The life-writings in prose and verse of Katherine Austen, née Wilson (b. 1629, d. in or before 1683), are extant in “Book M” (British Library, Additional MS 4454), a manuscript dating 1664–66 that was once one in a lettered series of volumes. Austen’s writing traverses topics from her legal battles as a widow, fighting for her eldest son’s inheritance of her late husband’s estate; the plague oubreak of 1665; interpretations of dreams; and her decision not to remarry for the sake of preserving her own economic independence and her children’s prosperity. She describes “Book M” as a book of meditations and her own writings are occasional and reiterative, interspersing her compilation of extensive extracts from sermons, lives, and literature. “Book M” is a vivid representation of the life and interests—financial, emotional, imaginative, and poetic—of an upwardly mobile widow and mother in Middlesex and London in the 1660s, and her social and writing worlds.