SOURCE: Vecchi, Linda. “‘Lawfull Avarice’: Rachel Speght's Mortalities Memorandum and the Necessity of Women's Education.” Women's Writing 8, no. 1 (2001): 3-19.

In the following essay, Vecchi argues that the central message of Speght's Mortalities Memorandum can best be understood by comparing its two poems, “The Dreame” and “Mortalities Memorandum,” the first of which bespeaks the author's thirst for knowledge, and the second of which exposes how difficult it was, even for an educated, self-confident woman like Speght, to escape the prison of seventeenth-century women's life.

The publication in 1621 of Mortalities Memorandum by the twenty-four year-old Rachel Speght provides the only piece of documented evidence for the existence of the author's mother. No records of her birth, marriage, death, or even a name, remain to inform us of the person whose passing, Speght tells us, occasioned the composition of her only work in verse. We possess only slightly more information about...