Katharine Kittredge's smart and suggestive introduction to this collection of essays posits that the texts her contributors examine “indicate that many of the binary constructions that were solidly in place by the nineteenth century (male/female; masculine/feminine; compliant/transgressive) still existed as permeable delineations open to discussion and negotiation throughout the long eighteenth century” (13). She argues further that “it is precisely by becoming ‘notorious’ that a single ‘lewd’ woman (real or constructed) has a profound effect on the society that reviles her” (2). Kittredge thus neatly lays out an intriguing rationale for this collection: that by examining the careers of women (both real and fictional) whom eighteenth-century society considered lewd or notorious, we can not only tease out the period's anxieties about gender and the nature of the sexes but also get a clear view of the “new social practices and complicated codes” (6) by which society set out to ease those anxieties.

This is fertile ground for both literary and historical analysis, and several of the essays in this collection live up to the promise of the introduction. That is, they present classic feminist reevaluations of conventional readings and conventional assumptions, while refusing to be trapped in an oversimplified mere reversal of those conventional views. Susan Lanser's essay, “Queer to Queer,” for example, usefully complicates the binary notion of gender by adding the “sapphic body” to the mix and suggesting that these “masculine women” (25) called into question any simple link between sexuality and gender. Without such a simple link, then the “Enlightenment project of fixing sexual categories” reveals itself to be “from the start an unstable and self-contradicting enterprise” (22). Susan Goulding's essay on Laetitia Pilkington continues the deft handling of conventional categories by suggesting that Pilkington managed to appropriate that most antifeminist of literary forms, satire, and use it to subvert literary tradition even while seeming to bow to that same tradition. Like Lanser, however, Goulding is mindful of the limits of a binary model, and she concludes that Pilkington's neat reversal of literary expectations was also vexed, and perhaps impossible to sustain: “she is a nearly paradoxical combination of satirized writer trying to strike back and literary descendant trying to inherit the ‘mantle’” (62).

Many essays in the second and third sections of the book, “Transgressive Images” and “Transgressive Acts,” present material that is in need of precisely the kind of feminist reevaluation for which the first part of the book presents a model. Some of the essays go further to continue what I take to be the book's overarching investigation of the limits of binary categories. Jessica Kimball Printz's essay, on “Gender, Criminal Biographies, and the Politics of Indifference,” provocatively uses criminal biographies to interrogate one aspect of feminist reevaluation. She suggests that texts like the female penitential narratives she examines have been ignored by feminist scholars because they do not offer up a female subjectivity that would allow scholars to claim subversive agency for the women concerned. As a result, Printz argues, scholars have missed an opportunity to investigate “alternative expressions of [the] culture's values,” (185), that is, expressions that do not fit neatly into a view of society based on binary gender difference. In the article, “A Mistress, a Mother, and a Murderess Too,” Patti Sileski's subtle reading of a Elizabeth Brownrigg's trial for murdering one of her servants does a nice job of complicating the notion of women's nature, as well as of the nature of maternal feelings.

The essays in part 4, “Transgressive Fictions,” attempt to tease out the extent to which female authors and characters in the texts they consider are agents—either conservative or subversive—within the gender codes at work in the period. Marilyn Francus's essay explores the fictional treatment of the same maternal paradoxes that surface in Sileski's investigation of a criminal case, Catherine Ingrassia reads Eliza Haywood's fiction as a kind of how-to manual for women wanting to “authorize or narrativize their lives as a self-actualizing gesture” (237), and Julie Shaffer's essay follows up on an idea that Kittredge puts forth in the introduction: that creative misreading is a strategy for “women to draw nourishment from the material that was intended to stunt their growth” (15).

Taken together, the essays in Lewd and Notorious point up just how much was at stake in eighteenth-century attempts to fix gender categories into an immutable and reassuring binary relationship. For twenty-first century readers, images of the punishments awaiting transgressive women in the eighteenth century can feel simultaneously extreme and familiar. Views of women attempting to negotiate or subvert those dangers can be both pathetic and inspiring. As so many of these essays point out, the work of complicating gender categories, or of escaping binary constructions in general, is far from complete.