Alice Thornton

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Standard Name: Thornton, Alice
Birth Name: Alice Wandesford
Married Name: Alice Thornton
AT is well known as a Restoration-period autobiographer whose several successive books of Meditations and Transactions of [her] life,
Anselment, Raymond A. “Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life”. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol.
45
, No. 1, 2005, pp. 135-55.
135
while predominantly and earnestly religious in tone, also give a vivid and often horrifying account in detail of her childbed experiences (as well as other escapes and deliverances). She also wrote letters, a memoir of her father, prayers, meditations, and poetry, some of them incorporated in her autobiography.
Photograph of part of the title-page of Alice Thornton's autobiography, published in 1875 as "The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton , of East Newton, Co. York." Her signature is reproduced below the title.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Judith Man
In sharing in the school of the young Wentworths, she would have shared their masters for the various accomplishments valued at the Stuart court: music, dancing, conversation, and probably modern languages, at all events French....
Friends, Associates Judith Man
JM 's friendship with Lady Anne Wentworth and the younger sister, Arabella , perhaps also with the future Alice Thornton , would have been constrained by her greater age and lower rank.
Intertextuality and Influence Julia O'Faolain
The topics covered in richly informative detail, far too many to enumerate, include a father's life-or-death rights over his offspring in ancient Greece, while such topics as buying and selling sex, or the relation...
Reception Brilliana Lady Harley
After having been long admired for their picture of female heroism in time of need, BLH 's letters are now coming under scrutiny as expressions of domestic Puritan ideology and of the involvement of private...

Timeline

23 October 1641: Many Protestants (but perhaps not so many...

National or international item

23 October 1641

Many Protestants (but perhaps not so many as reported) were killed in a Rebellion or massacre in Ulster.
Cope, Esther S. Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie. University of Michigan Press, 1992.
99, 107
Morrill, John. “The Stuarts (1603-1688)”. Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, edited by Kenneth O. Morgan, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 286-51.
314
Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War, A People’s History. Harper Perennial, 2007.
109, 114

6 May 2009: The antiquarian book collection of the late...

Women writers item

6 May 2009

The antiquarian book collection of the late Paula Fentress Peyraud (the largest in private hands), auctioned in New York, fetched more than $1.5 million US. Books by women between 1760 and 1830 predominated.
Mulvihill, Maureen E. “Literary Property Changing Hands: The Peyraud Auction (New York City, 6 May 2009)”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
43
, No. 1, 2009, pp. 151-63.
151, 153, 156, 158

Texts

Thornton, Alice. The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton. Editor Jackson, Charles, 1809 - 1882, Published for the Society by Andrews, 1875.
Thornton, Alice. The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton. Editor Jackson, Charles, 1809 - 1882, Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.