Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille's book is a multiple landmark. It is the first ever book on Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, and indeed the first ever book on Lucy Hutchinson. It also revolutionizes the way we read the Memoirs. Hutchinson's life of the regicide John Hutchinson has been in print almost permanently since its first publication in 1806, as a classic of literature as well as a vivid eyewitness account of the English Civil War, but it has mainly been quarried for information about the war, while very little attention has been paid to its author. Gheeraert-Graffeuille turns our attention to Lucy Hutchinson as a writer, insisting that she was “an incomparable mistress of literary form, surpassing many historians of the Restoration” (32). Her focus is on form and genre, but in the process she also refines our understanding of the work's continuing importance as a historical witness. She argues for the work's “generic hybridity” (35), and while bringing out its unique qualities she illuminates its dialogue with a range of contemporary genres.
The exploration begins with the title Memoirs. This was given by Julius Hutchinson in 1806, and the present reviewer has suggested discarding it because it brought in subjective elements from a later era; Gheeraert-Graffeuille, however, draws on extensive reading in early modern French and English sources to demonstrate how the memoir genre grew in popularity in periods of political crisis, when an appeal to personal experience offered forms of epistemological authority that were being shaken in the public world. That personal element could also be rooted in paradigms of exemplary virtue that went back to classical literature, and in a careful reading of Lucy Hutchinson's initial praise of her husband, Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows how Hutchinson combines secular ideals of the gentleman with Christian saints’ lives. She brings out what may seem a surprising congruence with some Catholic paradigms, which results, she writes, in “a tension between epideictic rhetoric and the ideal of plainness” (82).
Moving to Hutchinson's narrative of the Civil War in Nottingham, Gheeraert-Graffeuille highlights not the what but the how, the rhetorical strategies by which Hutchinson establishes her epistemological authority when trying to vindicate her own view against the rival narratives put forward as much by her husband's opponents as by the royalists. Gheeraert-Graffeuille devotes a chapter to the paradoxical rhetorical situation Hutchinson faced in asserting her authority as a narrator without undermining conventional views of wifely subordination, and concludes that, while she vindicates her husband, she also vindicates her own role as a historian. Hutchinson offers the local experience as a microcosm of national conflict, thus combining, as Gheeraert-Graffeuille points out, the county- and nation-based perspectives of recent schools of Civil War historiography.
Gheeraert-Graffeuille further demonstrates Hutchinson's craft through detailed comparison of the Memoirs narrative with an earlier manuscript composed during the war, arguing that this was no mere accumulation of source material but itself a structured narrative. She demonstrates Hutchinson's deployment, in both narratives, of motifs from romance and from the “secret history” genre, exposing a structure of dissimulations that reaches its apogee in the figure of Oliver Cromwell. The final chapter, on Hutchinson's art of digression, brilliantly brings to light a neglected structural principle: Hutchinson's use of an organized pattern of digressions to connect local and national history. Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that there was indeed an art to digression in humanist historiography, and distinguishes three kinds of digression: those on the long-term causes of the war, on military events during the war, and on the politico-moral digressions contrasting Colonel Hutchinson's exemplary character with vivid portrayals of the vices of his opponents. In conclusion, Gheeraert-Graffeuille notes Hutchinson's tragic view of the Civil War as “a form of stasis affecting the body politic” (300), pitted against millenarian hopes, so that the work offers “a counter-history of the English Revolution” (308).
This book decisively challenges residual views of Lucy Hutchinson as a simple transcriber of her husband's virtues; it also challenges stereotypes of what we might expect from a committed Puritan, demonstrating her many points of contact with humanist genres. It will become the point of departure for all future study of the Memoirs.
