The private life of an Elizabethan lady

by Margaret Hoby

"Lady Margaret was the only daughter and heiress of a wealthy landowner. She was married first to Walter Devereus, brother of Robert, Earl of Essex (favourite of Elizabeth I) then to Thomas Sidney, brother of the great Renaissance poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney, and finally to the Puritan Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby. This diary covers the period 1599-1605, when she lived on her estate in North Yorkshire, and records Lady Margaret's spiritual endeavours, the life of her househould and such great events as the legal case in Star Chamber which took the Hobys to London. Lady Margaret's diary is thought to be the earliest of its kind, and it is one of the most significant in what became a dominant genre for women in the 17th century, the meditative autobiographical journal. The appeal of the diary is on the one hand the account of Lady Margaret's spiritual life and on the other its picture of her domestic affairs and daily routine. In her introduction, Joanna Moody presents the personal