The Diary of Anne Clifford: 1616-1619.

This important edition makes available the most authoritative text we have of Anne Clifford's Jacobean diary, apparently the earliest surviving secular diary by an Englishwoman. It contains a wealth of information about the Jacobean court and society, and about cultural practices relating to domestic life, household arrangements, the recreations of the nobility, childhood, legal contestations over women's inheritance, and women's reading and writing. Earlier editions of the work by V. Sackville-West (1923) and D.J.H. Clifford (1990) are based on a nineteenth-century copy (Knole/Sackville Papers U269 F48/1, leaves 18-38) now at the Center for Kentish Studies in Maidstone, Kent. Achesoh's diplomatic edition reproduces an eighteenth-century copy in the Portland Papers (XXIII f 80119) now at Longlear House. Anne Clifford's original does not survive; the two copies were made or commissioned by later women relatives. Acheson shows conclusively that the Portland copy is not only more authoritative and complete, but is in fact that source of the later, somewhat truncated, Knole copy. This edition presents rather extensive new passages, especially in the marginalia, which were not hitherto available to readers of the Knole MS or editions based on it.

Achesoh's concise introduction and apparatus clarify several important issues relating to Clifford. She usefully distinguishes between the several forms of autobiographical writing Clifford employed, which earlier editors and critics have often conflated: the diary, which Clifford apparently kept all her life but of which we have only the years 1616, 1617, and 1619, and part of 1676 (the only segment in Clifford's own hand); annual summaries or "chronicles," of which we have the years 1603 and 1650 through 1675; and an autobiography, the "Life of Me," written in 1652-53, which reviews Clifford's life from conception to 1650. Acheson clarifies the murky issues surrounding Anne Clifford's legal claims on some Clifford baronial lands by attending carefully to the basis in contemporary law and precedent for inheritance by sole female issue and by painstaking research into the precise grounds upon which Anne and her mother pressed her claims. The extensive section of annotations identifies the people, things, books, plays, and events mentioned in the diary, as well as explaining oblique references to Anne Clifford's legal and domestic struggles over the land and the involvement of various court figures, including the king and queen, in that struggle. The bibliography lists and locates all the manuscript papers, letters, and documents by and pertaining to Anne Clifford, as well as an ample list of scholarship and criticism variously relevant to her.

In this diplomatic edition of the Portland diary, Acheson has made appropriate editorial decisions. Most important, this text reproduces the marginal notes in their proper place surrounding the text (not relegated to footnotes as in earlier editions), thereby highlighting their status as glosses that often expand upon the personal narrative of the text or else relate events in the larger world to it. Original spelling and punctuation are retained, and emendations (used sparingly) are marked by square brackets. The textual notes make readily legible the differences between the Portland and Knole manuscripts. Plates reproduce manuscript pages of the two manuscripts.

Given the care Acheson has taken in preparing this edition, it is a shame that the introduction is marred by what are, I suppose, computer inputting faults involving the repetition on several pages of a line or lines carried over from the previous page. At some late stage editors should make sure by old-fashioned proofreading that our new processes do not generate this sort of error.

BARBARA K. LEWALSKI Harvard University