Elizabeth Joscelin

01 January 1596 - 21 October 1622

The most learned as well as the most self-deprecating of the seventeenth-century writers of mother's legacies, EJ composed her deeply religious text when pregnant with her first child, in the belief (accurate, as it turned out) that she would not survive the birth. The poetry which she also wrote is not, apparently, extant.

BirthName: Elizabeth Brooke
Married: Joscelin
Indexed: Jocelin
EJ shortened her given name to Eliza and spelled her married name with the s when she signed the letter to her husband which accompanied her later-published text.
Leigh, Dorothy et al. Women’s Writing in Stuart England. Editor Brown, Sylvia, Sutton, 1999.
95
Her editor Sylvia Brown follows her spelling in her edition, but many sources (including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, also by Brown) follow the printed text's Jocelin. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography spells her father-in-law Josselyn.

Milestones

1596

Elizabeth Brooke (later EJ ) was born, the only child of her parents' marriage, though she had step-sisters from her father's second marriage.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Leigh, Dorothy et al. Women’s Writing in Stuart England. Editor Brown, Sylvia, Sutton, 1999.

21 October 1622

EJ died of puerperal fever nine days after the birth of her daughter.

qtd. in

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

12 January 1624

EJ 's The Mothers Legacie, to her unborne childe was entered in the Stationers' Register. It was posthumously published with her name the same year.

Leigh, Dorothy et al. Women’s Writing in Stuart England. Editor Brown, Sylvia, Sutton, 1999.

101

English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.

Biography

Birth and Family

1596

Elizabeth Brooke (later EJ ) was born, the only child of her parents' marriage, though she had step-sisters from her father's second marriage.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Leigh, Dorothy et al. Women’s Writing in Stuart England. Editor Brown, Sylvia, Sutton, 1999.