Anne Clifford | Biography

Lady Anne Clifford left one of the most extensive autobiographical records of the seventeenth century, including a memoir of the year 1603; a diary for the years 1616, 1617, and 1619; an autobiography dated 1653; summary accounts of each year from 1650 to 1675; and a diary for 1676. She also dictated biographies of her ancestors from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. The 1603 memoir and the diary for 1616 to 1619 have attracted particular attention from historians and from literary and feminist scholars as rare examples of secular autobiographical writing from the period and are even rarer for having been written by a woman. Clifford's plain style and her lack of self-consciousness in rendering the details, both delicate and indelicate, of her personal and public life in and around the court of King James are further attractive qualities of these early works. The later works, which are both...
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