I became a feminist critic of the renaissance in 1989, when a professor, in answer to my question about why there were no women on the syllabus, replied that there were no women writers in the seventeenth century. This comment took me to the library, where I discovered what he should have known but did not have to: not only were there women writers in the period, but feminist literary critics were retrieving them from the archives and rewriting literary history in the light of their contributions. One of these women writers was Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), the author of a singularly massive amount of genealogical, historical, and personal writings and a subject of interest, long before the 1980s, for Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. In 1985, the Marxist feminist critic Katharine Hodgkin wrote an essay about Clifford's conflicted status as a woman (victim of patriarchy) and as a landlord (oppressor). Clifford has received different treatment in recent years, considered primarily as a diarist (with the attendant and often ahistorical assumptions the genre solicits [see Kunin]) and as a heroic resister of patriarchal forces. My goal here is to use Clifford as a case study for the role of feminist criticism today, not only because she has raised such complex issues for feminist critics of the Renaissance and early modern period but also because the issues her life and work raise about kinship and the household, property and political agency, and the intersectionality of determining forces of identity and power are of continuing relevance to feminist methodologies and politics. I am particularly concerned with feminist claims that have become axiomatic—for the early modern period as well as others—both at the level of historical progression (the march toward modernity) and in more synchronic analyses of social and cultural practices and relationships (including our assumptions that we know what patriarchy, kinship, and household mean). By unsettling these axioms and reconsidering the stories Clifford tells, I hope to illustrate the truth that feminist criticism is by its nature a reconsideration, a form of doing rather than being.
Tales Bent Backward: Early Modern Local History in Persianate Transregional Contexts
