Recent years have witnessed significant scholarly inquiry into women's writing, utopian thought, and spatial constructs of the early modern period in England. In Women, Space, and Utopia, 1600–1800, Nicole Pohl ambitiously essays an amalgamation of all three strands of investigation; the resulting work, although often tantalizing and provocative, is compromised by its unsystematic arrangement of materials and the provisional, tentative nature of its overarching argument.

In general, Pohl organizes her book by spatial constructs. She reads the utopian visions of women against the grain of masculinist utopias of the period, discovering myriad ways in which they upset, revise, reverse, or resist dominant paradigms. Thus, whereas Alberti, More, Bacon, and their followers emphasize classical, colonizing, and totalizing spatial and gender constructs that imprison the female body and delimit female agency, the “domestic utopias” (11) studied here reinscribe the private sphere with political possibility and produce new representations of space that unshackle women, however momentarily. Pohl's description of these temporary autonomous zones is decidedly optimistic, yet she admits that she does not suggest “a coherent history of utopian spatiality in women's writing,” positioning her book as “quite simply, an attempt to think about alternative ways of being” (11).

The first utopian space Pohl examines is the so-called Architecture of Paradise (17), early modern revisions of Eden and Solomon's Temple. Arguing that traditional pastoral tends toward the naturalization and domination of the female body, she claims that Mary Wroth's Urania (London, 1621) and Aemelia Lanyer's seminal country-house poem, “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611), invert such domination by retreating to a utopia arcadia affording “a different space for self-determination and happiness, for a vita contemplative” (18); she adds that both writers invest heavily in the querelle des femmes tradition, finding in pastoral withdrawal an Edenic site for “a naturally feminocentric (and courtly) society based on virtue, constancy, female friendship and companionate marriages” (18). Given her own analysis, however, the claim works poorly for Urania, which, continuing in the vein of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, is chock full of scenes of domestic violence. Staking her sanguine reading of Wroth on two extremely brief passages of female escape, Pohl seems to force her argument when she posits that “the retreat to a pastoral environment in Wroth's work signifies the return to a Golden Age of female self-determination and selfhood” (28). Pohl is on much surer ground with Lanyer's superb poem, where her reading of a female utopia—however valedictory—seems highly apt and fruitful. This is, not accidentally, among the strongest portions of Pohl's text, precisely because the argument is so fitting. From here, unannounced and unexpectedly, the author leaps to Mary Leapor's poem “Crumble Hall” (1748–51) to serve as a point of comparison to Lanyer's earlier lyric. The discussion is fascinating, and Pohl contrasts the two poems’ utopian visions marvelously, but one nevertheless questions its inclusion here since “in opposition to Aemilia Lanyer, Leapor places her emphasis on issues of class, and not of gender” (35). Dispensing with Edenic sites, Pohl concludes her chapter with an absorbing analysis of the utopian dreams of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (London, 1666), focusing on the duchess of Newcastle's imagined voyage to an alternative paradise, a “celestial city within which the female ruler fulfils her capacities for learning and politics” (36), at the heart of which lies an emperor's palace in the shape of Solomon's Temple. Pohl attempts to make two points here. First, though this brave new world differs little from the real world of Restoration England in its political ordering, Cavendish does allow women a public role through authorship and celebrates this function in her very writing—a gesture that is innately political. Second, in placing a vision of Solomon's temple at the center of her newfound empire, Cavendish reaffirms women's role in scientific, rationalistic discovery and posits a woman as the leader of a new nation, albeit one modeled on imperialistic, colonizing England. Having surveyed the Edenic and Solomonic visions of four disparate early modern women, Pohl summarizes: “The architecture of paradise is allegorical … the texts by Mary Wroth and the Duchess of Newcastle create different conceptual spaces where masculinity and femininity, agency and subjectivity are redefined” (46).

The strengths and weaknesses of Pohl's approach in this initial chapter (first, definitions of masculinist paradigms and, then, a survey of a mélange of texts by women, some more apt for discussion than others, presented chronologically but without a clear path marked by obvious transitions; all of this leading to a tentative termination) characterize her other three sections too, wherein she appraises women's utopian visions of the country house, convents and female academies, and finally the Turkish seraglio. Especially fine in these pages are her analyses of Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (London, 1762), Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure (London, 1668), and Lady Mary Wortley's Turkish Embassy Letters (London, 1716–18); her work with Lady Mary Hamilton's Munster Village (London, 1778) and Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal (London, 1694) seems less judicious and well turned.

In summarizing her work, Pohl claims these female spatial utopias as “ambivalent domestic spheres, enclosing and confining on the one hand … but emancipatory on the other, as they enclose female communities in the absence of a patriarch” (155). The reader, however intrigued, desires more in the way of cohesion and augmented, persuasive conclusions.