Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, continued

The Memoirs are weird. Lucy Hutchinson, the Colonel's wife, writes them but she never identifies herself, and sometimes talks about herself in the third person. When she does this, she lets the reader know what "Mrs. Hutchinson" is thinking, even though she never calls herself as "I" or "me." For example, at one point, "My Lord of Portland and Mr. Howard came to Mrs. Hutchinson's lodgings...and my lord left her a message, that he must needs speak with her, upon a message of much concernment; whereupon she sought out my lord, knowing that he had professed much kindness and obligation to her husband, and thinking he might have some design not to acknowledge it by some real assistance" (279 of the Everyman ed., italics mine).

Also sometimes amusing are the details of how when Colonel Hutchinson was governor, he got his people to drink less by building more bars: "He procured unnecessary alehouses to be put down in all the towns, and if any one that he heard of suffered any disorder or debauchery in his house, he would not suffer him to brew any more. He was a little severe against drunkenness, for which the drunkards would sometimes rail at him; but so much were all the children of darkness convinced by his light, that they were more in awe of his virtue than his authority" (289-90).

There's good stuff in here, good enough to make me wish I were enjoying it more, but the way Hutchinson writes makes her prose very difficult to get through.