstead, 1990) p. 165.
Revelations: Diaries of Women, ed. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter (New York, 1974) p. 5.
Charles’s violent temperament is attested to in other sources. See Walker, Eureka, p. 4. For a discussion of domestic violence in the early modern period, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘“Being Stirred to much Unquietness”: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England’, Journal of Women’s History, 6 (1994) 70–89.
See Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Women Reading, Reading Women’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge, 1996) pp. 80–99.
These references seem to suggest that Rich was a consumer of the French heroic romances so popular in England at this time. Examples include Jean Desmarets de St. Sorlin, Ariana (London, 1636); François le Metel de Boisrobert, The Indian History of Anaxander and Orazia (London, 1639), and Gilbert sieur de Verdier Saulnier, The Love and Arms of the Greek Princes or the romant of romants (London, 1640).
Examples include Samuel Ainsworth, A sermon preached at the funeral of that religious gentlewoman Mrs Dorothy Hanbury (London, 1645); Thomas Heywood, The exemplary lives and memorable acts of nine of the most worthy women of the world (London, 1640) and John Ley, A pattern of piety (London, 1640).
For the predicament of the younger son in early modern England, see Linda Pollock, ‘Younger Sons in Tudor and Stuart England’, History Today, 39, June (1989) 23–9.
On this subject, see Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London and New York, 1993) p. 90.
These duties were set out in such books as Robert Cleaver, A godly form of householde governement (London, 1598) pp. 218–35, and William Gouge, Of domesticall duties (London, 1622) pp. 267–348.
On the dangers of generalising from the example of privileged women, see Margaret Ferguson, ‘Moderation and its Discontents: Recent Work on Renaissance Women’, Feminist Studies, 20 (1994) 349–65.
For recent work on the circulation of oral narratives, see Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1992), and Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford, 1988). See also the discussion of autobiography and ballad in Henk Dragstra’s essay in this volume.
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Wray, R. (2000). [Re]constructing the Past: the Diametric Lives of Mary Rich. In: Dragstra, H., Ottway, S., Wilcox, H. (eds) Betraying Our Selves. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62847-6_11
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