Miriam Nandi's Reading the Early Modern English Diary offers an interesting psychoanalytic and historical reading of early modern English diaries by Margaret Hoby, Anne Clifford, Ralph Josselin, and Samuel Pepys. Studying the interplay of time and object, practice and text, feeling and accounting in these diarists, Nandi argues that these works demonstrate complex and diverse emergent subjectivities. Noting the diary's functions of marking daily patterns, recapturing time, and accounting for both sin and pleasure, Nandi tracks how the diary both disciplines and enables the subject's ties to God and the community. Nandi notes that the layered interlocutors in these works are sometimes the diary itself and sometimes the subject's past or future self as witness, judge, or listener. Nandi argues that the diary, as a kind of intermediary object between the diarist and the world, and the diarist and themselves, offers a particularly interesting opportunity to see the evolving, devolving, or competitive ideologies of selfhood in this period.

This study is strongest when it reflects on the diary as a genre (in chapters 2 and 3) and in its readings of specific authors (in chapters 4–7). Using psychoanalytic categories with a reasonably light hand, Nandi illuminates Josselin's tortured pleasures in confessing sin (a form of jouissance), Clifford linking her status to both family and buildings (object seeking), and Hoby's Freudian self-monitoring. While Nandi relies fairly heavily on the previous work of scholars specializing in these four authors, she often provides insightful readings of specific passages and thinks deeply about how the diary's particular forms of personal accounting make for another kind of audience-making. Nandi moves flexibly between doctrinal, genre-based, psychoanalytic, and affective analyses of the diaries, often with sensitive and subtle readings.

Reading the Early Modern English Diary does have some structural limitations and excesses, to be sure. A significant chunk of the book summarizes the theories of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, Kristeva, and others. These summaries risk readerly impatience, especially as they force us to wait almost to page 80 before we encounter an early modern diarist. The actual author chapters are quite short, perhaps as a result. Despite its interest in the genre of the early modern diary, the book doesn't refer, except in passing, to other key diarists of the period (John Evelyn, most notably); given Elaine McKay's work on diary networks in the period, this feels like a missed opportunity. Nandi is also generally silent on the diary-like works of John Donne, Samuel Clarke, Philip Stubbes, and John Bunyan, as well as on the epistolary collections of Katherine Philips or others that replicate the diary's immediate reportage. Every monograph has to make its choices, of course, but more on this burgeoning culture of diarizing and self-documentation and less on Freud's concept of the id would have been welcome here.

The significance of self-making in early modern studies also has very broad implications for this period's literary history, and it would have been helpful for Nandi to have addressed some of those implications and contexts more comprehensively. If this study is an effort to rework Greenblatt or (more appropriately) to build on more recent studies of affect, interiority, and subject-creation, a wider discussion of these scholarly threads would have been invaluable. Feeling is a major point of interest in the study, for instance, but early modern affect scholars get very little space in the arguments themselves. Ramie Targoff's work on social individualism is not cited here, despite its relevance; nor are David Cressy's or Jonathan Gil Harris's studies on concepts of early modern time. Some anachronistic terms (like “dissenting”) suggest that the theological history of the period is not the work's forte.

This is still a rewarding study, though. Nandi's book is written in a crisp, interesting style, often with felicitous distinctions, and with clear argumentation throughout. It's a little hard to tell whether scholars specializing in Hoby, Clifford, Josselin, and Pepys will find much to surprise in this study, and early modernists will want more by way of cultural conversation than this book has to offer. But certainly, Nandi illuminates the early modern diary, and her analytical work is richly suggestive and worth the reading.