Examining how early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Collectively the contributors situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts.

Michelle M. Dowd, Julie A. Eckerle

Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 Introduction, Michelle M. Dowd, Julie A. Eckerle; Chapter 2 "Free and Easy as ones discourse"?: Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen, Helen Wilcox; Chapter 3 Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women's Life Writing, Margaret J.M. Ezell; Chapter 4 "Many hands hands": Writing the Self in Early Modern Women's Recipe Books, Catherine Field; Chapter 5 Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford, Megan Matchinske; Chapter 6 Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett's Memoirs, Mary Ellen Lamb; Chapter 7 Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space, Julie A. Eckerle; Chapter 8 Structures of Piety in Elizabeth Richardson's Legacie, Michelle M. Dowd; Chapter 9 Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish, Elspeth Graham; Chapter 10 Margaret Cavendish's Domestic Experiment, Lara Dodds; Chapter 11 "That All the World May Know": Women's "Defense-Narratives" and the Early Novel, Josephine Donovan;