Elizabeth Freke

The early-eighteenth-century remembrances of EF were edited in 1913 as a diary, but are regarded by their latest editor as a heterogenous group of two commonplace-books and other papers, together making up a life-story dominated by the pattern of the inventory or stock-taking. These texts are a rich mine of material about EF 's material circumstances and tortured emotional relationships with her husband, son, and others. She began writing out of an autobiographical impulse. She was also, apparently, a poet of unusual skill and forcefulness for an amateur.