Mary A. Waters's subject is well suited to the series in which it appears. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print purports to combine “efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race and class.” It promises, too, to feature work “which does not fit comfortably within established boundaries—whether between periods or between disciplines” (i). Waters's book focuses on the work of women writers at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries who wrote book reviews, essays, biographical and critical prefaces, and other miscellaneous criticism, much of it anonymous, some of it reasonably well paid, but none of it the acknowledged terrain of women.

Her subjects represent successive generations of women critics who were establishing themselves as professional writers in an expanding world of print culture. Anna Letitia Barbauld, née Aitkin, and Elizabeth Inchbald, both with reputations in other fields, wrote biographical and critical prefaces to reprinted works—in Barbauld's case, to F. C. and J. Rivington's fifty-volume series The British Novelists (1810), and in Inchbald’s, to The British Theatre, a collection of recently acted plays published by Thomas Longman (1806–9). Part 2 of the book discusses women's inroads into the field of book reviewing, in which the periodical press offered opportunities for a new professionalism for women writers. Waters begins with Mary Wollstonecraft, whose work for the Analytical Review Waters identifies as “the earliest known example of long-term regular periodical literary reviewing by a woman” (103), and Wollstonecraft's protégée Mary Hays, better known for her Female Biography: or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of all Ages and Countries (1803). A second chapter focuses on Barbauld and Elizabeth Moody's work for Ralph Griffith's Monthly Review, and a final chapter discusses Harriet Martineau's early journalism for W. J. Fox's Monthly Repository.

All five women, Waters points out, were closely tied in to Dissenting circles, which proved to be an important element in their professional development. Some, like Barbauld and Martineau, were the daughters of prominent Dissenting families. Others, like Wollstonecraft, associated with prominent metropolitan Dissenters like the publisher Joseph Johnson. The periodicals for which they wrote, the Analytical Review, the Monthly Review, and the Monthly Repository, were closely connected with Dissenting communities. The culture of Dissent, Waters suggests, promoted collaborative enterprises, which enabled women to enter hitherto restricted territory.

Waters is at her most interesting, and also her most secure, when writing about the development of the critical preface, a subgenre that women critics had made their own. Both Barbauld and Inchbald, she suggests, were making a case for the evolution of a truly national literature accessible to a widening readership. The age of the coterie and patronage was giving way to the dynamics of the literary marketplace, and the popular genres of the present day, the novel and the drama, were being championed against the exclusivity and constraints of Augustan classicism. Women writers’ appropriation of the critical preface as a vehicle for literary criticism in this period would be worth a monograph-length study of its own.

Waters is less at home in the world of reviewing and the contribution by women to the periodical press in the early decades of the nineteenth century. She evokes Jon Klancher's The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, WI, 1987) in support of her argument that the women critics were writing for a new middle-class reading public of which they were themselves members. But her sample of women critics and their work is not sufficiently representative to paint a full picture of women's inroads into professional journalism in the forty-year period she professes to consider. Mary Wollstonecraft is certainly the best-known female contributor to the early reviews, but she was by no means unique. The early Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly Review had a number of formidable women reviewers, as did the third member of the triumvirate, the Westminster Review, when it was established in 1824. Linda Peterson, in an article that Waters cites, “(Re)inventing Authorship: Harriet Martineau in the Literary Marketplace of the 1820s” (Women's Writing 9, no. 3 [2002]: 337–50), argues that Martineau was instrumental in redefining authorship away from Romantic notions of originality, genius, and inspiration, toward a more pragmatic engagement with editors and book publishers. It was a professional life as a “woman of letters” that she shared with a growing number of her contemporaries, and a life that each of Waters's subjects would have recognized.

Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, and Martineau do represent generational changes in women's engagement with the press, but Waters needs to emphasize the impact of the establishment of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 and the proliferation of reviews and opportunities for reviewing that followed it. The 1820s and 1830s marked a further change of gear for women reviewers. A case in point is the career of Christian Johnstone, whose review of Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in August 1832 Waters quotes, but she fails to note that this review was written by Johnstone, already a prolific reviewer for the magazine and later to become its editor. A minority they may have been, their contributions muted by anonymity, but the generation of women critics headed by Martineau, with writers like Sarah Austin, Maria Jane Jewsbury, and Christian Johnstone, represented a new stage in women's professionalism. It was a world that Wollstonecraft's career anticipated, and in which Barbauld participated in her later years, but the new generation, represented by Martineau and her colleagues, established themselves securely as “women of letters.”

Mary Waters has read widely in the secondary literature that explores women's writing in her chosen period. Her style, on the other hand, can be awkward. For example, there is a reluctance to think of synonyms for the Romantic period. And so we have “Romantic-era women writers,” “Romantic-era literary practice,” “Romantic-era government censorship,” “Romantic-era journalistic professionalism,” “Romantic-era notions of morality,” “Romantic-era British reading public,” and so on. A more relaxed and fluid prose style would make her interesting subject more accessible to her readers.