Scribbling Girls

Helena Aeberli

In the archives of the Bodleian Library is a small brown book. Faded and withered with age, its unassuming pages have for 350 years concealed a woman’s life. The book is The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delval, its author an aristocratic Englishwoman who lived between 1649 and 1717. Composed of deeply personal spiritual exercises and poems penned in Elizabeth’s youth but compiled alongside her reminiscences later in life, the Meditations spans her coming-of-age between 14 and 20. These teenage years are a period of intense physical and emotional turmoil for most young women but particularly for Elizabeth, born to a Royalist family in the midst of the Civil War and spurned by her father, who left her to be raised by an eccentric aunt before forcing her to break off a proposed elopement with her lover and marry a man she detested. It is with this marriage, and Elizabeth’s consciousness of the inferiority of her new position, that the text ends. 

When I stumbled upon Delval’s book whilst researching the intersection of food and sickness in the lives of early modern women, I found myself crying in the reading room. I’d seen a reference to Delval in another text, and had fully intended to skip to the relevant page, where she recalls eating an excess of fruit and becoming ill, but her voice drew me in. Soon I was compulsively turning pages, reading the journal cover to cover and staring in distress at the blank pages where it ended, after her anguished profession that she has ‘miserably…failed’ in the ‘duty’ of marriage. The immediacy of Delval’s meditations — on pain and sickness, forbidden romance, her tempestuous family relationships — resonated through the centuries. Anyone who has been a teenage girl can understand Delval, the agonised emotion seeping through her words even as it is wrapped up in the conventions of post-Reformation spirituality and courtliness. She felt so modern, pompously deriding her fellow ‘young people’ like today’s teenage keyboard warriors and dripping with self-hatred about being ‘born into this miserable world’. (1) But I was also moved by the autobiographical casing in which Delval wraps her girlhood writings, the very fact that she preserved and returned to them as an older woman. In an age which systematically devalued women’s voices and experiences, Delval saw the value of looking back to tell the messy, complicated story of her girlhood, with its tangled liaisons and spiritual crises, its periods of sickness and fad diets and precarious work and its tensions with paternal authority. Elizabeth Delval was a woman who, all throughout her life, was compelled to tell her story. To write herself into existence. To write her self. 

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously conjures the spectre of Shakespeare’s sister, the fictional Judith. Whilst her brother is educated, runs wild, seeks and finds his fortune in London, Judith is not sent to school. She cooks and cleans and ‘scribble[s]…on the sly’, before fleeing an arranged marriage into destitution, unwanted pregnancy, and suicide. (2) ‘This’, Woolf concludes, ‘is how the story would run…if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius’. In Woolf’s view, part of the problem which women writers must tackle is their lack of a tradition, a language and literary genealogy and history within which to express themselves. The indisputable fact that there is no female Shakespeare. 

Rereading A Room of One’s Own I am struck by how far the field of women’s history has come since Woolf’s day, with the discovering and reclaiming of female voices and artists from the far reaches of time, as well as the depth of fresh historical inquiry into the female condition. But beyond the new additions to the canon — the Aphra Behns and Artemisia Gentileschis — what about the scribbling sisters, the scribbling daughters, the (extra)ordinary women who wrote themselves into being across the centuries, who were not writers in the formal sense but whose words still cling onto survival in the nooks and crannies of the archive? Women like Elizabeth Delval. Must the story of Judith always end in death — in suicide, in self-annihilation, the loss of voice? Was there another way for her to survive? Does she survive still?

Delval’s life unfurls a different path for the early modern woman writer, that of the memoirist or autobiographer, or less loftily the diarist, the letter-writer, the scribbler. The writer of what is sometimes called the ego-document. Such documents proliferated during the 1600s, alongside increased literacy and an expanded lexicon of the self. This was a century in which the number of ‘self-compounds’ tripled, reflecting ‘a momentous conceptual and ideological shift in the relationship of English speakers, readers and writers to their own identity’. (3) In the context of intense religiopolitical turmoil, many seventeenth-century ego-documents were often explicitly religious, documenting a period of spiritual crisis and the emergence from this dark night of the soul into the light of faith. A striking number of such texts were written by women, as a glance at the Perdita database of ‘lost’ female authors suggests. Delval’s memoirs were born from her youthful meditations on faith and her own tempestuous spirituality, a classic teenage rebellion tempered with a desperate desire for redemption. Contemporaries like Dionys Fitzherbert and Hannah Allen wrote within an even more explicitly spiritual framework, framing their mental and physical ill-health as trials sent by God and the Devil. (4)

In A Room of One’s Own Woolf is scathing about female self-writers, disdaining mere letter-writers and arguing that the women of the future must ‘use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression’. (5) But neglecting this tradition of women writing themselves into being, harnessing the poetic and polemic powers of their own life stories, is to neglect a rich part of our history. ‘I align myself with a genealogy of erased women’ says Kate Zambreno, writing of the ‘mad wives of modernism’ in Heroines. (6) But this genealogy stretches so much further back than the nineteenth century. It extends like a frayed umbilical into the womb of history.

To cry in the reading room over some long dead woman’s life. Not unlike Woolf in the British Museum, sketching her angry Professor X and doodling concentric circles across her notes. To approach a historical or literary text from the point of emotionality, connection, kinship. From the point of solidarity. To reach out through the centuries and take hold of her hand. 

Like Zambreno, I too am consumed by history’s ‘erased women’, by the written threads which remain of them and the lives which I can spin from the remnants. I let them possess me, these early modern women who were so often seen as possessed themselves. When my grandmother dies I think of Delval, the pages she writes after her beloved grandmother’s death, the enormity of guilt and self-hatred which piles up and up in the following pages, culminating in an act of rebellion and excess against her aunt that plunges her into physical illness. Curled up on my period, I recall the numerous women who described the agonies of their monthly ‘flowers’ (such a pretty word; so ironic) in letters to friends and pleas to doctors. I remember in my own moments of madness the descent of the Puritan autobiographer Dionys Fitzherbert into insanity and the narrative she span to legitimise such crisis. Perhaps it makes me a bad historian, yet I cannot help but see them as my sisters. 

This is what art does; it moves us, sometimes even to madness ourselves. And yet we do not see these women’s works as art. They are acknowledged as invaluable historical texts but rarely designated as ‘literary’ or ‘artistic’ works. To reprint and republish them outside the scholarly handbook would seem insanity. Because who among us would want to read the scribblings of a long-dead madwoman, or a churchwoman, or a girl? And yet what of their male contemporaries? What of John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, the autobiographical precursor to the more famous Pilgrim’s Progress which is still taught at schools, enshrined on lists of ‘Books You Must Read’? Which arises from the same fertile soil but sits in a literary tradition of its own, bookended by Saint Augustine and Rousseau’s dual Confessions? 

Nearly four hundred years on, we live, like our seventeenth-century predecessors, in an age where the vocabulary in which to express the self is expanding (‘selfie’ just the newest self-compound) and our access to literary material exploding. It is also an age in which women's self-writing is once again the subject of extensive discourse, from debates about the ethics of autofiction onscreen as well as on page, to the furore over the latest personal essay series in The Cut, and hand-wringing over an influx of young women on writing-platform Substack penning pieces about ‘girlhood'. It is this context in which I’ve returned to the female writers of the seventeenth-century, those women whose lives Woolf could scarcely imagine, the traces of whom linger on in their surviving ego-documents. 

In the last year or so, much of this contemporary discussion has come to centre on autofiction. Much has been written about the term, usually taken to mean a blend of autobiography and fiction where the narrator and the author share an identity, but there is still little consensus. Autofiction is a sticky, unruly topic. Annie Ernaux, often labelled one of the genre’s foremost practitioners, has rejected the term as redundant, whilst Chris Kraus has said she would ‘never use that term’ to describe her own work. In the context of this debate, contributors to 2022 volume The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms argue for a more expansive definition of the ‘autofictional’, a conceptual mode involving the self and fiction which operates differently across space and time and which 'requires continuous reconsideration in order to accommodate the variety of texts that writers, critics, and readers feel should be discussed under the label.’ (7) This definitional expansion and fluidity can be critically provocative. Even the personal essays which have gained a prominent if ironic place in online culture could be seen as a kind of amateur autofiction or autotheory, ‘art/writing that combines theory or philosophy with autobiography’, in which personal experience informs the formulation and expression of ideas. The teenage Substackers writing their girlhood essays, whilst easy to mock, stand testament to this impulse, which also drove Delval to her meditations. 

Looking back at the seventeenth-century autobiographies in light of this focus on the fluidity of the ‘autofictional’ rather than ‘autofiction' as a static genre, I’ve come to see them as autofictional works —  a potentially sinful anachronism but one which I find stimulating. Scholarly tomes have been written in an attempt to define these literary artefacts, which are neither diaries nor straightforward autobiographies in the modern sense, which aim to provide a totalising, purportedly ‘truthful’ portrait of an individual self. Despite the common name, seventeenth-century autobiographies do not sign on to Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’, in which an author commits to present a true, and thus autobiographical, story, because their sense of the self and the stories it tells is not and cannot be unitary. Reading them as autofictional opens up new possibilities of understanding the relationship between the self-as-writer and the self-as-written-I, as well as the ways in which cultural narratives such as religion and gender shape the way a life-story is expressed on page. Their emphasis on God’s role in spiritual narratives of sin, suffering, and redemption, the preternatural elements of such narratives, as well as the period’s cultural emphasis on locating the individual within the community fragment the notion of a unitary, cohesive individual self to be truthfully presented in words. Similarly, the composite nature of texts such as Delval’s, composed over periods of time and drawn together into a single body, challenges the linear autobiographical form. Seeing such texts as a form of autofictional writing rather than autobiography can enable a deeper understanding of the genre as well as connecting it with a longer literary tradition which is thriving today, particularly among female writers. When I began to view these texts in this way, I no longer saw them just as sources, useful for my research, or their writers as mere disembodied voices crying out of time. I saw them as deeply talented pioneers of form, using the constraints of their condition as tools to carve out new imaginative spaces. They were not just women who happened to write but silenced artists fighting to find a place to speak. 

Much as spiritual autobiographies by early modern women conveyed crises of faith and feeling within a spiritual but deeply gendered framework and could be easily dismissed as ‘lesser’ works, autofiction is often depicted as a feminised form of writing, a chronicling of the trials and tribulations of womanhood within a loosely fictionalised form. An opting out from the logical, realist enterprise of constructing a novel or the truth-telling of autobiography, instead a distastefully ‘confessional’, ‘diaristic’, or even ‘gossipy’ and ‘trashy’ form which sits uneasily with generic categories and spills out into the real word. When Rachel Cusk’s controversial chronicle of her divorce, Aftermath, was released in 2012, the reaction was hostile to the point of legal action, accusing her of revealing too much about her family’s collapse and inviting gossipy speculation about the real events hovering behind a paper thin veil — Google autofill quickly suggests ‘Rachel Cusk first husband’ and ‘Rachel Cusk divorce’. Even more favourable critics struggled with Aftermath, labelling it ‘narcissistic’, an act of ‘writerly greed’. Annie Ernaux faced similar criticisms in the wake of her Passion Simple, criticisms which often took on a paternalistic and gendered element. As Lauren Elkin writes in her essay on Ernaux, the female autofiction writer is constantly demeaned for her self-centering, ‘told she cannot see beyond her own navel’. Unsurprisingly, male autofiction writers such as Ben Lerner rarely receive the same response — something reflected in the canonical status of male self-writings such as Rousseau’s Confessions in comparison to their female counterparts. 

Something similar happens to Sandra, the protagonist of 2023 film Anatomy of a Fall, a writer of autofiction on trial for the suspected murder of her husband, when passages from books based on her turbulent family life are used against her in court to prove her status as a bad wife and mother. In the law court as well as on the page, Sandra’s truth, fiction, and narrative overlap and entangle in complicated ways. As Kraus, herself publicly criticised for I Love Dick, notes in an interview: ‘Everyone loves “autofiction” until it gets too specific or mean.’

Here is the autofictional as a disorderly, out-of-bounds and un-pin-downable genre, concerned with the seeping porosity of personal life, and thus as intrinsically feminine as the women’s ‘unruly’ tongues and ‘leaky’ bodies so often maligned in early modern discourse. 

Little of these early modern women survives beyond the words they left us. And even when they wrote at length, they were still relegated to the subordinate, accessory status of ‘wife’, ‘daughter’, or ‘sister’. The British Museum lists Lady Mary Carey, a Parliamentarian woman who emphasised the rare equality of her marriage in her writings and penned poignant and painful meditations on the loss of her children, as ‘Author of verse and autobiography; the daughter of Sir John Jackson; first married to Pelham Carey, then later to George Payler.’ Like Woolf’s fictitious Judith, Mary’s entire life and career was dependent upon her relationships to men, men of secure social and financial status, rare men who believed in gender equality. It is unsurprising that female self-writers like Carey or Delval were also members osf the aristocracy or landed gentry, granted the opportunities denied to the majority of English women, the money, space, and education Woolf saw as the material conditions for artistic labour. 

So few female voices have survived through the centuries in comparison to their male peers. When we find them, it is impossible not to want to hold them close, to listen and re-listen to the stories they have to tell. I think often about Dionys Fitzherbert, the devoutly religious Englishwoman who left a detailed manuscript account of the breakdown she suffered in her mid-twenties in the first decade of the seventeenth-century. An obsessive reader ‘interested in books more than in marriage’, who remained celibate throughout her life, I see the ghost of Dionys in my friends and mutuals and the authors who line my shelves. (8) Her bookish abrasiveness not unlike Woolf’s, her bulimia like Ernaux’s. Her desire to write in the face of adversary so achingly familiar. I cannot help but imagine her today, as a girl, as a writer. 

Like Delval, I came across Dionys Fitzherbert whilst researching women’s experiences of sickness and their connection to food. Dionys’s breakdown at the age of 26 was occasioned by a white lie; claiming to be sick to escape an oppressive social engagement. After indulging in a baked apple — a food well known for its dangerous properties — this feigned sickness developed into extreme spiritual anxiety, hallucinations, and eventually a total physical and psychological collapse. It is this episode of breakdown and recovery which she chose to narrate in the manuscript autobiography written in her late twenties. As Katherine Hodgkin has decisively argued, the manuscript is concerned with proving her sanity, re-shaping her experience of madness into a spiritual battle between God and the Devil rather than a mental collapse. Her narrative thus defies the connection, tightly bound at the time and not fully unravelled today, between ‘women, madness, and sin’. As Hodgkin has argued, Fitzherbert as a writer thus faced a challenge, a turbulent impetus to recover ‘what can be recollected of a time when the self was in a sense absent from itself’. (9) ‘There is no heart or tongue can explain or express the exceeding anguish and extreme dolour that oppressed me’, she wrote, years after her experience, struggling to make meaning out of a past which defies it. (10)

In its explicit narrativising of her madness into a story of spirituality, and its anxious unease over the nature of her memories, Fitzherbert’s memoir foreshadows the ways in which the autofictional (and its little sister, the personal essay) problematises truth, memory, the construction of a linear narrative. The ‘autobiographical pact’ has little meaning in this text, which is so concerned with the dissolution of the self and its construction by others, as either mad with melancholy or tormented by the devil. Contemporary autofiction may centre on a self who is both author and protagonist, but that self is elusive, multi-faceted, shifting in front of the reader — in the case of ‘Faye’ in Cusk’s Outline trilogy, scarcely deploying her own voice. Is it any wonder then, that the autofictional form holds such appeal to women? When to be a woman is always to be constituted by another, as anOther, torn between different selves — for Dionys, at times literally identifying herself with the Antichrist. 

Zambreno, writing of the theories and theorists of modernism, whose work was so often dependent on their wives(/muses/collaborators), notes that for these theorists, ‘women’s radical spoken utterances are not art or writing in and of themselves, rather that an author is needed to edit and repeat, to shape and discipline’. (11) For Zambreno, this disciplining is bound up with hysteria, with Freud and Charcot, but of course it is bound up with hysteria’s predecessors, the past’s possessed women. The voice’s discipline not so far from the body’s; those unruly tongues again. Dionys undressed with her hands ‘bound’, fearing that her doctors meant to ‘leave me naked’. (12) So many hundreds of years later, Zelda Fitzgerald tied to an asylum bed, abandoned in the fire which would burn her alive. Dionys’s visions of herself vomiting in the yard outside her sickroom; Woolf, starving and hearing the birds speak Greek, an anecdote from her breakdown she passes on to Mrs Dalloway’s shellshocked soldier, Septimus Smith. Dionys rejecting melancholy, a diagnosis which ‘could be cured by giving up books and getting married’; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s avatar in The Yellow Wallpaper, banned from books and work by her husbands. (13) That ‘genealogy of erased women’. So their writings are the ramblings of mad women. So they are self-expressions, voyeuristic chances to glance into hysterical, female lives. Are they not also art? 

Ernaux, setting out to write A Girl’s Story, spilling out a ‘stream of words and images’ to fill ‘fifty pages’ with her memories. ‘I refused the pain of form’. (14)

What makes a ‘real’ writer? What does it mean, to trace a tradition, and to call that tradition art, to elevate it above the status of source material? What does it mean to treat a woman’s life as more than just a woman’s life?

Following a conversation with a writer friend about our anxieties, our sense of writerly inadequacy, I scrawl questions in my diary which will later remind me of the nineteenth-century Russian diarist and artist Marie Bashkirtseff, who died at 25. What is it that I believe I need that would make me a ‘serious’ writer, a ‘real' writer? To earn money? Acclaim? Acceptance to publications; the audience that would bring? Reads, clicks, likes? But what about those girls back then? They did not see themselves as writers, and I am even more certain society did not. But they wrote. 

They wrote themselves into being, carved out space for themselves with their pens amidst the prevailing cultural forms and expectations of the time, of religiosity, marriage, motherhood. This narrativising, story-telling impulse, taking the tattered threads of a life and spinning them into the tale of a self, even as the very concept of the self was in its nascency. A way of hallowing or valuing spaces traditionally feminised and feminised stories traditionally demeaned, as I wrote in my diary. Childbirth, child loss, pregnancy, menstruation, sickness, romance, faith, girlhood; the topics about which the seventeenth-century women self-writers wrote still preoccupy us today. As does the need to justify writing about them — just search the dreaded ‘girlhood’ on Substack. Across time, a consciousness of the world that limits us, a desire to escape and remake it, and to insert our own stories within it. 

Academic history teaches us not to approach our sources with empathy or an eye for analogy, but to maintain a critical distance from the past. To emphasise context and construction, the deep differences between past and present. 

And yet. 

And yet. These women who possess me.

‘I align myself with a genealogy of erased women.’ (15)

‘All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded’. (16)

I find scribbled in my notes on Delval’s manuscript: I love her. 

Women writers; our lives multiplying, the possibilities of our lives multiplying, the possibilities of our writing, of our art. All those girls across time and space, all their personal essays. The navel-gazers, the scribblers. Their ways of making meaning out of stories considered meaningless. ‘What can be recollected of a time when the self was in a sense absent from itself?’ (17) This is Hodgkin’s question, posed in relation to Fitzherbert’s autobiography of madness. But this is also the question which drives all self-writing, not just that which recollects madness. Ernaux, at the very end of A Girl’s Story: ‘It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing.’ (18)

It is also, in a sense, the question which drives us to the discipline of history. What can we remember, what can we reconstruct, from a time when our selves were not ourselves? From a past which is both familiar yet alien, which is fundamentally meaningless yet so close we can reach out and touch it, in the faces of our friends and the books on our shelves. Which is so close we can love it.

Notes

(1) qtd in R. Adcock, S. Read, and A. Ziomek, Flesh and spirit (2016), p211, 204

(2) V. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (2018), p62-68

(3) N. H. Keeble, "'Self-confidence and Self-Conceit Render Men Fools': Seventeenth-Century 'Self-' Compounds, Puritan Discourse and Early Modern Subjectivity(star)." Renaissance Studies (2022), p4

(4) K. Hodgkin, Madness in seventeenth-century autobiography (2007) 

(5) Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p83, 106

(6) K. Zambreno, Heroines (2024), p167

(7) A. Effe and H. Lawlor (eds.), The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms (2022), p2

(8) K. Hodgkin, Women, madness and sin in early modern England: The autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (2010), p23

(9) Hodgkin, Women, madness and sin in early modern England, p20

(10) qtd in Hodgkin, Women, madness and sin in early modern England, p167

(11) Zambreno, Heroines, p90 

(12) qtd in Hodgkin, Women, madness and sin in early modern England, p165

(13) Hodgkin, Women, madness and sin in early modern England, p165, p73

(14) A. Ernaux, A Girl’s Story (2022), p17

(15) Zambreno, Heroines, p167

(16) Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p119

(17) Hodgkin, Madness in seventeenth-century autobiography, p20

(18) A. Ernaux, A Girl’s Story (2022), p. 143