Overview

Key insights into women’s multi-dimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century. Lady Mary Carey (c. 1609–c. 1680) was a noblewoman who examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript that she intended for self-reflection and for sharing with restricted audiences of family and friends, rather than for print publication. Her poetry and prose, composed and revised between 1650 and 1658, were important enough to her inner circle, however, that her autograph manuscript was carefully copied by another hand in 1681. In addition to providing us with key insights into women’s multidimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century in England, Carey’s work teaches us a great deal about a woman’s deepest emotional and spiritual states while confronting the hardships of life—from the fears of childbearing to the sorrows over child loss to the terrors of war.  

Full Product Details

9781649590886

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Reviews

"""While Lady Mary Carey’s poetry has been available in small excerpts in anthologies, this is the first attempt to gather her known writings, prose and poetry, in a single authoritative edition—one that establishes that Carey was an active participant in probably more than one coterie network and was conversant with multiple genres of spiritual writing, from mothers’ legacies, elegies, and prayers to conversion narratives and autobiographical meditations. While Carey matches the description of a good/proper early modern woman in the period’s prescriptive writings, her volume also contains robust questioning of male superiority, as well as a poignant challenge to the God who took so many of her children at an early age. Her writings have much to show us about the ways in which literate seventeenth-century Englishwomen navigated patriarchal environments."" -- Margaret Ezell, Distinguished Professor of English, Texas A&M University"

Author Information

Mary Carey (c. 1609–c. 1680) was the daughter of Sir John Jackson. She married Pelham Carey in 1630, and later was remarried, to George Payler, though she continued to be known as Lady Carey. Pamela S. Hammons is professor of English and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami and coeditor of World-Making Renaissance Women: Rethinking Early Modern Women’s Place in Literature and Culture.  

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