A Mothers Spiritual Dialogue, Meditations, and Elegies: Volume 101

Key insights into womens multi-dimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century. Lady Mary Carey (c. 1609c. 1680) was a noblewoman who examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript that she intended for self-reflection and for sharing with restricted audiences of family and friends, rather than for print publication. Her poetry and prose, composed and revised between 1650 and 1658, were important enough to her inner circle, however, that her autograph manuscript was carefully copied by another hand in 1681. In addition to providing us with key insights into womens multidimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century in England, Careys work teaches us a great deal about a womans deepest emotional and spiritual states while confronting the hardships of lifefrom the fears of childbearing to the sorrows over child loss to the terrors of war.