The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke 1671-1714

Elizabeth Freke's accounts of her late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Norfolk gentry world are the basis for a new critical edition of her autobiography. A complexly contradictory woman caught in an unhappy domestic life, she consciously constructed and reconstructed an identity as a wife, mother, and widow. By preserving two quite often different manuscript versions, the edition provides a new appreciation of a distinct self-image among early modern women's autobiography.