In this eloquent and thoughtful study, Kathryn S. Freeman demonstrates that women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular Elizabeth Hamilton, Phebe Gibbes, Sydney Owenson, and Marina Starke, took a more nuanced approach to British rule in India than merely colluding, in one degree or another, with the imperial project. Instead of regurgitating the Asiatic Society of Bengal's representations of India, Freeman argues that in expressing sympathy with Vedic nondualism, a way of thinking that does not insist in things being conceptually divided into two opposing aspects, women's narratives challenged the Western paradigm of the Hindu male as effeminate and the notion that miscegenation was inherently perilous. They also contested Enlightenment dualities and romantic conflations of masculine heroism and virtue. Freeman's research adds to the work of scholars such as Michael Franklin and Tara Ghoshal Wallace, who have portrayed a more multifaceted India than most other studies, including works of postcolonial criticism, have allowed.

Sanskrit translations undertaken by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Orientalists, comprised Britain's introduction to Vedic philosophy and literature and are the focus of Freeman's first chapter. Freeman effectively argues that two of the Society's luminaries, William Jones and Charles Wilkins, allegorized nondualism, subjecting it to more monolithic notions of Western culture that can be traced back from Macaulay's 1835 “Minute on Indian Education.” In chapter 2, Freeman turns her attention to Elizabeth Hamilton's satirical epistolary novel, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796). While conceding that Hamilton was connected to the imperialist East India Company through her brother Charles, and that she chose to dedicate her novel to Warren Hastings, Freeman suggests that Hamilton's work still problematizes imperialism in its shift from a masculine to feminine paradigm of creativity. As a narrative in which Hamilton marginalizes herself to the editor of male correspondents sharing their lofty views of the Orient and British women, Hamilton's peripheral yet resonant voice criticizes both Indian and British misogyny.

In chapter 3 Freeman examines Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and The Missionary (1811), novels by Phebe Gibbes and Sydney Owenson respectively, which Freeman describes as Anglo-Indian. While “Anglo-Indian” might be an accurate term for Gibbes, I would question its usage for Owenson, who never even visited India. This chapter heading also misspells “Sidney” for “Sydney,” an error repeated in the list of chapters at the beginning of the book and throughout the text, as “Sydney” and “Sidney” alternate for no apparent reason (this is an example of noticeable typos throughout the book that mar the general clarity in Freeman's prose). Freeman persuasively argues that while Gibbes and Owenson draw on sentimental fiction, they also challenge the traditional objectification of the female in ways connected to conflicting epistemologies at the heart of the imperial project. Gibbes's British India challenges the stereotyping of India as primitive and Britain as civilized, and it contests Western dualism as Gibbes upholds the Vedic nondualism of ancient texts that transform her heroine, Sophia. Reworking the bildungsroman formula, Gibbes traces Sophia's coming of age as a trajectory of ambivalence. Sophia falls in love with a young Brahmin and comes to see her identity as formed by India. When she returns to England, she projects the now dead Brahmin's gentle manhood onto her inane and significantly-named British fiancé, Doyly.

Set in seventeenth-century India, Owenson's The Missionary reworks the marriage plot of the sentimental novel by raising female subjectivity to voice views counter to the hegemony of late Enlightenment Orientalism. Owenson was knowledgeable about Oriental scholarship and the work of William Jones, evident through Luxima's articulation of Hindu philosophy; indeed, Freeman calls for a corrective to the observations of scholars such as Julia Wright, who, in making the connection between British imperialism in Ireland and India, do not specify India enough. Freeman rightly observes that Owenson's subversion of the sentimental tradition is more sophisticated than Gibbes’, as Owenson's heroine, Luxima, extolls the nondualism that the European religious zealot and missionary, Hilarion, condemns. Hilarion's study of Sanskrit demonstrates how Owenson associates the learning of language with the imperial project.

Mariana Starke's dramas, The Sword of Peace (1788) and The Widow of Malabar (1791), form the content of chapter 4. In The Sword of Peace, Starke's heroines, Eliza and Louisa, successfully navigate the treacherous world of Anglo-India in their quest to reorient the sword from a symbol of the phallic power of war to one of peace. In their quest they graduate from confident gossips to confident heroines by unsettling the binary of female virtue and promiscuity fundamental to the male western literary tradition. Starke reappropriates virtue from the notion of female chastity to female valor. In this way, Freeman astutely concludes that Starke's work differs from Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published four years after The Sword of Peace, in that Wollstonecraft chided women as well as men for lack of virtue. Freeman points out that The Widow of Malabar has been interpreted as expression of “civilized” Christian outrage at the practice of sati, but she argues that its main critique centers on British patriarchy.

Freeman's insightful and careful close readings find an alternative paradigm for these authors; they also prompt us to rethink periodization, in particular how a focus on female authorship of this period might affect postcolonial approaches that sometimes conflate romanticism and Orientalism with unadulterated imperial dominance. Her work is a welcome addition to current scholarship.