Lady Falkland: Her Life (1645) is a story of conversion, that of Elizabeth Cary and her children, written anonymously by one of the protagonist?s four daughters who took their vows in the Benedictine convent at Cambray. A retrospective survey of editorial procedure reveals that since its discovery in the 1850s, the manuscript has craved the attention of scholars, who have mostly appropriated the narrative to make it accord with their own interpretive leanings or even priorities, thereby changing not just the text and its generic ascription, but also the identities of the subject of narration and of the writer in the process. The present study contends that such critical transformations may be grounded in Life?s inherent textual polyphony resulting from collaborative revising work among Lady Falkland?s Catholic children, and no less from the analytical and skeptic mind of its writer. Hence Life unfolds several chapters of transformation: religious, scholarly, and most importantly, that of its writer?s discontinuous identity.

—Dr Isabel Calderón-López, University of Cádiz, Spain