Over the course of sixteen years--from 1700 to 1716--Lady Sarah Cowper kept a truly remarkable diary, comprising over 2,300 pages of intimate commentary, not only on her personal life but also on religion, politics, and society in early modern England. Throughout this revealing text, she interweaves her own words with unattributed quotations from other writings--conduct manuals, sermons, periodicals, and other forms of prescriptive literature--in order to valorize her own identity and her claims to authority, both within her family and within a wider public sphere. Not only did Lady Sarah...