Alice Thornton: A Seventeenth-Century Autobiographical Subject

Abstract

Sometime in 1668 Alice Thornton of East Newton in County York deliberately sat down to write about her life. It had been her practice to write about her life. It had been her practice to write about her experiences since her "first youth and childhood" in some sort of diary form and these were now written up in a work called 'A Book of Remembrances'. This book in turn was later considerably fleshed out to become her 'Autobiography', and it is with this larger work (of some 280 pages) that I will be dealing with here.