In writing and then rewriting autobiographical remembrances recalling three decades of marriage and ensuing years of widowhood, Elizabeth Freke strikingly redefines the relationships among self, family, and patriarchy characteristic of early modern women's autobiography. Suffering and sacrifice dominate an extensive ledger of disappointment and bitterness that reveals over time the complex emotions of a Norfolk gentry woman seeking significance and even vindication in her hardships and frustrations. The infirm woman who eventually found herself utterly alone remained to the end a contentious, melodramatic, yet formidable figure - a strong-willed, even sympathetic person intent upon asserting herself against what she perceived as familial neglect and legal abuse. By making available both versions of the remembrances in their entirety, this new, multiple-text edition clarifies the refashioning inherent in each stage of writing and rewriting, recovering with unusual immediacy Freke's late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century domestic world.
Author Biography:
Raymond A. Anselment was born December 4,1939, and educated in both Minnesota and New York. After teaching for a year as a lecturer at the University of Rochester, he accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professorship at the University of Connecticut, where he is currently a Professor of English specializing in seventeenth-century English literature. The author of three dozen articles, an edited collection of essays on two plays of George Farquhar (Macmillan), and a facsimile edition of Thomas Taylor's work on typology (Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints), Anselment has also published three book-length scholarly studies that range across various seventeenth-century periods and issues. The first, entitled Betwixt Jest and Earnest (University of Toronto), explores the practices and limitations of religious ridicule in a number of prose controversialists, including Milton, Marvell, and Swift. The second book, Loyalist Resolve (University of Delaware), focuses on the poetic responses to the political conflicts of the Caroline and Interregnum decades. The Realms of Apollo (University of Delaware, which by contract had the right of first refusal), chosen by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book, explores the ways in which seventeenth-century poets confronted the realities of such everyday threats as infant mortality, plague, syphilis, and smallpox. Anselment's diverse scholarly interests are further evident in the more than twenty authors he has studied in essays published in most of the significant British, American, and Canadian journals in his field, including Review of English Studies, Medical History, Modern Language Review, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, The Seventeenth Century; ELH, Studies in English Literature, Modern Philology, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Journal of the History of Ideas, Philological Quarterly, Studies in Philology, Huntington Library Quarterly, The Journal of British Studies, Restoration, Papers on Language and Lite