Written around 1639, Isham's Book of Remembrance was one of the longest pieces of autobiographical writing by a woman of the entire seventeenth century and one of the earliest sustained pieces of English autobiography of the early modern period tout court. Born on 28 January 1609, Elizabeth Isham was the daughter of Sir John Isham and Judith, Lady Isham of Lamport Hall. In 1631 she came very close indeed to marrying John Dryden of Canons Ashby, a fellow member of the Northamptonshire gentry and cousin to the poet. Thereafter she espoused what she termed ‘the private life’ and died at Lamport Hall in 1654 at the age of forty-five. Elizabeth was the eldest of three Isham children; she had a younger sister, Judith, and a brother, Justinian. Judith died in 1636, at the relatively early age of twenty-six. Like Elizabeth, she was an intensely pious woman who never married. Elizabeth thus spent almost her entire life within the environs of the Isham household and one of the several functions that her book of remembrance served was to explain and legitimate her choice of such a cloistered ‘private’ – the term is her own – life.

Studded with moments of direct address to God, Isham's book was, in many ways, a devotional act, serving both as an account of her emergence into full self-consciousness as a faithful, prayerful Christian and sinner, and as a reminder to herself (and an acknowledgement to God) of her continuing propensity to sin, and thus of her constant need for the grace and mercy of God. There is a sense, therefore, in which the whole text can be viewed as one long, continuous exercise in prayer. In it we can watch myriad previous, private and extempore, as well as in set, prayers, as well as the benefits of a lifetime's intense reading and scriptural study and meditation, being folded into a highly wrought autobiographical text of some 60,000 words. Her Book of Remembrance served as a testament to Isham's piety, devotional practices and an exercise in the creation and deployment of memory. Writing it enabled her to recall, recast and recount her life as a story of the interrelations between a just and merciful God and one of his elect saints.