Ruth Connolly
Exemplarity and Familiarity: William Woodroffe’s Edition of Mary Rich’s Diaries.
Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick kept a spiritual diary from 1666 until her death in
1678 and the manuscript is an important example of the introspection and selfexamination that particular practices of reading and writing encouraged in the
Protestant “godly”. Such was her devotion that she earned a place in Samuel Clarke’s
Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons (London, 1683) as a model of feminine piety.
Afterwards, the diaries passed into the hands of her personal chaplain Thomas
Woodroffe and then to his son William, a fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge and
later vicar of Balsham in Cambridge. William took the mass of papers, broke them up
into sections spanning six months, indexed each fragment, glossed her entries at lines
he considered significant or noteworthy and then distributed the edited texts as
exemplary reading to his parishioners. His marginal comments on Rich’s diary entries
serve as a second memoir of Rich; as a form of autobiography since he records
significant events in his own life and as instructions to his parishioners on how to
interpret Rich’s work. He places the greatest emphasis (through the heaviest
annotation) on the entries recording her troubled married life but also highlights the
communal aspects of this introspective work, listing visitors and identifying wellknown figures. Woodroffe’s treatment of the manuscript has influenced all
scholarship on Rich since; indeed it is impossible to ignore since his amplifications
and speculations are on the manuscript page, guiding any reader. As a result his
editing stipulates a particular interpretations of Rich’s words, behaviour and activities
and his editing work is inseparable from the text itself so that any treatment of Rich as
a narrative voice is also a engagement with the preconceptions, intentions and
interpretations of her first editor.