Knowing her Place: Anne Clifford and the Politics of Retreat

Anne Clifford, as the daughter of the Earl and Countess of Cumberland, was a seventeenth-century heiress of very high social standing. Clifford’s texts produced between 1605 and her death in 1676 begins with a response to her father’s will and her very public deprivation of her legal rights. Clifford’s focus on property acts to illuminate conceptions of self as tied to a network including the local and the national. In a situation where property is bound to ties of land and genealogy as well as capital, it illuminates wider cultural networks. Thus, Clifford’s exceptional status, wealth and creativity were brought to the fore by her lawsuit, and in turn bring into view the operations of discourses and self-understandings usually seen only intermittently, in the courtroom. Clifford’s philanthropy narrativizes space, time and the identity of others under the sign of her inheritance and importance. The inscriptions on her land rework the emphasis on fullness of presence and description found in chorography.