1 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (New York: HBJ, 1928), 119.

2 Anne Murray Halkett probably wrote the first version of her manuscript narrative in 1677-78; it was first published in 1875 and again in 1979, and each time titled somewhat differently: Anne Murray Lady Halkett, The Autobiography, ed. John Gough Nicols (Westminster Camden Society), New Series, No. 13, 1875; and Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis. Oxford University Press, 1979. I have made a new etext edition of the manuscript with new notes and placed it on the Net in 2006, with new notes; I followed Nicols and called the text, . "The Autobiography of Anne Murray, Lady Halkett". For this paper I cite pagination from Loftis. A contemporary example of a memoir written so that the writer may focus on her relationship with an important historical personage is Memoires de Madame Campan, premiere femme de chambre de Marie Antoinette, ed. Jean Chalon, notes Carloes de Angulo (Paris: Ramsay, 1979); a contemporary example of an autobiography written so as to tell the life story of the writer is The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, ed Charles Jackson (London & Edinburgh: Surtees Society, 1875). In many cases life-writings by women who wrote from the later 17th through the 19th century have been retitled or titled in the first place by editors as in the case of Halkett. If it's an Autobiography, then it's meant to be the story of Halkett's whole life; if it's a Memoir, it's a record of an historically-important era in which the author was involved with people regarded as significant by others.

3 For the thinking behind my paper I am indebted to the whole of Carole Pateman's profound The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988).

4 e.g., Sheila Ottway, Designing Disencumbrance: The Representation of Self in Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century English Women. (University of Groningen, 1988): 253-76; Sharon Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600-1680. (Cambridge UP, 2006), 111-13. "Spiritual autobiography" is one of the types long accepted in a typology of 17th through 18th century autobiographies, and one that, along with "family history," "conversion narrative," "scandal memoir," "Defense (or apology, appeal, vindication)" and "travel-writing" still dominates the way scholars perceive women's autobiographies in this era. See, e.g., Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Carolyn A. Barros and Johanna M. Smith, edd. Life-Writings by British Women, 1660-1815. (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2000):24-32; Elspeth Graham and Elaine Hoby, ed. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989); and Charlotte Otten, ed. English Women's Voices, 1540-1700 (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1992).

5 Sara Heller Mendelson, "Stuart women's diaries and occasional memoirs," Women in English Society, 1500-1880, ed. Mary Prior (London & NY: Metheun, 1985):184-86.

6 I am much indebted to a thorough and detailed description of the manuscripts and "stitched books" in the British Library by Margaret J. M. Ezell, "Ann Halkett's Morning Devotions: Posthumous Publication and the Culture of Writing in Late Seventeenth- Century Britain," Prints, Manuscript & Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, edd. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol. Columbus: Ohio State U, 2000): 215-34.

7 David Stevenson, "A Lady and Her Lovers: Anne, Lady Halkett," King or Covenant: Voices from the Civil War. (Melksham, Wiltshire: Cromwell Press, 1996):191: "what can be deciphered suggests a typical determination to prove that her parents were of good birth, derivation from noble stock being claimed on both sides of her family." Halkett is the only woman's text Stevenson discusses. See Delany, British Autobiography, 133, 171-72. See also comes from Patricia Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: Delaware UP, 2000):90-91. When referring to Anne Halkett before she married James Halkett, I call her Anne Murray. We cannot know if she ever used the name Bampfield.

8 I use the word married to cover bethrothed in the present tense or bethrothed with consummation, both of which in the era were recognized as legitimate forms of marriage. The ceremony may have occurred in Holland as Loftis surmizes; at any rate until 1653 Anne Murray lived with and behaved towards Joseph Bampfield as his spouse. Even though Bampfield had not legitimately married Anne Murray because in 1648 his first wife, Catherine Sydenham (who died in 1657), was still living, in Anne Murray's eyes she had become Bampfield's wife. If she had not, she was in the eyes of others not just a fallen woman, but an adulteress, a searing stigma that not only would have ruined her prospects in the 17th century, but in print destroy her reputation afterwards. That is why when in 1653 Anne Murray got herself to admit in spoken words she knew Bampfield had another living wife, she delayed two years before marrying James Halkett despite Halkett's manifest eligibility and eagerness to marry her. See my paper, "Cast out from respectability a while:' Anne Murray Halkett's Life in the Manuscripts", given at a panel, "Bibliograph, Textual Studies, and Book History, Session I," Gettysburg EC/ASECS, October 27, 2007.

For a concise explanation of the forms marriage could take as well as the confused state they were in during the interregnum due to well-meaning attempts to reform the law to achieve consistency, see Chris Durston, "'Unhallowed Wedlocks:' The Regulation of Marriage during the English Revolution," The Historical Journal, 31:1 (1988):45-59. See Sigmund Freud, "The Taboo of Virginity," Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, trans. James Strachey, ed., introd. Philip Rieff (NY: Collier, 1963):70-86.

On Charles's hatred of Bampfield, its sources and how this destroyed Bampfield's career (and thus led to Anne's separation from him), see Colonel Bampfield's Apology, edd. Paul H. Hardacre and John Loftis, together with Bampfield's Later Career: a Biographical Supplement by John Loftis. (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1993), hereinafter called Bampfield's Apology and Loftis's Supplement, 82-2-83, 138-39,168, 242.

9 e.g., Margaret Bottrall, "'A kind of picture left behind me ...'", Everyman a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (London: Murray, 1958):151-52; Mary Beth Rose's "Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography," Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse UP 1986):267-68; Gabriele Rippli, "'The conflict betwixt love and honor' - the autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett" (pp. 7-29), Feminist contributions to the literary canon: setting standards of taste, ed. Susanne Fendler, ed. Lewiston, NY; Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1997), 17 ("Halkett's autobiography can be divided into three large parts ..."). This powerfully received image has been reinforced recently by Donna Landry, "Eroticizing the Subject, or Royals in Drag: Reading the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett," The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England, edd. Paula Backscheider and Timothy Dystal (London, Portland, Ore: Frank Cass, 1996): pp. 134-40. For an example of valuing Halkett's book as an anticipation of the novel, see Seelig, Autobiography and Gender, 111-30, 156-57; for her uses of Austen, 115, 117, 188n.28; for an overt treatment of Halkett's and Bampfield's memoirs as companion romances, see Sheila Ottway, "They Only Lived Twice: Public and Private Selfhood in the Autobiographies of Anne, Lady Halkett and Colonel Joseph Bampfield, Betraying Ourselves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, edd. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox. (NY: St Martins Press, 2000): 136- 147.

As I showed in my "Cast out from respectability", the narrative we have does not end with Anne Murray's marriage to James Halkett, as she immediately goes on to tell of their return journey to Scotland, their visit to Halkett's relatives and her taking on the role of stepmother to his younger daughter, and how, using her Drummond family connections and London friends, she began to network to help her new royalist husband avoid serving in Cromwell's Scottish council (Loftis, Memoir, 86-87).

10 Stevenson, "A Lady and Her Lovers," 193: "the page of the memoir which would have recorded her mother's death is missing." Rose attributes the power of Halkett's autobiography also to the central role her mother plays in Halkett's early life and Halkett's unusual candor; Rose says that Halkett "refrains from idealizing her," Gender, Genre, and History," 268-69; Seelig says (more frankly) that Halkett presents her mother as "harsh and vindictive," Gender and Autobiography, 116. Rose argues that Anne's autobiography is so superior to those by Margaret Cavendish, Ann Fanshawe and Alice Thornton because (among other traits) alone among 17th century women autobiographers Anne does not idealize or sentimentalize her mother. This is not quite true, as readers of Lucy Hutchinson's brief memoir will recall. Lucy Hutchinson, "The Life of Mrs Hutchinson, written by herself, a Fragment," in Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed., introd. (London: Everyman, 1995):15. Hutchinson does break off when she begins to write of her mother -- or her text was destroyed. Hutchinson's presentation of her mother's love life and her mother's dislike of her daughter's intelligence and power of self-determination were noted in another paper given at the panel, "Womens Autobiography in the Long Eighteenth Century," Montreal ASECS, 30 March 2006: Robert Mayer's "Lucy Hutchinson's Autobiographical Career."

11 This act on behalf of Balcarres is Anne's last known work for him. They were a couple for some 23 months out of 4 and 1/2 years after the marriage or bethrothal in late spring into summer 1648 to January 1649. She is 25-26. The periods were 1) marriage and open life together in Holland. 9 months; 2) January 1649-September 1649, another clandestine cohabitation in London. 9 months; 3) Fall 1652 to February 1653, love affair resumed (he quietly comes into her room at night), in Edinburgh. 5 more months. In addition, the brief encounters: two meetings where they come together emotionally and perhaps physically, one hysterical which she deals with by getting very sick: in late October 1650 -- last week is 26th-31st October, Saturday through Thursday, Fyvie, 2 days and 2 nights; September 1652, Bampfield intercepts Anne at Floors; the adieu, Sunday night, the 10th of December 1654, London, 1 night. See my essay, Cast out from respectability a while:' Anne Murray Halkett's Life in the Manuscripts

Anne's first if bigamously married husband, Joseph Bampfield was closely associated with the Scots Presbyterians and particularly Balcarres, see Bampfield's Apology and Loftis's supplement, 76-80, 132-34, 165, 168, 238-39, 249; Robertson, Moray, 86; and Eva Scott, The King in Exile: The Wanderings of Charles II from June 1646 to July 1654. (NY: Dutton, 1905). 296-97, 395-96, and David Stevenson, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Scotland, 1644-51 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2003):122-79. An English point of view and discretion may be partly responsible for how critics have glided over an episode in Scots history, which also reveals that Anne continued to fulfill engagements she committed herself to when attached to Bampfield.

12 Loftis, Memoirs, (195n) remarks "there are at least three other accounts of the escape:" J. S. Clarke, The Life of James the Second, Collected out of Memoirs Writ of His Own Hand, 2 vols. (London: 1816)1:33-38; Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, 9:19-20; and Colonel Joseph Bampfeild's Apologies, "Written by himselfe and printed at his own desire" (1685):41-42. All three are consistent in detail, and Anne Halkett's (not published until 1875) "corresponds closely with that in The Life of James the Second." The retelling from F. C. Turner, James II (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), 16-19, is accurate as long as he follows Halkett's memoir. Once Turner moves away from Halkett's text and begins to blacken Bampfield from other sources, he becomes inaccurate.

13 Feminist scholars and critics studying the lives and writings of early modern and 18th century women have recently demonstrated how important communities of women and supportive individual female friendshps were to individual women. See, for example, Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, edd. Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); Rebecca Monte and Nicole Phol, edd. Female Communities 1600-1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (London: Macmillan, 2000); and Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005): 232, but also passim. The theoretical or psychological-social grounding for all this may be found in Lyn Mickel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (Cambridge: Harvard, 1992).

14 There have been a number of studies of the self-esteem and power felt by royalist and gentry women due to their rank and Anglican beliefs and how this led to their writing; viz., Carol Barash, English Women's Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), and Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers: 1650-1689 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); but the older view of the era itself turning over to women of all types and ranks a space in which to find roles outside that of wife, mother, and daughter, seems to me as important. See Keith Thomas "Women and the Civil War Sects," Past and Present, 13 (1958):42-62; Margaret George, Women in the First Capitalist Society: Experiences in Seventeenth Century England (Urbana: Illinois UP, 1988); and Stevie Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640-1660 (The Woman's Press, 1998). Although she continually denied her desire to function publicly and record her participation in history, Lucy Hutchinson was clearly similarly motivated.

15 Four scholars of the English civil war, two of them historians, who have used Couper's biography have suggested that the original manuscript narrative's ending is not representative and went on to deal with Anne's marriage. See David Stevenson, "A Lady and Her Lovers," 205 ("perhaps the marriage was dealt with originally"); Loftis suggests this, and John Gough Nicholls and Samuel Gardener feel "there is some danger of assuming that what survives [of Anne Murray, Lady Halkett's manuscript] is representative of what was written." Some reviewers also suggest that the book went on to cover Anne's later life; see Mark A. Kishlansky, "Review," Loftis, John, ed. Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe. Oxford University Press, 1979, Modern Philology, 78:4 (1981) ...", 431. Historians are dependent on Halkett's account to know how James escaped; she is the only one to describe how she dressed him (Loftis, Memoir, 24-26). For Halkett's French contemporaries, see Faith Beasley, Revising Memory: Women's Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth Century France (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990):64-70. Halkett's text exemplies the alternative or unconventional history Madame du Deffand praises: "These are what I like to have in histories ... and what show me that in everyday events one does not discern truth at all, one does not see the underpinnings." Halkett's narrative might have pleased Austen's Catherine Morland who we remember did not like conventional history: it's filled with "The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome ... (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed., introd., notes Marilyn Butler (NY: Penguin, 1995):1:14:97.

16 See L. C. Cumming, "Anne, Lady Halkett," Blackwoods Magazine, Nov. 1924, Vol CCXI, Microfilm o6250, pp. 654-76, particularly 654-55, 672-73, 675-76; Emily Hahn, Aphra Behn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), published in the US in 1949 as Purple Passage: A Novel about a Lady Both Famous and Fantastic; on the Hahn's life and feminist norms, see Ken Cuthbertson, Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves and Adventures of Emily Hahn (NY: Faber and Faber, 1998).

17 See my paper, "Cast out from respectability a while where I tell how Anne's sister insisted she separate herself, and would not support Anne if Anne did not; Anne saw this as allowing herself to be stigmatized as a fallen woman, particularly Notes 18 and 19.

From her earliest extant to her latest meditations, in the diary entries copied out by Couper in the latter part of his biography, and in the narrative manuscript there is repeated evidence that Anne Murray Halkett never forgot nor was allowed to forget that she had been "shamed," been a target of "reproach," and is experiencing "perpetuall disquiet" (Loftis 76). "Disquiet" and "misfortune" are Anne's words, the first repeated in her autobiography, meditations and copied out by Couper in his biography (e.g. Couper 44; Loftis 76: "what would be a perpetuall disquiet to mee", 76. She tells us that in Edinburgh in fall 1652 after nightfall Bampfield would regularly join the conspirators, how she was made uncomfortable by the mean teasing of the women servants, Crew and Jane Hambledon: "several times ... shee had observed a gentleman come privately to my chamber and sayd she knew that I and severalls looked upon him as one I intended to marry, but hee should never bee my husband (Loftis 69-70).

See also [Anne Murray Halkett], Meditations upon Jabez his request, ... Together with sacramental meditations on the Lords Supper; and prayers, pious reflections and observations (Edinburgh : printed by Mr. Andrew Symson, and are to be sold by him and Mr. Henry Knox, 1702), 83. The last part of this book contains a series of secular meditations which recall those of 17th century writers upon ethics, p. 83. It's not surprize to find Anne Halkett meditating "Of retirement," 76, "Of marriage and widowhood," 77-78; "Of the burden of Debt," 79, but there are some surprises, like "A Prayer on a long Continued Storm of Frost and Snow, January 24, 1684, 72. At the opening of the book too there are revealing passage, e.g., "The occasion she was detained somewhere" and decides to "fill time" writing about it. Nonetheless, she wrote to soothe, calm, compose and cheer herself.

At the same time there has been a conservative reassertion of Halkett's conventional religiosity, and the value and interest of her devotional meditation, but one which marginalizes Halkett's real distress. See Trill, Suzanne, "Lady Anne Halkett" (1621[?]-1699): Diarist, Autobiographer, Political Writer, Woman of letters," Active 1644-1699 in England, Britain, Europe. The Literary Encyclopedia, 15 Nov. 2004. The Literary Dictionary Company. 20 April 2006.

18 Paul Delany, "Female Autobiographers," British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969):162-63.

19 In her perceptive article,"Fashioning innocence: rhetorical construction of character in the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett," Texas Studies in Literature and Language (46:3) 2004, 340-62, Judith Kearns devotes a great deal of space to refuting Delany by thematic textual analysis. She seems, though, to forget Anne Murray was now broke, homeless, and married to a bigamous stigmatized spy. Who would take her in? Halkett secured a place in Scotland because Bampfield had connections with and the trust of powerful Scots Presbyterian royalists, and he wrote her advising her to go to Edinburgh (Loftis, Memoir, 49); see again my "Cast out from respectability ...". See also Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (London: Pandora, 1987).

20 See Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1989): 178-200; Caroline Breashears, "Scandalous Categories: Classifying the Memoirs of Unconventional Women," Philological Quarterly, 82 (2003):187-200; Barros and Smith, Life-Writings, 28-30. See Chokalian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, 93.

21 This approach has in the past led to unexamined and unjust distortions of Joseph Bampfield's conduct and thus the history with which Anne Murray Halkett was closely involved. See Loftis's frank discussion of his earlier approach to Bampfield before he came to produce his edition of Bampfield's Apology and study Bampfield's life preparatory to writing Loftis's important revisionary biographical sketch, Bampfield's Apology and Loftis's supplement, 14.

22 Kishlansky, 431. It's interesting how part of the evasion or erasure of Halkett's story has prevented an obvious comparison of her with Aphra Behn. For two important recent revisionary essays on Aphra Behn where it's suggested she did not support herself by her pen for a living (something impossible to do and improbable), but used the money she could get this way to supplement her standard of living when protected by different men or when living alone. See Germaine Greer, "Did Aphra Behn Earn a Living by Her Pen," Slipshod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (New York: Viking, 1995):173-197, and "Women in the Literary Market Place: Pimping in Grub Street," Women and Poetry 1660-1750, edd. Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttledown (London: Palgrave, 2003):161-79. See my "Cast out from Respectability", Loftis, Memoirs, 223n82. For an instance of evident embarrassment, see Selig, Autobiography and Gender: "she might have had second thoughts on rereading what she had written" (130).

23 The emphatic importance of money is made explicit in Lady Elizabeth Delaval's autobiographical meditations; see Helen Wilox, "Her Own Life, Her Own Living? Text and Materiality in Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Autobiographical Writings," Betraying Ourselves: Forms of Self- Representation in Early Modern English Texts, edd. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox. (NY: St Martins Press, 2000):105-19. Couper frequently points out that Anne continually struggled against her indebtedness and also brought a legacy of virtue in place of money and rank e.g., Couper 30-31 (the period of well over a year the Halketts lived in London while Anne attempted to wrest an inheritance back), 50-53 (the harassed close of her life). One of the final anecdotes in Couper's biography: Anne Halkett finally answers a friend's repeated demand she stop her charities because she is so much in debt that

the true case was, that she could easily command less or more to relieve the poor or serve the Sick, and while she had it, she could not deny it: Whereas it required greater Summs to pay off Debts, which she could not command [whereupon] She wrote to a Friend, concerning some proposals, which, if they took effect might contribute to her ease; By his return she found that no relief could be expected that way (Couper 51).

24 At the East Central meeting of our society this past October, I showed that since Couper followed Halkett's original manuscript narrative closely, following it proportionally, paraphrasing and even quoting from it as he went, Couper's biography functions as a palimpsest through which we can discern the general subjects of what has been torn away and where the original story ended. For my comparison I also relied on matter from her devotional meditations and the chronology that emerges from Colonel Bampfield's Apology and Loftis's Supplement. Bampfield was, as I argued, Halkett's first husband in her eyes, even if the marriage was bigamous on his part; their relationship lasted 4 and 1/2 years. See "Cast out from respectability"See Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," translated by James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980):39.

25 To recap, from my "Cast out from respectability", the first episode, a thwarted courtship, climaxes twice in Anne Murrray's fierce quarrels with her mother. There is then a gap during which Jane Murray died, and we read on to find Anne Murray helping a Colonel Bampfield, her bethrothed, to rescue the young James, Duke of York (April 20, 1648). Where Anne is living is left vague, except that it seems to be London, until shortly after the death of Charles I, she goes to live with her younger brother, William Murray, who has been ejected from court (probably in February 1649) and dies. Since she could have been imprisoned for helping a Stuart heir to escape, she must now flee London so she goes to live for ten months with her friend, Lady Anne Howard in Naworth Castle, Cumberland (September 10, 1649 to June 1650, Loftis 32-50). She is ejected, and, upon receiving Bampfield's letters and advice (Loftis, Memoir, 49), heads further north, Scotland. At Fifeshire the emphasis is on how quickly she is accepted into the household of Lady Mary Seton, Countess of Dunfermline and her niece, Lady Anna Erskin and remains in safety at Fyvie castle with them as their companion for more than two years (September 19, 1650 to June 24, 1652, Loftis, Memoir, 53- 63); at the end of this chaotic era brought on by wars, Anne initiates a short touring excursion into Moray, northern Scotland for a month as companion to the niece (June 1652, Loftis, Memoir, 53). Then when Anne choses (in the face of her maid's frightened hysteria (Loftis, Memoir, 62) to travel by herself to go to live in Edinburgh and intrigue with Bampfield on the Stuart's king behalf, the seven months she stayed in, and he hid near, Sir Robert Moray's house are accounted for by presenting herself as a needed companion to the pregnant Lady Sophia Moray (summer 1652 to January 1653, Loftis, Memoir, 66- 69). After Sophia Moray's agonized death in childbirth (January 1653), and Bampfield's desperate flight further north when he was excluded from Charles II's comission to the Scottish royalists conspirators (February 1653), she is driven to less respectable lodgings where she's immediately in danger of molestation. It is then (March 21, 1653) she admits she knows Bampfield's first wife is still living, and after recovery from a fourth psychosomatic illness, presents herself as now governess to and living with James Halkett's daughters (November 1653). Finally, when she goes to London (September 1654), where she's arrested twice for debt, she goes to live with her sister at her brother-in-law's estate (Loftis, Memoir, 79-83) until she marries James Halkett (March 1, 1656), after which her first step is to apply for help from Margaret Boyle, Lady Broghill in Edinburgh (Loftis, Memoir, 87).

26 Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, 91.

27 See Women in context : two hundred years of British women autobiographers, a reference guide and reader, ed. Barbara Penny Kanner, Jane Decker, et aliae. NY: G.K. Hall; London : Prentice Hall Hall International, 1997). (HQ1593.A3 K35 1997 Reference). There are a number of recent exceptions where this story is told, e.g., Claire Tomalin's Mrs Jordan's Profession: The Actress and the Prince (NY: Knopf, 1994).

28 The texts I will be quoting from are The Memoires of the Dutchess Mazarine. Written in French by her own hand, and done into English by P. Porter, Esq. Together with the reasons of her coming into England. Likewise, a letter containing a true character of her person and conversation. London: Printed and are to be sold by William Cademan, 1676; La Verite dans son jour, ou les veritables memoires de M. Mancini, connetable Colonne, edited and annotated by Patricia Francis Cholakian and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1998); Memoires de'Hortense et de Marie Mancini, ed, introd., notes by Gerard Doscot (1965: rpt. Paris: Mercure de France, 1987); The Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat, Daughter of the late Admiral Yeo. Written by herself. London, 1771, and Miscellanies in Prose and Verse by Mrs Catherine Jemmat, Daughter of the late Admiral Yeo, and author of her own memoirs. London, 1771; An Apology For The Life Of George Anne Bellamy, Late Of Covent-Garden Theatre, Written By Herself. (in six volumes). 3rd edition. Edited by Alexander Bicknell. London: Printed for J. Bell, 1785); I've also read and compared La Verite with Memoires de'Hortense et de Marie Mancini, ed, introd., notes by Gerard Doscot. For more on Catherine Jemmat, see Roger Lonsdale, "Catherine Jemmat," Eighteenth Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford UP, 234-37; "Catherine Jemmat," Barros and Smith, Life-Writings, 138-147. Francis Hawes Vane (bap. 1715, d. 1788), is my sixth example; see below.

29 Hortense's was published in 1675 and a year later translated into English, and Marie's was published in in 1677; the suggestion was made to me in conversation by Charles Hinnant. 1676; see Elizabeth Goldsmith, Goldsmith, "Publishing the Lives of Hortense and Marie Mancini," Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, edd. Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (thaca: Cornell UP, 1995):31-45. We of course cannot know if Halkett or Bellamy read the Mancini books, only that Anne Halkett read French and contemporary plays and her text is strongly influenced by 17th century French romances and plays; and that between the ages of 4 and 9 George Anne Bellamy was educated in a French convent and remained fluent in French and a reading woman all her life.

30 See my "Cast out from Respectability"; Hartmann, Enchanting Bellamy, 91-114, 175, 202; Deirdre E. Heddon, Bellamy, George Anne (1731?1788), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2036, accessed 10 Jan 2007].

31 Cholakian and others record how when Mazarin died, Marie Mancini rightly feared Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna would not go through with the marriage; the contract which married Hortenze to Richilieu's nephew, Armand de la Meilleraye handed her huge fortune over to him upon marriage, Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, 85, 102-3. Both memoirists show how reluctant their relatives were to extend any help to them, and advised them to return to their husbands.

32 See my argument for considering Anne Halkett's diaries as part of her autobiography, See "Cast out from respectability" See also Estelle C. Jelinek, in her "Introduction: Women's Autobiography and the Male Tradition," Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. introd. Estelle Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980), 18-19. A contemporary instance of the multiform autobiography is Anne Clifford's; when studied this way it becomes a masterly life-writing; see, e.g., B. G. MacCarthy's study in The Female Pen: Women Writers and Novelists, 1621- 1818, prefaced by Janet Todd (1946; rpt NY: NY University Press, 1994):56-66; Seelig, Autobiography and Gender, 34-35. Two instances of the form which may be familiar to English readers where the editor has been faithful (in both instances the editor was a close friend, correspondent and lived with the autobiographer) are the autobiographies of Margaret Wilson Oliphant as published and "arranged" by her second cousin, Annie L. Walker Coghill; Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, as published and "concluded" by her close friend and correspondent, Maria Weston Chapman; The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. W. W. Oliphant, arranged and edited by Mrs Harry Coghill (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899); Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, 3 volumes edited and completed by memorials by Maria Weston Chapman, introd. Gaby Weiner (1877; rpt. in 2 vols. London: Virago, 1983). For two 17th century examples, see Joanna Moody, ed. The Private Life of An Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1998); Lady Anne Clifford, The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616-1619: a critical edition, ed. Katherine O. Acheson. (New York: Garland, 1995); Clifford, D. J. H., ed. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1992). But see Domna T. Stanton, "Autogynography," The Female Autograph (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987):9-13, where she argues this is stereotypical thinking and points to male autobiographies which are discontinuous, fragmented, evasive and female autobiographies which are linear and present a public life.

33 I accept Patricia Cholakian and Elizabeth Goldsmith's analysis of the two French women's texts are basically by Hortense and Marie Mancini; see Patricia Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation in Seventeenth Century France (Newark: Delaware UP, 200):91-95; 102-104; Elizabeth Goldsmith, "Publishing the Lives of Hortence and Marie Mancini," Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, edd. Going Public: Women and Pubilshing in Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995):31-45. Marie Mancini left letters now in archives in Italian libraries which show the same style, attitude, personality and abilities as her memoir, see Elisabetta Graziosi, "Lettere da un matrimonio fallito: Maria Mancini al marito Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna," Le scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia secoli XV - XVII, a cura di Gabriella Zarri. (Roma: Viella, Libreria editrice, 1999):535-84. Several scholars who have studied Halkett's autobiography beyond myself have argued she must've kept careful diaries and this may be seen in Simon Couper's biography; see my "Cast out from respectability"; Hartmann's argument that Bellamy had to have written much of her book is based on its intimate tone and detailed character and perspective; he too posits diaries and kept letters, see Enchanting Bellamy (Surrey, England: Windmill Press, 1956), 312-18 and passim. Bellamy's added-on sixth volume is the same kind of discontinuous form Halkett's diary entries are in, and those described and cited above. Jemmat's first volume is also filled with a verse miscellany (97-148); she may said to have continued her autobiography in a second apparently quite different book, Miscellanies, in prose and verse, by Mrs Catherine Jemmat, Daughter of the late Admiral Yeo, of Plymouth, author of her own Memoirs (London: Printed 1771). She opens both with a long impressive list of subscribers and dedication which frames her as an injured woman in need of support. Francis Vane's memoir appears as "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality" in Tobias Smollett, Peregrine Pickle, introd. Walter Allen (London:Everyman, 1930): 29-143. It has naturally been on occasion attributed to Smollett or said to have been revised by him.

It is in fact common for a woman's autobiography to have lost its original paratext and be known only in an abridged form re-framed by later editors. See Jane Couchman and Ann M. Crabb, eds. Women's Letters across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004). For comparable French and Italian situations where the unpublished autobiography was a single narrative surrounded by fragmented, interrupted and formless materials which were then added to, censored and reshaped according to the criteria of the editor or publisher who wanted to alter the life to suit a stereotype or agenda of his or her own or a later era, see Nancy Miller's "Writing Fictions: Women's Autobiographies in France," Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Criticism (NY: Columbia UP, 1988), 102-23 (e.g. what was done to Daniel Stern or Marie D'Aoult's journals) and Elisabetta Marchetti, "Le lettere di Teresa di Gesu. Prime traduzioni et edizioni italiane," Per lettera: Le scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia secoli XV - XVII, a cura di Gabriella Zarri. (Roma: Viella, Libreria editrice, 1999): 263-86. The recent Broadview edition of Oliphant's autobiography (ed. Elisabeth Jay, 1988) has dropped the last 2/3s of the original and replaced it with an apparatus of "contemporary materials," which in effect erases much that is important about's Oliphant life which she wrote about in her letters. The new book is much shorter than Coghill's edition, even with the new apparatus. For the situation for modern biographers, see Ian Hamilton's Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Modern Biography (London: Pimlico. 1993).

34 Cholakian and Goldsmith demonstrate that Hortense's memoir is judicial; she is writing to support her case for legal separation and maintenance from the courts; Marie Mancini is vindicating her character which she thought degraded and debased by the pseudo-memoir; she too is looking for financial support. Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, 94-100, 103-7; Goldsmith, Publishing Women's Life Stories, 1647-1720 (Adlershot: Ashgate Press, 2001):98- 133. Catherine Jemmat is a third woman seeking money (from her father or support from her relatives) and to vindicate her character as well as put before the public how she was coerced into marriage to a brutal alcoholic possessively jealous man.

35 See Josephine Donovan, "Towards a Women's Poetics," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3:1-2( (1984):99-109. Also useful is Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indian UP, 1987). Smith has interesting comments on why Halkett's autobiography is not considered culturally significant, 8, 11, 88. I am in this paper also indebted for my general sense of women's "scandal memoirs" to Caroline Breashears's "The Female Appeal in Great Britain, 1676-126, a paper given at panel, "Womens Autobiography in the Long Eighteenth Century," Montreal ASECS, 30 March 2006, where she proposed a set of more accurate characteristics and a new generic name, "the female appeal." Catherine Jemmat's autobiography fits Breashears' outline most closely.

36 Mary G. Mason puts it this way, women autobiographers repeatedly write their lives in ways that "ground their identity in a relationship with a chosen other (or others), "The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers," Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980):207-35, especially 209-10. Mason's essay has been influential because she is basically correct about women's autobiographies. For another 19th century example, compare "Diary 1879" and "Diary 1880" to all the others in The Journals of George Eliot, edd. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 149- 214. Mason would say that when Oliphant's sons had all died, when Eliot's beloved partner had died, this two women seems to have lost their ability "to write openly about themselves." I would put it that they lost the imagined audience they cared about as well as the social justification of their existence, their place in imagined social communities. See also Marianne Hirsh, "Mothers and Daughters: Review Essay," Signs: Journal of women in Culture and Society, 7:11 (1981):200- 22.

37 All five exemplify Carole Pateman's argument in The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Cal: Stanford UP, 1988), that women are not seen as directly tied to society, but rather to society through a family or husband; when laws permit this a married woman is given no appeal against all but life- threatening abuse; she is told to return to her husband.

38 Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986):151-63; Christine Mason Sutherland, The Eloquence of Mary Astell (Calgary, Alberta: Calgary UP, 2005):82; Mary Astell, "Serious Reflections Upon Marriage," First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799, ed. Moira Ferguson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985):190-96.

39 Janet Todd treats "The Memoirs of a Lady Of Quality" as equivalent to Manley's slanderous fictions meant to attack others, see The Sign of Angellica (NY: Columbia UP, 1989):, 128-29. The only available separate edition of Vane's memoir I could find was one accompanied with salacious drawings. Vane is amoral and strikingly anti-social as this was understood in the 18th century, e.g., "the world had now given me up, and I renounced the world with the most perfect resignation. I weighed in my own breast what I should lose in point of character, with what I suffered in my peace at home, and found, that my reputation was not to be preserved, except at the expense of my quiet I therefore determined to give up a few ceremonial visits, and empty professions, for the more substantial enjoyments of life" ("Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," 2:463); but this is in response to the behavior of others. She is not an agent of her fate, so much as reactive. She writes a memoir drenched in intense emotionalism. It's often said to be devoid of sensibility. She is putting forward a case which resembles Hortense Mancini's. She ought to be included in anthologies of memoirs by women and she is not. A rare disinteresed full analysis may be found in W. Austin Flanders, "The Significance of Smollett's Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," Genre, 8 (1975):146-54.

40 Todd, Sign of Angellica, 84-98, 128-31; Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self- Representation, 89-91, describes how in his book about Hortense Mancini, The Vagabond Duchess, Cyril Hughes Hartmann continually describes Hortense as a liar treats her as a liar not to be trusted and will not retell the story Hortense seeks to tell; with an admixture of pity, this is precisely his fundamental attitude towards Bellamy until near the end of his biography, see, e.g., Enchanting Bellamy, ix (she is "wildly inaccurate, tells "tall stories which I do not for a moment believe"). The difference is in Bellamy's case Hartmann has much less information to go on, so he must retell her story more or less as she told it, interlacing it of course with frequent denigrating remarks.

41 Hartmann, Enchanting Bellamy, continually discovers Bellamy in lies; she is incompetent, extravagant, inconsistent, beneath the first rank of actors, and a sexual dupe; Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992):113-126. Straub is offended by the trope of "sentimental victim." For W. MacQueen-Pope's sneers, see Ladies First: The Story of Woman's Conquest of the British Stage (London: W. H. Allen, 1952):203-12 (he cannot resist a salacious subtitle: "she had a weakness for trousers"). Those who seem to read the biography with sympathy, believe in Bellamy's integrity, sincerity, greatness as an actress, argue it is by George Anne Bellamy (e.g., Sandra Richards, The Rise of the English Actress (NY: St Martin's Press, 1995); those who want to think the text a hypocritical construction, a "sensibility" text, or dismiss Bellamy as an promiscuous extravagant woman who was an inferior actress, favor seeing it as simply by Bellamy or "apocryphal" (Tracy D. Davis, "Review" of Richards's The Rise of the English Actress, Theatre Journal, 47:2 (1995):317-20.

42 The comparison between Halkett and Bellamy's behavior when they discover the lover is already married is strikingly similar. When Halkett was first told by Bampfield his wife was yet living, when Bellamy was first told Calcraft was married, she became hysterical; her behavior over her relationship with Digges shows her also at first pretending not to believe Digges married, then insisting on a special relationship, and finally refusing to separate herself from him; these reactions and behavioral responses are again recorded in the very late 19th century novel, A Blameless Woman by Henrietta Standard; see my "Cast out from Respectability". Like Halkett, Bellamy also had men promise marriage who did not keep their promise, in one case she lived with him and had one son, see the story of Sir George Montgomery Metham promised he'd marry her. A woman who was not marriageable as Anne was not for not bringing any connections sufficiently good or permanent or money. Lady Bracknell does come to mind. See Hartmann, Enchanting Bellamy, 91-114, 175, 202.

43 See Isobel Grundy, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Italian Memoir,'" The Age of Johnson, 6 (1994):340-42; Antoinette Marie Sol, Textual Promiscuities: Eighteenth-Century Critical Rewriting (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2002):19-29, 68-69. Montagu was imprisoned in a house she herself rented in Italy on the advice of her Italian male friend and servant, perhaps lover, Count Ugo Palazzi. Marie Mancini's way of describing her experience resembles Montagu;s too: Marie blames herself. This memoir is found in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Italian Memoir, Romance Writings, ed. Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996):81-105.

44 William, Lord Byron, had demanded Bellamy leave the stage and become his mistress; she had refused, and his reaction was to revenge himself, in the style say of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen (in Grandison) to take what she had refused to give him. Among the shocks she experiences is her brother's assumption she is guilty and violence. When she though to return, she writes:

"I soon found that my elopement had been most grossly misrepresented in the news-papers. Everything that ill-nature could suggest, was lavishly bestowed upon me, notwithstanding I was innocent of the least depravity of the kind imputed to me, not even in thought" (I, 75)

The stretch she spent in the country with relatives shows her trying on different roles (by dressing herself in quaker garb), seeking reassurance (she continually writes her mother who at first does not write back), perhaps in a state of nervous collapse or depressed and rejuvenating herself through long walks in the countryside. We should take seriously her reiterated fear of Byron; the more of the time allowed aristocrats to regard actressses on stage as fair prey no one else would protect.

45 The incident is very close to a similar one in fiction, Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray, edd. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999):3:1-3 Adeline similarly refuses to lie, is ostracized and falls into a depression. Gary Kelly reads Opie's fiction as one concerned with what happens to "the moral identity" of a heroine who "leaves, is deprived of, or is banished from the protection of home and parents," in English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (London: Longmans, 1989):84-85.

46 See Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, 88-91. Cholakian links the way readers often read women's autobiographies recall the "coercive nature of confessional practices." Foucault saw that confession empowers the priest to grant absolution after the subject has obeyed a "prescribed set of rules." Misframing becomes a form of "policing" the narrative.

47 See Bampfield's Apology and Loftis's supplement, 14, 238-52.

48 See Couper, Life, 34-35; "Cast out from respectability", and my notes to the close of my etext edition of Halkett's text.

49 I summarize Anne's episodes of illness here. They take up an enormous amount of space in the narrative. The first occurs during her time at Naworth. In this case the pagination is taken from Nicholls's edition which I have put on the Net as an etext edition, and accompanied with notes The Autobiography of Anne Murray, Lady Halkett. Anne became distraught when in London in very early 1649 Bampfield first tried to tell her his wife might be alive (p. 27), but the genuine sickness come on at Naworth in December 1649/January 1650 (this the first of her illnesses and there is no sign of malaria before this or "weakness", pp. 32-33): she can't speak to others, is out of it ("My distemper increased, and I grew so weake I could hardly speake.." "Aprehending the aproach of death," p 32). She is really hysterical and it is to be understood as the reaction of a woman who has lived with a man for 17 months as his wife [?], but then why didn't she get pregnant?"' this first time she recovered quickly when advised by Mrs Cullcheth. Again during this time she had her first experience of "the effects of melancholy vapours" (p. 36) and told Mr Nicholls the truth about her past. She is 26 and he 27. He makes the second of his great escapes (the first was in 1643; see Bampfield's Apology, 39, 99, 251).

Again in late October 1650 at Fyvie when Bampfield comes to visit her (p. 65), "betwixt both I was brought into so great a distemper that I expected now an end to all my misfortunes .." (p. 65). Again this does not read like malaria or a physiologically caused illness; it is no less real. It should be said he does seem innocent at times, really believes wife dead, "whose sattisfaction in seeing mee was much abated to find mee so weake, and for seeming so douptfull of the reports concerning him" (p. 66)

May 1653: Here she collapses upon being confronted with evidence she felt she could not dispute with Bampfield gone: this is just after she is after helping Balcarres and his wife: "violentt bloudy fluxe," "none saw mee that expected life for mee"( p. 87), terrible pain: "I beged some releefe from the violentt paine I had, which was in that extreamitty that I never felt any thing exceed itt", she is at "the gates of death" (p. 88).

Spring 1564: She collapses once last time during this memoir when Halkett was strongly pressuring her to marry him in 1654 and 1655: "fell into a feaverish distemper, p 94, "some people to say that I fell sicke with heartbreake" (p. 94)

During these repeated episodes she seems to have run a high fever ("feaverish distemper"). The last times it seems to me she has some other sickness to, and my guess is malaria. Symptoms: She suffered bad headeaches (the "brain fever" from thwarted and traumatic love experiences found in Victorian novels from Gaskell's Cousin Phillis to Trollope's Small House at Allington and The Duke's Children). It's possible she had malaria which was worsened at intervals when she was under high stress. Her weakened health probably led to giving her birth to weak neonates too. In Simon Couper's 1701 Life, he refers several times to her "weak constitution." Couper is discreet and only records the illnesses that occurred after her marriage to Halkett. He characterizes her as in bad health and of a weak constitution throughout so I suspect she may have had malaria. This would help explain why three of her children died so young. She, alas, probably saw this as God's judgement on her, as a punishment; see Couper 30, 32. Her terror of God can be seen in her writing The Mother's Will to the unborn Child while waiting to give birth.

50 My study of Anne's text against Simon Couper's shows that in the original she was not loathe to name names when describing the litigation she began when she lived in London before marrying Halkett, and I suspect part of the matter at the end of the book was a demonstration of Halkett's contention that "None fail[ed] her more, than they who hmade greatest Professions of Kindness, and none provoing more real Friends (though to little purpose) than they from whom she least expected it, Cooper 1701 Life, 31; see also 41 where it's evident Couper is paraphrasing a sentence about those who disappointed the debt-harassed women late in life, and has left out details. On the tendency of critics to use the idea that autobiography is valid only if strict truth is told to invalidate the woman autobiographers story, see Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, 88-91.

51 In Marie's case we are beginning to be able to read some of her uncensored as yet unpublished letters to him (in the Colonna archive in the Benedictine Library of Santa Scolastica) where we learn from her letters to her husband about what life was like for her during the months husband's agents imprisoned her in a fortress in Flanders:

"Have pity on me, I beg you for the love of God ... I have not received any more of your letters nor has anyone in this house informed me what are your intentions ... do not abandon me ... Do not leave me without your letters these and nothing else provide consolation when [I am] wearied by my enemies ... "

This was her second imprisonment or isolation; the first occurred when she was "sequestered in a lonely chateau on the French coast." In the memoir itself Marie has to be careful not to offend the powerful men whose aid she needs: Louis XIV and her husband. Like her sister, she resists believing the king will not help her. Her husband's agents were able to capture her because she went back to Italy; a shock similar to Hortense's is registered, however mutely when she realizes the king will not even see her face to face (La Verite dans son jour, 73, 75). An example of discreet language:

As I reflected from time to time on the violence with which they tried to keep me in the convent under unpleasant conditions which were very different from those I had been led to hope for, I was filled with uncertainty. I did not, however, lose courage because the two attempts I had made to deliver myself had failed so badly ... (La Verite dans son jour, 90)

There are three versions of her memoirs, a first by someone whose text debases her; a second she wrote to refute the first, and a third, a rewrite, somewhat censored and muted version by Gabriel Bremond. See Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, 103-8; Graziosi, "Lettere da un matrimonio fallito: Maria Mancini al marito Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna," Le scrittura epistolare femminile, 535-84.

52 Recent editors of Ann Sheldon's and Mary Eleanor Bowes's memoirs misconstrue Sheldon's life, that of a prostitute who survives by allowing men she is fearful of to play tricks on her; they ignore Bowes's husband's threats to beat her while depreciating "narrator's tone" as "exhibiting" an "alternation beween the testy and the hangdog." There seems little sympathy for Bowes, in Barros and Smith, Life Writings, 299-310; the hardship and humilations of Sheldon's life as a prostitute are described as gaiety, 264-7. The editors do not acknowledge the circumstances the woman writes in which are against her interests to make explicit. Philippina Burton Hill was the victim of continual baiting and ridicule, and her narrative is described as having "humorless self- absorption and convoluted style," 253. Language and statements which detract from and treat with askance women's scandal chronicles occur in the paratexts which frame the "scandal" memoirs of this collection For example, Elisabeth Craven is described as "rather notorious," 238); Sheldon usually "didactic" although she was a woman of "high spirit" (265). Repeatedly one reads the woman was "that sort of woman," was "extravagant," and "reduced" to doing this or that, made bad choices and thus ended in poverty and her text is not to be trusted (it's put that way).

53 See my Trollope on the 'Net (London: Hambledon Press, 1999):181-86 (on Trollope's An Autobiography).