This book collects together essays from fourteen scholars who collectively demonstrate how women writers actively engaged with and debated contemporary scientific advances, circa 1660–1818. While the subtitle is “Prefiguring Frankenstein,” only a few chapters speak directly to this theme—the majority are stand-alone essays that focus on a single woman’s writing. The large quantity of essays means they are unfortunately rather short, but seeing so many different women represented in the table of contents creates a striking first impression. Further, the great variety between the chapters demonstrates that women adapted almost every genre available to them—both literary and nonliterary—to explore scientific subjects as diverse as medicine, alchemy, physics, astronomy, and psychology.

Judy A. Hayden’s helpful introduction explains how women sought educational opportunities across the long eighteenth century: while the increasing professionalization of science removed it from the domestic sphere, women still had opportunities to advance their knowledge through salons and public lectures, as assistants, and via increased access to print publications. This is followed by Sarah Hutton’s articulate and complex chapter that might have been better as a foreword to the book than as a supporting chapter. She explains that while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein offers a vivid critique of the new science, women writers before her tended to demonstrate an enthusiastic curiosity for the subject. She also offers a thoughtful feminist historiography of science, explaining how scholars have traditionally responded to the absence of women from the sciences by depicting science itself as misogynistic. This critical review essay should be required reading for anyone interested in studying early modern women and science.

After these two survey chapters, twelve more essays follow chronologically: five covering the late seventeenth century, six spanning the eighteenth century, and one about the early nineteenth century. They each include the last name of a woman writer in the essay title, lending her a scientific cache usually reserved for male scientists, such as Newton or Boyle. Alvin Snider shows how Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder combines Lucretian physical theory with a retelling of Genesis, a strategy that allowed her to engage with contemporary debates on materialism without perverting her modesty. Hutchinson’s contemporary, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is perhaps the most famous early modern woman in the history of science. Here Jacqueline Broad shows how Cavendish engaged with the 1660s medical controversy between the Galenists and the Helmontians: she doubted van Helmont’s theory of a spiritual principle and argued against his claims that women’s imaginations were responsible for monstrous births. Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker demonstrate how Anne Conway took control of her debilitating migraines, adopting a “physician-patient” persona with which she challenged authority and eventually constructed a supportive network of Quaker women who helped her heal both body and soul. While Aphra Behn wrote in many genres, here Karen Bloom Gevirtz focuses on her 1680s fiction, demonstrating how Behn used her narrators to challenge the developing scientific philosophy of the detached unbiased observer. Deborah Boyle’s chapter closes the seventeenth century with a rereading of Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, where Boyle’s meticulous analysis of key differences in Astell’s and Descartes’s discussion of scientia reveals how Astell reinterpreted dualism to value the domestic sphere over the public.

Hayden takes us into the eighteenth century with Susanna Centlivre’s plays, showing how Centlivre’s satire of a female virtuoso subtly condoned female curiosity through its preservation of order. Judith P. Zinsser demonstrates how Emilie Du Châtelet’s careful use of Aristotelian rhetorical strategies makes it difficult to believe that she had no formal education in rhetoric—her sophisticated ability to construct a philosophical argument was on a par with male contemporaries. When Julie Park juxtaposes Fanny Burney’s novels with the mechanical creations of inventor Jacques Vaucanson, Burney’s lifelike characters embody contemporary technologies, similar to constructing artificial intelligence. Frederick L. Burwick uses Elizabeth Inchbald’s successful play Animal Magnetism to explore how she satirized doctors like Franz Anton Mesmer, who appropriated new theories of electricity and magnetism to explain a form of hypnosis that could not be scientifically explained. Yet while Inchbald’s play was a commercial success in 1788, Sophia Lee’s Almeyda premiered at Drury Lane in 1796 and lasted only four nights. Marjean D. Purinton offers a complicated reading of the gender and racial politics at work when the title character feigns madness, drawing parallels between two high-profile cases of insane women that were dominating the media. Dometa Wiegand shows how Anna Barbauld’s poetry embraced the wonder associated with navigation and astronomy while passing comment on how science and discovery fueled the British Empire’s expansive colonization. The final essay is Pam Perkins’s analysis of Scottish writer Anne Grant, who struggled to be taken seriously when she moved beyond the stereotypically feminine genre of letters and into social science essays observing Highland culture. The book then concludes with a relatively comprehensive bibliography and helpful index.

While collections on early modern women’s involvement in science are in themselves still rare, one that foregrounds how writing was a powerful agent that enabled women’s participation in that science is completely unique. The book also signals the state of the field: there are very few references to once-popular 1980s feminist theories of science. Instead, this eclectic assortment of women writers—including some who will be more familiar to historians of science and others who are traditionally only considered among literary scholars—demonstrates how women enjoyed engaging with and challenging new theoretical paradigms. Although the book can be slightly repetitive at points (a problem with edited collections more generally), the explanation of key terms within individual chapters means that each one may be readily used in isolation. This interdisciplinary collection unites literary studies with the history of science to produce a carefully balanced and enjoyable survey that will appeal to a diverse readership.