Heather Wolfe's edited collection The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 is the first book-length study on Elizabeth Cary's works and influence. Wolfe's introduction helpfully lays out Cary's known works, including a number of manuscripts believed lost. Because women used manuscript more often than print, Wolfe explains, and because “manuscripts have a much lower survival rate than printed books,” the extent of Cary's work (and that of women writers in general) is difficult to assess (2). Yet the picture of Cary that emerges from the book is one of a passionate writer who was deeply engaged with the major issues of Stuart England, and one whose writings were also taken seriously by others.

Part 1 presents three new essays on Cary's best-known work, The Tragedy of Mariam. In the first of these, Ilona Bell analyzes the ways that Cary's female characters use the sonnet and lyric forms to interrogate and revise the Petrarchan tradition. Erin Kelley's essay complicates the now-conventional identification of Mariam as a proto-Christian martyr by comparing Cary's vision of Mariam to the way she is described in a number of other early modern accounts and arguing that Cary's Mariam is more defiant. Kelley finds models for this defiance in depictions of female martyrs in early editions of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, a text that, around the time Cary was writing her play, was being abridged and revised in ways that dispossessed female martyrs of their disruptive powers. Alison Shell's essay examines Cary's indebtedness to Thomas Lodge, not just for his account of the Mariam story, but also for his suggestion that historical figures be read as moral exemplars against which readers interrogate their own lives. She suggests Cary's Mariam, then, might be read as an “autodidactic” (as opposed to an autobiographical) text (57).

The essays in part 2 focus on multiple versions of Cary's history of Edward II. Curtis Perry shows how the text offers a nuanced perspective on James I's and Charles I's alleged favoritism toward the Duke of Buckingham, one that condemns disorderly passion both on the part of the king and on the part of those who rebel against him. Mihoko Suzuki's chapter considers Edward II as a work of political theory in dialogue with works by Niccolò Machiavelli, Christine de Pizan, and others. Essays by Jesse Swan and Margaret Reeves focus on the work's textual history. Whereas scholars have traditionally dismissed the octavo as a redaction of the longer folio version, Swan and Reeves both offer evidence for the octavo being the earlier version. Swan's essay shows how later eighteenth-century reproductions of the octavo (and their editorial interventions) contributed to this confusion and also to the mistaken attribution of the work to Cary's husband. Reeves analyzes connections between the folio, octavo, and two manuscript versions of the text, establishing Cary as the author of all four versions and giving us a glimpse into Cary's process of revising her work.

Part 3 focuses on Cary's lesser-known writings. Karen Nelson's essay focuses on Cary's translation of Jacques Davy du Perron's Replique to James I (1630), a rebuttal of James's defense of the English church and a catalog of its errors. By taking on the role of a mere translator of du Perron, Nelson argues, Cary served her own interests of converting English Protestants back to Catholicism. In a fascinating essay, R. W. Serjeantson attempts to reconstruct the content of the “one paper of Controversy” mentioned in Cary's biography, a response to her son Lucius's letter to Walter Montagu, a recent convert to Catholicism and Queen Henrietta Maria's chamberlain. Serjeantson considers how Cary might have made use of the arguments raised by du Perron's Replique to defend both Montagu and the infallibility of the Catholic Church. In the last essay of this section, Nadine Ackerman builds a convincing case for attributing to Cary the authorship to yet another work, an elegy on the death of the Duke of Buckingham.

In the final section of the book, Deana Rankin considers Cary's influence as a patron of the Irish Catholic Richard Bellings's A Sixth Booke to The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. The final chapter, by Marion Wynne-Davies, examines the writings of four of Cary's children to reveal how each would have responded to Cary's very forceful attempts to convert them to Catholicism.

The essays meld together so well that at times one forgets that this is a collection of articles and not a single book-length study. Yet there are a few omissions that preclude our seeing this book as a comprehensive account of Cary's work and influence. Cary's connection to the literary circle of Mary Sidney, the countess of Pembroke, is one, as is a consideration of Cary's relationship to and influence upon other women writers. It is a strength of the book that it refuses to reduce Cary's work and influence to “women's writing.” Yet the picture we get of Cary from the collection as a whole risks presenting her as too removed from the works and concerns of other female writers of her day. Very few women writers are mentioned in the text, and when they do pop up, it is only briefly (the exception is Suzuki's discussion of Christine de Pizan in chap. 5). Still, the collection is an important piece of scholarship, one that greatly advances our understanding of Cary's written work and writing life.