Is autobiography a subset of history? I’m an autobiographer, and Kempe, the failed saint, wrote the first autobiography in English (in about 1430). This is only one of the parallels I make to give the historical matter a vector. I draw together the emergence of the modern self and the end of the modern self, the decaying society in which Kempe lived, the decaying society in which I live, and our respective plagues. L.’s ruling-class status equals the divinity of Jesus. (In the fifteenth century, gods were closer to mortals—about as close as a Rockefeller.) The two stories are like transparencies; each can be read only in terms of the other.

The present extends in all directions; it orders the future and reorders the past. Margery’s story can be taken as one huge metaphor to describe Bob’s state of mind. That is, as the second term of a metaphor that describes the present.

But writing about a historical subject does not mean writing from the other side of history. That’s what makes me uneasy about the fashion for movies and books that seem to “restore” a period as one would restore a house—a distasteful tourism masquerading as good taste. Antique restoration is a postmodern mode, from Masterpiece Theater to the many fundamentalisms in this country and abroad. It is a postmodern desire to want a city or even a parlor to be an exact duplication of an earlier period. These fundamentalisms all speak to the yearning to be authentic, to be part of a recognizable order.

Instead, I feel I am a contributor to Margery’s life, an event in her posthumous life, and she has certainly contributed to my own sense of myself. Our lives are intertwined. Her posthumous life’s twists and turns allow me to adopt that line of thought. Margery did me the favor of disappearing for four centuries. She was all but forgotten except for a few lovely prayers. She is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Her book was discovered in the library of Col. Butler-Bowdon’s sixteenth-century manor house and published in 1934. Margery wakes up in this century as though she experienced a wonderfully prolonged coming out in which the necessity to tell her story prevailed. But Butler-Bowdon, her Prince Charming, referred to her in his preface as “poor Margery.” She was disappointing—her vulgarity, self-aggrandizement, and the faults in her piety. The distinct phases of her reputation duplicate other coming outs: first the establishment was ashamed of her because she was a noisy woman and inadequate saint; then feminism glorified her strength; and now the great maw of cultural studies absorbs her life, which becomes one more example in the history of subjectivity and daily life.