Alice Thornton – författare

An early modern domestic and spiritual memoir, My First Booke of My Life depicts the life of Alice Thornton (1626–1707), a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century. Her memoir documents her perspective on the Irish rebellion and English civil war as well as on a plethora of domestic dangers and difficulties: from her reluctant marriage, which sought to rescue the sequestered family estate and clear her brother's name, to financial crises, to the illnesses and deaths of several family members and six children, to slanderous criticisms of her fidelity and her parenting. This first complete edition of an autobiographical apologia begins with recollections of Thornton's childhood and ends with the death of her husband, restoring almost half of the original text omitted from the nineteenth-century edition. The image she fashions of a woman devoted to God and family evolves from the conventional format of the deliverance memoir into a rhetorically sophisticated defense of her life in response to rumored scandal. Inseparable from the praise of God and family is the distinctive sense of identity that emerges from the introduction, text, and annotations, all of which provide a significant contribution to early modern woman's writing.

Alice Thornton (1626-1707) was a middle-class woman who was best known for her autobiography describing the English Civil War and its effects on her life. She was the daughter of Christopher Wandesford (1592-1640), Lord Deputy of Ireland, and enjoyed a privileged upbringing. His death, followed by the Civil War, caused a crisis in the family, who eventually settled in Yorkshire in considerably straitened circumstances. This volume, first published in 1873 by the Surtees Society, contains the first published edition of Thornton's autobiography, which provides fascinating details of her life. Her relationships with her husband and children are fully described, and she writes candidly concerning her health problems, pregnancies, and the deaths of six of her nine children. Thornton also shows a keen awareness of the lack of autonomy which marriage then entailed. For more information on this author, see http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=thoral