Newly reunited manuscripts by Alice Thornton show how she navigated personal crises during tumultuous events such as the civil war
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he was a 17th-century Yorkshirewoman whose memoirs combined commentaries on major political events with local and personal details of her life. Now an academic who has studied the writings of Alice Thornton has said they provide a “northern female perspective” in contrast to the London-based diarist Samuel Pepys.
Thornton’s memoirs contain accounts of financial catastrophe, rumours of sexual impropriety, childbirth, attempted rapes and repeated interventions by God to deliver her from an early death. Thornton lived to be 80, a remarkable age at the time.
Two of four autobiographical volumes were discovered by Cordelia Beattie, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh. One was handed by a descendant of Thornton to Beattie’s father in a pub in Ludlow, Shropshire, and the second was unearthed in the library of Durham Cathedral.
