Elizabeth Isham’s Everlasting Library: Memory and Self in Early Modern Autobiography

This book is about conversion narrative, a popular genre of spiritual autobiography that proliferated during the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century within the context of the Evangelical Revival in England. The subject is set in a large chronological frame, beginning with the rise of the genre in the mid-seventeenth century and ending with the ‘fall’ of the genre among some of the non-Western converts of early nineteenth-century missionaries. This large frame allows the genre to be seen whole, and draws attention to the particular conditions under which early modern people turned to spiritual autobiography. Tracing the development of the genre across the period of the Evangelical Revival through different communities and representative writings, the book provides a comprehensive typology of conversion and evangelical self-identity as it differed among the Arminian and perfectionist followers of Wesley, the Moravians under the influence of ‘stillness’, the moderate Calvinists in the Church of England, the Particular Baptists who continued to embrace high Calvinism, and others. A chapter is also included on conversion narrative among evangelical Presbyterians involved in the Cambuslang Revival in Scotland. On the basis of extensive, untapped archival sources, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative explores the different forms of expression among the educated and uneducated, pastors and laypeople, women and men, and Western and non-Western peoples. By being on the trailing edge of Christendom and the leading edge of modernity, eighteenth-century England provided the right conditions for evangelical conversion narrative to flourish, and the concluding chapter examines afresh the significance of the appearance of the genre in this context. This book is concerned with the history of autobiography, the study of eighteenth-century religion and culture, and our understanding of the Evangelical Revival.

In this 2007 book, Kate Chedgzoy explores the ways in which women writers of the early modern British Atlantic world imagined, visited, created and haunted textual sites of memory. Asking how women's writing from all parts of the British Isles and Britain's Atlantic colonies employed the resources of memory to make sense of the changes that were refashioning that world, the book suggests that memory is itself the textual site where the domestic echoes of national crisis can most insistently be heard. Offering readings of the work of poets who contributed to the oral traditions of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and analysing poetry, fiction and life-writings by well-known and less familiar writers such as Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson and Aphra Behn, this book explores how women's writing of memory gave expression to the everyday, intimate consequences of the major geopolitical changes that took place in the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth century.

Early modern autobiographies and diaries provide a unique insight into women's lives and how they remembered, interpreted and represented their experiences. Sharon Seelig analyses the writings of six seventeenth-century women: diaries by Margaret Hoby and Anne Clifford, more extended narratives by Lucy Hutchinson, Ann Fanshawe, and Anne Halkett, and the extraordinarily varied and self-dramatising publications of Margaret Cavendish. Combining an account of the development of autobiography with close and attentive reading of the texts, Seelig explores the relation between the writers' choices of genre and form and the stories they chose to tell. She demonstrates how, in the course of the seventeenth century, women writers progressed from quite simple forms based on factual accounts to much more imaginative and persuasive acts of self-presentation. This important contribution to the fields of early modern literary studies and gender studies illuminates the interactions between literature and autobiography.