Part of an explosion of critical work on early modern life writing in recent years, Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500–1660 offers a valuable perspective on issues of identity and self-understanding. Its substantive approach to the material indicates just how far the field has come from first-stage descriptive pieces that mined texts for evidence of how “real” men and women lived their lives or expressed disappointment in the seemingly reticent, nonconfessional voices that spoke from the pages of early modern life writing. On the contrary, Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly fully acknowledge the rhetorically motivated act that is autobiographical expression, as well as the quite different assumptions that informed self-writing in early modern England (as opposed to more romantic notions of the self that have informed subsequent periods). Indeed, the authors begin by noting that “people in the early modern period did not have a detailed language for experiencing, and describing, individuality as we know it” (1) and thus take as their starting point the social aspects of the early modern self and self-expression. From here, they launch into a detailed exploration of several lenses through which to view autobiographical practice in early modern England: time, mirrors, travel, war, and wills. The result is a wide-ranging and historically specific exploration of the social and philosophical aspects of early modern identity.

One of this book's many strengths is that it uses concrete and thoroughly interrogated examples to identify and define some of the forces that acted on the writing self; in other words, it offers a valuable counterpart to texts that theorize early modern selfhood by pointing to individual efforts to make sense of life experience, whether the chaos imposed by civil war, the lessons reflected from one's mirror, or the dual sense of time in which all temporal experience is interpreted according to a spiritual, or timeless, paradigm. Although the authors rely on a few familiar examples (Thomas Whythorne, Ralph Josselin, and Anne Clifford), more often they turn to the words of more obscure writers and texts. From several narratives responding to the failed Cadiz expedition of 1625 to little-known travel narratives in which writers from a range of backgrounds struggle to maintain a sense of their place in the world despite conflicts with numerous others (both familiar and foreign), Early Modern English Lives is grounded in textual evidence from both manuscript and print writings, evidence that suggests that one's sense of self at this time was largely dictated by a constant awareness of one's life outside of time or—to put it differently—in God's time. Thus, the “dual time” of autobiographical expression is the most consistent theme throughout this text, offering a compelling reminder of how the early modern English life writer was constantly struggling “to find a self-location in terms of time, space and providential determination” (31).

In light of this argument, the four-section organization of Early Modern English Lives (comprising “Autobiography and Time,” “Reflections,” “The Self at War,” and “Women and Life-Writing”) allows for depth and specificity on several unique perspectives that help to demonstrate how socially situated narratives convey a sense of self as social being. The opening section on time builds a foundation on which the subsequent chapters can be read, and the last chapter of the book—on women's wills—does a particularly tidy job of returning to these issues by demonstrating how female testators understood the temporal as a way of negotiating and preparing for the eternal. However, this thematic structure also means that this study—while compelling—is far from comprehensive, generally ignoring how life writers engaged with other textual genres and thematic lenses in their self-construction. Secular genres are particularly overlooked, as are those life writers who do not refer so consistently to spiritual concerns in their self-writings. Although Bedford, Davis, and Kelly explain that they do not intend “an overarching method that … avoid[s] the constraints of specific perspectival channels” (7), the fact remains that the book can feel—especially in the middle sections—disjointed and arbitrary rather than cohesive and comprehensive.

Furthermore, although the chapters on time, mirrors, travel, and war are quite valuable, the book's concluding section on women's life writing is less effective. Here, in contrast with the rest of the volume, the authors deal with essentially canonical writers (Grace Mildmay, Margaret Hoby, and Clifford) in order “to examine new possibilities for writings widely acknowledged as exemplary artifacts from the period” (164). However, many other “exemplary” and now-canonical life writers from this period, including Anne Halkett, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Rich, suggest that exemplarity comes in many forms. Engaging the works of these writers or other more obscure women may have complicated the book's central claims, but these claims would likely have been stronger for having to accommodate life accounts with less obviously spiritual content. As it is, the book's focus on primarily spiritual texts by women provides an inaccurate picture of early modern women's life writing and does not, in the end, contribute new perspectives on these writers other than situating their work in the context of dual time. Given the fact that the discussion of how these women negotiated the eternal “in an unavoidably temporal mode of expression” (165) could have been made in the book's early chapters on time, the choice to treat women's writing separately is not entirely clear. Marginalizing women's life writing in a section of their own also seems to repeat many of the assumptions about men's and women's distinct lives that—as Early Modern English Lives itself suggests—are no longer well-founded. Given the range of texts and perspectives considered in this volume, it seems a missed opportunity not to have considered men's and women's lives in a more integrated context. On the whole, however, Early Modern English Lives remains a valuable contribution to autobiographical studies, demonstrating more than anything else the rich rewards of attending to early modern life writing from a historically attentive and rhetorically aware perspective.