A True Account of My Life and Selected Meditations

Born in the early 1620s to parents of Scottish descent who were servants in Charles I’s household, Anne, Lady Halkett (née Murray), grew up on fringes of the English court during a period of increasing political tension. From 1644 to 1699, Halkett recorded her personal and political experiences in both England and Scotland in a series of manuscript meditations and an autobiographical narrative (A True Account of My Life). Royalism, romance, and contemporary religious debates are central to Halkett’s vivid portrayal of her life as a single woman, wife, mother, and widow: collectively, the materials edited here offer the opportunity to explore how Halkett’s meditational practice informed her life writing in the only version of her writings to date available in a fully modernized edition.

The forty-four meditations Suzanne Trill includes in her edition of Anne Halkett’s A True Account of My Life and Selected Meditations redefine the importance of Halkett’s contribution to seventeenth-century life writing. The devotional nature of the Meditations complements the religious sensibility, often overlooked, in her autobiographical True Account--an account of a life that is otherwise overshadowed by rumors about her relationships with men and her Royalist loyalties. Extensive notes and a comprehensive bibliography reflect the scrupulous scholarship of Trill’s edition. The Other Voice Series offers students accessible and user-friendly editions of previously neglected works; now the presence in that series of Halkett’s works, in Trill's edition, further advances our understanding of the literary and cultural importance of early modern women. 
-Raymond A. Anselment, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Connecticut

SUZANNE TRILL is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published an old-spelling edition of Halkett’s Selected Self-Writings (2007) and is co-editor of Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (1996), and Lay by Your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England, 1500–1700 (1997).