A Mother’s Spiritual Dialogue, Meditations, and Elegies New

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

Lady Mary Carey examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript created for self-reflection and 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 that her autograph manuscript was copied in a fair 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 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.

PAMELA S. HAMMONS, Professor of English and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami, specializes in early modern English and medieval literature, manuscript culture, poetry, women’s writing, and theories of gender and sexuality. World-Making Renaissance Women: Rethinking Early Modern Women’s Place in Literature and Culture (Cambridge 2021), which she co-edited with the late Brandie Siegfried, is her most recent volume.