Isham, Elizabeth

Abstract

Elizabeth Isham (1609–1654) was a Protestant Stuart gentlewoman of Northamptonshire who, in her early twenties, chose to remain single against family wishes and social expectations after protracted negotiations for an anticipated marriage failed and who later wrote a defense of her decision. In her thirtieth year, she began a self-examination addressed to God that ranged from early childhood to the time of writing in order to reconcile as fit her choice of a single “priuet life” of the mind. A year’s work produced a roughly 60,000-word manuscript memoir and spiritual autobiography, My Booke of Rememberance, one of the earliest narrative autobiographies in English. Knowledge of the existence of Isham’s remarkable text, which illuminates not only her life but the often painful physical and spiritual struggles of the women whom she lived closely with and survived, was lost until the text was rediscovered in 2002 in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in Princeton’s Firestone Library. Having learned from youth to use writing to prompt memory, Isham also constructed a unique “diary” of her life up to her fortieth year on a single folio sheet divided, front and back, into thirty-six small squares, in most cases one per year, each filled with minute notations. The diary rests in the Isham family archives in the Northamptonshire County Record Office, along with lists Isham made of books owned by her and family women, which highlight the emphasis in the Rememberance on the critical sustenance of reading and writing for her and her fellow women’s emotional, intellectual, and spiritual lives.