Catherine Evans
Perdita; Millman and Wright (2005)
Born to Thomas Norman of Bedfordshire, a leatherseller who had been educated at St. Albany Hall, Oxford, and his wife Anne (née Searle). She was baptised on 19 August 1599 as "Annie" Norman. She was engaged to Roger Ley from the age of 15 for seven years, allegedly due to the poverty of the couple. They married on 25 February 1621/2 at St Botolphs without Bishopgate. The couple set up a parish school in Shoreditch where Anne "by unparraleled industrie" taught herself Latin and Greek to teach to a university standard. The Leys were close to the Shoreditch parish minister John Squire who was a controversial Laudian minister. Anne's later letters are often written from the country home in Northchurch Hertfordshire, where she seems to have moved after the plague broke out in 1636. However, she complains of being exiled, and describes herself as "a banished Ulysses". She died in the first week of October 1641 and was buried on the 22nd.