SOURCE: Clifford, D. J. H. “Introduction and Acknowledgements” and “Prologue.” In The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, edited by D. J. H. Clifford, pp. x-xv, 1-18. Wolfeboro Falls, N. H.: Alan Sutton Publishing, Inc., 1990.

In the following excerpt, Clifford provides a brief overview of the content and composition of Clifford's diaries and offers a detailed discussion of her family background.

‘It is but seldom that any personage who is not of first class historical importance has succeeded in impressing his or her personality upon a whole countryside or has transmitted, however superficially, a personal tradition through succeeding generations of a rural population. This is, however, the case with the Lady Anne Clifford.’ This comment from the introduction to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments' 1936 inventory of Westmorland monuments is as valid today, four hundred years after Lady Anne's birth, as it has ever been. Indeed, the impress of...