Lucy Hutchinson

Biography

Lucy Hutchinson wrote one of the greatest English prose works of the seventeenth century: 'Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson,' an account of her husband's life and the wars that surrounded it, addressed to her children. Her husband John was governor of Nottingham Castle for Parliament throughout the First Civil War, and one of the regicides who signed Charles I's death warrant. Lucy's account of the war combines sharp political analysis with intimate domestic detail and fierce partisan passion — she despised compromise and regarded those who worked for the Restoration as apostates. She is also remarkable for her self-portrait: educated, formidably intelligent, capable of writing in both Latin and Greek, and deeply aware of the constraints her era placed on women. When her husband was arrested after the Restoration and died in Sandown Castle prison in 1664, she turned her grief and her genius into the Memoirs, which circulated in manuscript for over a century before first publication in 1806.