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This first complete edition of an autobiographical apologia begins with recollections of Thorntonês childhood and ends with the death of her husband, restoring almost half of the original text omitted from the nineteenth-century edition. The image she fashions of a woman devoted to God and family evolves from the conventional format of the deliverance memoir into a rhetorically sophisticated defense of her life in response to rumored scandal. Inseparable from the praise of God and family is the distinctive sense of identity that emerges from the introduction, text, and annotations, all of which provide a significant contribution to early modern womanês writing.
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Raymond A. Anselment is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book.