Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, Life and Letters

Edited by Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library)
2001 | 550 pp. | Cloth | 6 x 9 in | 978-0-86698-272-6 | MRTS 230

Out of Print
Heather Wolfe's edition of the Life and Letters is the first publication of the letters and supersedes previous editions of the Life of one of the most important woman writers of seventeenth-century England. The Life of Lady Falkland was written in an English Benedictine community of women in Cambrai. The edition offers several fresh perspectives on it, providing, for the first time, a textual history of the Life and a study of its origins in the community. The editor's close study of the manuscript and its conventions has enabled her to date the composition of the Life and to identify the author and her annotators. Texts of a large number of official and family letters concerning Lady Falkland's conversion to Catholicism are also included in the edition. Detailed cross-reference between the letters and the life allows the reader a critical perspective on the biographer's interests and motivations, and it enables full participation in the enterprise of distilling fact from fiction.