Elizabeth Bagwell

Mrs Bagwell was married to William Bagwell, a carpenter whose naval employment brought the couple into Samuel Pepys’s professional orbit. Pepys’s diary records her visits connected with her husband’s advancement and then a sexual relationship pursued by Pepys. Modern scholarship identifies her first name as almost certainly Elizabeth, although Pepys himself does not provide it.

The diary is an especially difficult source because it is written entirely from Pepys’s perspective and records episodes involving coercion and physical struggle. Elizabeth Bagwell’s own account has not survived. Her significance therefore lies both in what the diary reveals about patronage and sexual power and in the limits of reconstructing a woman through the writings of the man who exploited that imbalance.

Deborah Swift’s A Plague on Mr Pepys reconstructs Elizabeth Bagwell’s side of a relationship preserved historically only through Samuel Pepys’s diary. Bess hopes Pepys’s naval patronage will help her carpenter husband Will, but the arrangement exposes her to a severe imbalance of power as plague strips away ordinary protections. By centring Bess rather than the famous diarist, the novel turns a fragmentary historical record into a study of ambition, coercion, marriage and survival in 1665 London.