SOURCE: Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. “Claiming Patrimony and Constructing a Self: Anne Clifford and Her Diary.” In Writing Women in Jacobean England, pp. 125-51. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Lewalski argues that Clifford's Diary reveals the relation between writing and resistance, between authoring a text and authoring a self.

Anne Clifford (1589-1676) provides an instance of sustained public opposition to patriarchal authority and property settlements. Her struggle is recorded in several autobiographical works, among them a fascinating though fragmentary Diary covering the years when she felt herself most embattled (1616-1619).¹ While lawsuits over women's claims to property and inheritance were very common in the era, as the cases described in that curious tract The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights makes clear,² Anne Clifford's Diary offers a rare reading of one such situation by the women involved (Anne Clifford and her mother, Margaret Clifford, Countess of...