Mr. Isaac Stephens is a PhD candidate in early modern British History whose dissertation, "In the Shadow of the Patriarch: Elizabeth Isham and her World in Seventeenth-Century Northamptonshire", is a micro-history of a never-married woman named Elizabeth Isham. The foundation of the dissertation is a spiritual autobiography that Isham wrote circa 1640 which gives a rare and intimate look into the life of an early seventeenth-century gentlewoman. Recently, Mr. Stephens completed an annotated transcription of this autobiography:

http://www.history.ucr.edu/people/grad_students/stephens/TheAutobiography.pdf