Page - 99 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

“As i cannot write I put this down simply and freely” | 99www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 95–122 capital letter introduces a quotation. In the first line, the narrator introduces herself in the first person: As i cannot write I put this down simply and freely as I might speak to a person to whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully intrust myself and who I know will bear with all my weaknesses The use of “writing” in the first line can be interpreted as a reflection by the author of her social position: as Chloe Flower notes, “Parker’s use of the word ‘writing’ could imply polished exposition or literary style; as a working-class girl, she would have been hesitant to claim the skills of writing.”11 The lines that follow are presented as a dialogue with a reliable partner with whom the narrator wishes to develop an intimate conversation. It is not clear who the anonymous interlocutor of the “I”-narrator is. It may be the author herself, indicating that the text can be interpreted as a self-reflexion. Flower interprets the “I” in the background of literary genres as linked to autobiography: Unlike the double “I” structure of forms such as the Bildungsroman, the autobiography, or the confession – where the past, narrated, self converges at the end with the present, narrating, subject – the sampler sewing “I”’s procession into futurity is decidedly less straightforward. Sampler sewing models a circular shape of development in which the young girl painfully revises or “mends” earlier experience; the subject is conceived of as perpet- ually reworking herself.12 In the second part of the text, God and Jesus are addressed in prayers. In lines 2–6 Elizabeth describes her origins and her family. Born in 1813, she grew up in Ashburnham, a small village in East Sussex, in a “poor but pious” family. Her father “was a labourer” for the local landowning nobleman, and her mother was a teacher in the charity school financially sustained by that nobleman’s family. Elizabeth was the sixth child of eleven. Though they led a modest life, her industrious parents provided Elizabeth and her siblings with a stable living situation, moral guidance and a religious education: 11 Flower 2016, 312, with references to Kortsch 2009. Goggin 2002, 40 suggests, among other possible readings of this phrase, a self-imposed silence. 12 Flower 2016, 302; Goggin 2009, 33.