Elizabeth Major

Elizabeth Major was a religious writer, spiritual autobiographer and poet. She published one book, Honey on the Rod, or, A Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction: with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (1656), under Joseph Caryl’s imprint. The text of Honey on the Rod is a religious disquisition divided into two parts: A Comfortable Contemplation, a dialogue set in prose between incarnations of the ‘Soul’ and ‘Consolation’, and Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered, a collection of poems which explore themes of pride and self-indulgence. Little is known of her, but some information can be gleaned from the preface to the second part of Honey on the Rod, in which she informs the reader that she was raised primarily by a “godly and careful Father” (her mother died while she was in her infancy). During the “fifteenth or sixteenth year of [her] age” Major was sent to live with another family where she enjoyed “a wise and virtuous Governess” for about ten years until she was stricken with lameness. She returned to live with her Father “where [she] persued with an inordinate desire of recovery … and endeavored the accomplishing of that desire, without an humble and obedient submission to the will of God.” At home she mostly wasted time and money and in her preface she looks back on these moments as “folly, “realizing that she “had offended God, and deprived [her]self of that little health [she] enjoyed.” 

For more on Major, see entry in Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); also Patricia Demers, Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).