About the Editor:
Dr. Joanna Moody is a Visiting Lecturer in English and Related Literature, and in Educational Studies, at the University of York, U.K. Her research interests lie in Renaissance literature, particularly early modern women's writing. Her edition of the Hoby diary, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605, was first published in 1998, and she is a contributor to the New Dictionary of National Biography.

The letters of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon offer the richly illuminating story of a loving mother and devoted friend. Cumulatively, they provide an unfolding, sometimes self-dramatizing narrative, one which details the expansive life of a privileged woman and her family throughout the turbulent years of the early to mid-seventeenth century. The correspondents vary from close relations and friends, such as Lucy, Countess of Bedford, to distant cousins and to associates at the London court and in Europe. The letters enable us to share in the pleasures and disappointments that form a natural part of daily life, and we find, along with insights into social customs and attitudes to death, references to important personalities and the major political events of the time. The readiness of families such as this to write directly, rather than to dictate through secretaries, makes the literary outcome more personal and intimate, more expressive of inner feelings and shared sensibility. In consequence, the letters carry their own truth across the ages.