Introduction
Elizabeth Walker (née Sadler) is known to have written a pious autobiographical memoir entitled Some memorials of God's Providences to my Husband, Self, and Children, the original manuscript of which, however, is not known to survive. Together with directions she wrote for her children's instruction, her autobiography was the basis, at least selectively, for the biographical memoir written after her death by her husband, the Rev. Anthony Walker (1622-92), published as The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker (London, 1690). He describes her papers as including ‘an Account of her Parentage and Birth, left under her own hand’, with the title above, written ‘in a large Book in Octavo, of the best Paper she could buy, neatly bound, gilded, and ruled with red’.
What remains of her ‘memorials’, through the agency of her husband, has attracted interest not least because of the proximity of the Sadler family to the Shakespeare and Quiney families in Stratford upon Avon: see Allan Pritchard, ‘Elizabeth Walker and Shakespeare's Stratford’, N&Q, 223 (April 1978), 156-60.
Peter Beal