Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660 (review)

Early Modern English Lives offers a broad survey of a number of autobiographical texts, authors, trends, and genres spanning the late-sixteenth through the early eighteenth century. Bedford, Davis, and Kelly’s collection of largely independent essays focuses on topics as disparate as time, mirrors, travel, sieges, spiritual self-examinations, and wills. Four sections (on autobiography and time, mirroring, war, and women’s life-writing) provide a coherent framework for the individual essays, all of which appear as collaborative efforts of the three authors. Well-known diaries, including those of Ralph Josselin, Anne Clifford, Margaret Hoby, and Thomas Whythorne, appear prominently alongside discussions of lesser-known texts such as those by Puritan preacher Richard Rogers and adventuring sailor Richard Pike. Occasional discussion of literary texts (Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as Richard II, King Lear, and Hamlet, plays by George Chapman and Thomas Heywood, in addition to brief analysis of Milton’s “On Time”) adumbrates the analysis of life-writing throughout the volume.

Bedford, Davis, and Kelly explore “how people wanted their lives to be recoded, what they thought worthy of recoding, and how they conceived of individuality as a social concept rather than a model of unique genius” (5). The treatment of time unifies the volume more than any other theme, with each of the four sections returning at some point to the interactions of chronos and kairos that structure self-presentation by diarists, autobiographers, and chroniclers. Their analysis reveals that all these genres of self-representation return, at some point, to an idea expressed by Thomas Whythorne about why people have their portraits painted (and presumably write about themselves): “to see how time doth alter them” (47) as they progress towards eternity.

The book’s second section “Reflections: Selves and Others” offers the book’s most complex theoretical and historical interpretation by focusing on how self-representation in the period is “caught up in a paradigm shift between externalization and internalization of character, between responsibility to the other and to the self” (85), emblematized in the recurrent rhetorical and physical concern with mirrors and mirroring. Discussion of manufacturing technology for glass mirrors (as opposed to those of highly polished metals) gives way to consideration of how conduct writers, painters, travelers, and sonneteers like Shakespeare use the image of the mirror. The authors assert that much of the early modern competition between growing individuality and entrenched social roles manifests in the idea of the mirror as something that delineated “the relationship between the corporeal and the eternal,” depending largely on the scriptural concept of “through a glass darkly” (116).

Early Modern English Lives concludes by treating women’s writing, be it diary, memoir, advice book, or (as the authors here fascinatingly assert) last will and testament. Centering their exploration on well-known but generically distinct diaries by Grace Mildmay, Margaret Hoby, and Anne Clifford, the book argues that for these elite women “the realization of selfhood is the understanding of how to inhabit — whether through prayer, through rightful inheritance of property, or through rightful expression of virtue — the place that one is born to” (193). The section on wills that follows the analysis of these much-discussed diaries gestures towards a rich field of inquiry, with women’s wills as a form of self-representation akin to mothers’ advice books: a form of textual production that exemplifies concerns with agency and legacy.

On the whole, Early Modern English Lives presents a readable discussion of a variety of texts by writers male and female, secular and sacred, homebound and widely traveled. Problems in the volume stem from its structure as a collage of related, but not truly integrated, analyses of related, but dissimilar, genres of self-representational writing. The book leaves readers stimulated but with the sense that they have skated along a surface, catching glimpses of rich worlds below all too briefly as they passed.