Elinor James

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Standard Name: James, Elinor
Birth Name: Elinor Banks
Married Name: Elinor James
EJ was a publisher and political writer in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as well as a tireless admonisher of monarchs and fervent supporter of the Church of England . Her tone has the stridency of the totally convinced. She wrote and printed over ninety identified political pamphlets and broadsides (more than six times as many as were known only a few years before the end of the twentieth century). It is highly likely that yet more will eventually be unearthed.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
James, Elinor. “Introductory Note”. Elinor James, edited by Paula McDowell, Ashgate, 2005, p. v - xxviii.
xxvi
The volume selected and introduced by Paula McDowell for the Early Modern Englishwoman series includes ninety facsimiles of pamphlets by EJ , then one manuscript and two printed transcriptions of pamphlets whose originals are apparently lost, plus the text of an incorrect ascription.
James, Elinor. Elinor James. McDowell, PaulaEditor , Ashgate, 2005.
James, Elinor. “Introductory Note”. Elinor James, edited by Paula McDowell, Ashgate, 2005, p. v - xxviii.
x
Portrait of Elinor James by an unidentified artist, c. 1690. She sits in a high-backed upholstered armchair by a table covered with a cloth, each boldly patterned. She is wearing a red silk dress with lace at neck and sleeves, and a tall head-dress with lace lappets. She displays several of the works which she wrote, printed, and distributed, including a splendidly bound copy of "Mrs. James's Vindication of the Church of England".

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Davys
MD makes skilful use of letters to project character, political issues, and gender interaction. Her use of significant dates (All Saints' Day, November the fifth) links her with the prophetic tradition of Lady Eleanor Douglas
Publishing Ephelia
The royal licence indicates that the gentlewoman attribution must have been accurate. The date belongs to the height of the plot: that is, the anti-Catholic furore that followed the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey
Publishing Marie Stopes
Next year she printed another pamphlet, smaller again, entitled A New Gospel to All Peoples. This she said she had [f]irst delivered to the Anglican Bishops assembled at Lambeth,
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online.
in the manner of such...
Textual Features Catherine Phillips
Though she stresses her own patriotic loyalty (Britannia's Monarch dear, I own / My Sov'reign under God)
Phillips, Catherine. The Happy King. Privately printed, 1794.
88
she is as eager to direct the king as such long-past predecessors in the genre...
Textual Features Joan Whitrow
Writing from Putney-Park on this significant anniversary for Protestants, she may have been influenced by Elinor James , who chose the same day the previous year for an address to the king which had landed...

Timeline

12 December 1610
The Stationers' Company agreed to deposit, free of charge, in the Bodleian Library one copy of every book that was published.