Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution: Gender, Genre, and History Writing by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution: Gender, Genre, and History Writing by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille
• Paul Salzman

Gheeraert-Graffeuille, Claire, Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution: Gender, Genre, and History Writing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022; hardback; pp. 368; R.R.P. £76.00; ISBN 9780192857538.

Early modern women's writing has been experiencing a golden era over the last decade, with increasing numbers of fine critical studies, editions, and (with the occasional hiccup) a steep rise in general interest. While a growing acknowledgement of the variety of early modern women's writing has been especially important, with attention being given to everything from recipes to advice manuals, to women's libraries and book use, there has also been a growing sense of the canonisation of some of the writers who fit clearly into established literary and historical categories of worth. Three that I think are especially notable in this regard are Mary Wroth, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, with perhaps Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips following closely. Scholarly editions remain a marker of literary merit, however arbitrary that might seem. In the case of Wroth, thanks to Josephine Roberts's pioneering editorial work we have editions of both parts of Urania and of her poetry, with the oeuvre completed by the recent Revels edition of Loves Victory by Alison Findlay and others. Following on from Janet Todd's The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (Rutgers University Press, 1997) we are now seeing a Cambridge University Press edition of Behn's complete works, headed up by Elaine Hobby. Hutchinson's Memoir of her husband was well known in the nineteenth century, where it went through several editions, and was edited by James Sutherland in the 1970s and by N. H. Keeble in the mid-1990s.

With the attribution of Hutchinson's epic Order and Disorder by David Norbrook, and his subsequent edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), and the attention paid to her remarkable translation of Lucretius, she is now an indispensable example of the entanglement of seventeenth-century literature with the momentous events of the Civil War and its aftermath. Oxford University Press is now halfway through an authoritative edition of Hutchinson's work under the general editorship of David Norbrook. It is in this context that Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille's detailed study of Hutchinson's Memoir and its multiple contexts makes an extremely important contribution to our understanding of her as a writer, and of late seventeenth-century historiography in general. This is a very clever book because it manages to make a narrow focus on a single text into a wide-ranging account of Hutchinson, of early modern women's writing, and of the way that the idea of history in the later seventeenth century was an amalgam of what to a modern reader might seem like irreconcilable genres (for example, history/fiction). [End Page 317]

In the first chapter, Gheeraert-Graffeuille relates the Memoir to life writing and the idea of exemplarity, as well as the refinement of that idea in the seventeenth century, to take into account more modern notions of biography and history. The second chapter expands this account of theories of history and explores seventeenth-century tensions between what might be called exemplary history and critical history. Here Gheeraert-Graffeuille clarifies how the Memoir, as a blend 'of several genres of writing' (p. 109), allows Hutchinson to encompass the personal and ideological responses to the events of the Civil War. In the third chapter, Gheeraert-Graffeuille analyses the way that Hutchinson draws on her own direct experience of the Civil War, centred in Nottingham, and a variety of sources that Hutchinson also uses to flesh out her account.

Hutchinson pieced together her account of the Civil War from a combination of personal experience and information provided by others—notably, in a remarkable but not unusual ideological balance, from her husband and her Royalist brother Sir Allen Apsley. In particular, Gheeraert-Graffeuille notes that 'Lucy Hutchinson's local point of view, anchored in Nottinghamshire affairs, allows her to write a history of the Civil War in which the local and national are tightly intertwined, as well as to give the reader an exceptional insight...