Remembering a Hero
Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of her Husband
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9799236 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Hirst (0000-0002-9148-4586) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 119 |
| Issue | 482 |
| Pages | 682-691 |
| Publication date | 2004-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/119.482.682 |
| OpenAlex | W1993401463 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
The dramatic high-point of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of Col. John Hutchinson is the account of the Colonel’s escape from execution at the Restoration as a regicide. Her story of his unflinching honour and her own loving disobedience – a disobedience that rescued him from an impenitent traitor’s fate – has entranced generations of readers, including Whiggish, republican and feminist scholars. Despite evidential flaws, and despite long-available evidence that other republican stalwarts saw John Hutchinson in less flattering light, the power of Mrs. Hutchinson’s narrative has swept doubts aside. An overlooked parliamentary diary of the 1660 Convention makes reconsideration of that narrative unavoidable, for the diarist heard the Colonel abjectly repudiate his republican past. Events in 1660 were not as Lucy Hutchinson represented them. That fact must call her motives into question as she wove her history of Col. Hutchinson’s life. Although the Memoirs present her as selfless author and paragon of wifely duty, she stood at a political distance from her husband. In her writing she elided that distance and remade her husband, and in so doing committed acts of imaginative resistance as great as the political resistance in 1660 she (wrongly) attributed to herself. That Lucy Hutchinson’s account has won so much acceptance, in spite of the evidence, perhaps speaks to our own taste for heroes as well as to her narrative skills
Art · Aside · HERO · Honour · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Resistance (ecology · Witness · Classics · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Philosophy
Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2004-2005
History from Loss
Paper Frames’
Recent Developments in Early Modern English Life Writing and Romance
Making the Memoirs
Lucy Hutchinson
Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs , François Guizot’s histories of the English revolution, and Henriette Guizot de Witt’s women’s history
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2005 - 2023 (19) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |