Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings by Katherine Austen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings by Katherine Austen Lisa Di Crescenzo Austen, Katherine, Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings, ed. Pamela S. Hammons (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Toronto Series, 26), Toronto, Iter/CRRS, 2013; paperback; pp. vii, 216; 8 b/w plates; R.R.P. US$27.95; ISBN 9780772721501. In Pamela S. Hammons’s modernised and carefully annotated edition of Katherine Austen’s intriguing autograph manuscript miscellany, Book M, the oeuvre of a pious, ingenious, and literary widow in Restoration London is presented to the reader in an accessible and frequently illuminating text. Largely understudied by literary scholars of the women’s canon of Renaissance England, this elegant edition of Austen’s life writings is a welcome addition to a small body of recent research on Austen’s manuscript. Widowed young, Austen was protectress of her children and her family resources, deploying an innate cleverness and piercing self-awareness to successfully manage, negotiate, and subvert the structures of patriarchy in seventeenth-century London. Hammons sensitively situates Austen in time – she lived from the late 1620s to 1683 – and in the complexity of her social location in the aspirant gentry. Through her multi-generic compilation of texts, written and compiled primarily between 1664 and 1666 – spiritual meditations, sermon notes, financial records, letters, personal essays, and more than thirty occasional and religious lyric poems – Austen elaborated a perspective of herself in relation to the mundane and spiritual worlds. This outlook, refracted through a providential worldview, intersects dramatically with the upheavals and chaos of England’s civil wars, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Great Plague outbreak of 1665–66, and the Fire of London in 1666. Hammons demonstrates a subtle and intuitive grasp of Austen’s writing and the repertoire of her considerable literary capabilities as a thinker, writer, and poet, deftly treating the personal and theological connection of the texts. Footnotes enlarge on Austen’s history, her seventeenth-century vernacular, and biblical discourse, without encumbering the text itself. The short analysis of Austen’s outlook in the introductory essay does not stint on interpretive detail, and offers a comprehensible entrée to the text and its multiple and various genres. The complexity of these textual forms, their modes of discourse, and assumed readerships demand more extended attention here, a purpose that a short review can only partially serve. ‘When I view over the assurances and hopes I have had in this book of my meditations’, Austen writes towards the end of Book M, ‘I have overcome my enemies and my fears, but such is the unsureness of every ground in this world to anchor on as I soon come to wade in deep places again’ (p. 194). A viable and often-used medium for women writers in seventeenth-century England, the manuscript form and the practice of writing itself enabled Austen’s contemplation and comprehension of herself in relation to [End Page 258] the significance of her temporal and spiritual worlds. Hammons argues that this perspective was ‘carefully tailored’ (p. 10): among the most compelling of Austen’s own idiosyncratic preoccupations to shape her sense of self, and examined by the editor, include her engagement with prophetic discourses and her considerable effort to govern how she was perceived as a widow. Most suggestively, Austen’s self-figuration as a widow entails a deliberate inversion of this state and a fashioning of herself, as Hammons’s lucid interpretation emphasises, as ‘a seventeenth-century English Penelope’, ‘heroically loyal’ to her dead husband, while also a shrewd, eagle-eyed guardian of her material resources against suitors (p. 20). The scripted multidimensionality of Austen’s self-presentation is skilfully rendered by Hammons who alerts the reader less familiar with Austen’s works to her deployment of the tropes of female weakness and fragility in her meditations to play down her actual considerable material, familial, and personal resources. Ultimately, however, it is perhaps in the author’s chronicling of the spiritual and metaphysical complexities of her everyday life, and God’s immediate intervention therein through dreams and visions, that the modern reader comes closest to Austen’s sense of...