‘Like Penelope, always employed’: Reading, Life-Writing, and the Early Modern Female Self in Katherine Austen’s Book M

Abstract

Ever since Virginia Woolf evocatively imagined the frustrated existence and tragic demise of Shakespeare’s sister, the search for the literary texts of early modern women has been bound up with the search for traces of their lives. Women’s life-writings in the early modern period, however, are often impersonal and rarely present a unified sense of self, instead occurring most frequently in generically fluid forms, and producing fragmentary subjectivities. I argue in this article that the generic eclecticism of early modern women’s life-writings is closely related to the question of what and how early modern women read. Focusing on the example of Katherine Austen’s Book M, this article explores the relationship between early modern women’s reading and life-writing practices. I seek to bring together scholarship in both fields, and to explore both reading and writing as activities mutually constitutive of early modern women’s textual selves.