At the opening of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875), we watch Lady Carbury, a middle-aged writer, composing a letter to an editor: “I almost think you will like my ‘Criminal Queens.’ The sketch of Semiramis is at any rate spirited. … I hope you will not think that I have been too strong in my delineations of Henry VIII. and his sinful but unfortunate Howard. I don't care a bit about Anne Boleyne . … Marie Antoinette I have not quite acquitted” (1986, 1–2).

Trollope's Lady Carbury is a target of mockery. Yet she is not unsuccessful in suggesting the appeal of her subject matter. As Mary Spongberg shows us in Women Writers and the Nation's Past 1790–1860, “criminal queens” are importantly dangerous, supplying material for much history writing. Spongberg focuses at the outset of her study on Edmund Burke's commentary on the onset of the French Revolution, illuminating Burke's decision to rely on tropes of chivalry and romance in presenting Marie Antoinette. Burke could not further his cause in adopting a Whig view of the French queen. At first, Wollstonecraft challenges Burke's chivalrous romance, favoring the Enlightenment Whig paradigm. Wollstonecraft eventually rejects Whiggism's rationale, throwing off as destructive to women a cultural obsession with condemnation of Marie Antoinette and her predecessors.

According to conventional Whig doctrine, Queens (especially imported spouses) are perpetual threats to rational government. Spongberg illustrates such queens’ association with suspect foreignness and dangerous Catholicism. Inevitably—if unfortunately—feminine, queens tend to be consistently presented as amoral, promiscuous, and power-hungry. Queens are criminals until proven otherwise. Eventually, English women writers were to reevaluate customary history, adopting different perspectives and making new inquiries. Such writers did not sound like historians. They drew for models on biography and secret history. (This latter is a genre that could do with more exploration than Spongberg is willing to give us; the French background in both scholarship and creativity deserves more acknowledgment.)

Women Writers and the Nation's Past 1790–1860 is tightly designed. Queens provide the central focus. We follow multiple discourses upon (largely unfortunate) royal spouses from Henrietta Maria and Mary of Modena to Caroline of Brunswick. The discussion of Wollstonecraft supplies one of the strongest sections of the book. Spongberg exhibits Wollstonecraft changing her approaches. In The Wrongs of Woman her “Maria” is partly a vindication of Mary Queen of Scots and Marie Antoinette and those other meddlesome Marys who seem in the male versions of history and law to have no rightful place. Mary is evidently always a fiction.

Spongberg's last section is largely devoted to two nineteenth-century historians, Agnes Strickland and Mary Anne Everett Green. In Lives of the Queens of England, for instance, Strickland presents Mary of Modena in relation to the politics of 1688. Green, skilled in languages and paleography, produces the correspondence of Henrietta Maria. Spongberg emphasizes that Green used “the tools of ‘scientific” and “objective” archival research to generate great empathy for the French queen” (139–40). Women's history now provided “alternate feminine narratives of nation” (155). This last chapter, if worthy, seems less interesting than the preceding discussion. Analysis of Wollstonecraft's evolving views is more interesting than summaries of Strickland and Green.

Spongberg assumes that the desirable treatment of female actors in history must be based on provision of what she terms “empathetic history.” I am not certain that the term empathetic is as helpful as the author thinks. Is the new empathy truly stronger than the old sympathy? How is it elicited—or created? Figures encountered within written history are characters, whether we meet them in Suetonius or Strickland. Mary Spongberg eschews discussion of fiction—a big omission. She nearly breaks that rule in reference to Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, and again in discussion of Austen's mischievous and pointed “History of England.” Apparently, however, she regards historical novels as “low,” if a dismissive reference to Hilary Mantel is any guide (156). Yet women were developing the historical novel—destined to be a leading form of literature in Europe through the nineteenth century—well before the era of Walter Scott, who acknowledges in Waverley (1814) his debt to these other producers of empathy.