The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599-1605

The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1571-1633, is one of the most important journals of a woman writer of the sixteenth century. Lady Margaret was the only daughter and heiress of a wealthy landowner. She was married first to Walter Devereux, brother of Robert, Earl of Essex (favourite of Elizabeth I) then to Thomas Sidney, brother of the great Renaissance poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney, and finally to the Puritan Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby. The diary covers the period 15999-1605, when she lived on her estate in North Yorkshire, and records Lady Margaret's spiritual endeavours, the life of her household and such great events as the legal case in Star Chamber which took the Hobys to London.