Elizabeth Delaval

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ED is remembered for her manuscript book about her own early life, drafted in 1663-72, during her teens and early twenties (sometimes called either a diary or a commonplace-book). Its obvious motive was religious self-examination, and meditations and prayers alternate with narrative and commentary on her courtships and her family relationships. The whole is flavoured with fictional romance.

Milestones

Probably late 1648
Elizabeth Livingston (later Delaval) , the only child of her parents, was born probably in England before they fled for political reasons to the Hague.
Ezell, Margaret J. M. “Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Women Writers”. English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, edited by Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths, Vol.
3
, British Library; University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp. 216-37.
219
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Later 1663
Lady Elizabeth Livingston (later Delaval), in her mid teens and in the second year of a Court post, began to record her personal life in passages both of narrative and of pious meditation or analysis: she kept up this practice until 1672.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
1717
ED died in this year, in Jacobite exile at Rouen in France.
Greene, Douglas G., and Elizabeth Delaval. “Introduction”. The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval: Written Between 1662 and 1671, edited by Douglas G. Greene and Douglas G. Greene, Northumberland Press, 1978, pp. 1-25.
17
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

Probably late 1648
Elizabeth Livingston (later Delaval) , the only child of her parents, was born probably in England before they fled for political reasons to the Hague.
Ezell, Margaret J. M. “Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Women Writers”. English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, edited by Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths, Vol.
3
, British Library; University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp. 216-37.
219
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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