According to the 19th-century bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt (grandson of the other William), ‘the books had lain in a corner of the library time out of mind, unnoticed and unheeded,’ until in 1856 the collection was sold off in parts at Sotheby’s. In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them together,’ which he seems to have done. She had a habit of adding sharp evaluative comments to title pages, compacted literary criticism in five words or fewer: on her third quarto of Othello, ‘a sad one’ on her copy of James Shirley’s The Constant Maid, or Love Will Find Out the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’. ‘Frances Wolfreston her bouk geuen by her motherilaw mary wolfreston,’ she wrote in her copy of The workes of Geffray Chaucer. She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a book had passed. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.

‘Frances wolfreston hor bouk’ is written in italics across the title page. The most spectacular instance is the only surviving first edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, now at the Bodleian Library. But what she left when she died at the age of seventy was unusual: a library of several hundred books, dominated not by the standard theological works of the time but by an unmatched collection of what we would now call English literature. She was born around 1607, had eleven children and lived in the manor house at Statfold near Tamworth, where her descendants still live today. O n the face of it, Frances Wolfreston from Staffordshire looks like an unlikely literary star.

Lost and found divinity 2