As the title suggests, the aims of Melanie Bigold's elegantly written study are manifold. Combining book history, textual criticism, bibliographical research, and biographical studies, she explores the “writing lives” of Elizabeth Rowe (1674–1737), Catharine Cockburn (1674?–1749), and Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806). Her three case studies support the contention that correspondence circulated in manuscript was central to women's engagement with philosophical, religious, and literary ideas within the republic of letters, and she establishes her subjects as significant participants in the intellectual debates of the British Enlightenment. At the same time, Bigold persuasively shows how the literary careers of these authors prompt us to question what Margaret Ezell has called our “hidden assumptions” about women writers (Writing Women's Literary History, 1993, p. 6). Ezell's work is an important influence for Bigold, and the proposal for an “exemplary” tradition of women letter writers, whose authority was based on piety, virtue, and learning, responds to Ezell's invitation to feminist scholars to look beyond female transgression and printed works for alternative models of authorship.

The study devotes two discrete chapters to each of the chosen writers and teases out fascinating intellectual and formal connections among them, particularly their shared interests in religious and philosophical discourses and their letter-writing practices. Elizabeth Rowe's development of a poetics of enthusiasm and her use of amatory narratives in both her familiar correspondence and her fictional compositions is seen as a contribution to the “reinvigoration of the language of religious devotion and ethical philosophy” (19). This is combined with attention to her afterlife, including discussion of her influence on writers such as Samuel Richardson, Elizabeth Carter, and Frances Burney, and an assessment of the impact that “biographical exemplarity had on the posthumous literary value” of her works (62). In contrast to Rowe's fast-growing critical reputation, Catharine Cockburn has been less well served by literary history, and Bigold's research will provide an important corrective to this. Cockburn emerges from Women of Letters as a philosopher and a polemicist (as well as a dramatist, poet, and writer of fiction), whose correspondence demonstrates her scholarly engagements with the writing of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and Anthony Ashley Cooper (third Earl of Shaftesbury) among others. In contrast to the treatment of Rowe and Carter, there is more emphasis on Cockburn's “philosophical afterlife” (165) than her biographical, literary, or bibliographical legacies; nonetheless, Bigold addresses the origins of her construction as an austere learned lady” (153) and assesses subsequent attempts to read her life and work in proto-feminist terms. Elizabeth Carter is the most familiar of Bigold's authors as “one of the most eminent women of letters of the latter half of the century” (169) and a member of the intellectual community of the bluestockings. Bigold's insight that Carter “lived for posterity” (170) provides a rationale for the greater emphasis in these final chapters on self-fashioning and the management of a literary reputation. It also results in a counterintuitive structure in which Carter's afterlife is rather awkwardly addressed prior to the analysis of the literary and moral arguments presented in her letters. However, Carter's use of the trope of “the theatre of moral virtue and earthly happiness” (215), an interest she shared with Rowe and Cockburn, brings together various strands of the enquiry.

The chronological movement from Rowe to Carter provides a broad historical perspective on the identity of the professional woman writer, particularly Carter's experience of an “articulated sense of a female tradition” (214) and the place of Rowe and Cockburn in its formation. The conclusion also briefly looks forward to the artistic, intellectual, and moral potential of the “exemplary tradition” for subsequent women writers. However, Bigold is careful not to present a rival literary history of “good versus the bad girls” (6), and in her attention to the differences between her writers' compositional methods, writing styles, generic experiments, and self-representations she shows that exemplarity comes in many forms.

Women of Letters is more than a collection of case studies, and throughout Bigold is keen to signal the wider significance of her insights for research into eighteenth-century literary culture. Her exploration of the interface between manuscript circulation and print is representative of a growing body of scholarship which argues that these were not discrete or mutually exclusive realms of literary production in the eighteenth century. Bigold shows how “an emergent professionalisation of literary careers” coexisted with “a thriving and socially diverse manuscript republic of letters” (185). She also convincingly demonstrates through detailed archival work that for Rowe, Cockburn, and Carter manuscript circulation was often a precursor to, and instrumental in, their subsequent appearance in print. The epistolary form has recently moved from the margin to the center of studies of eighteenth-century women's writing. Its richness is illustrated here as Rowe, Cockburn, and Carter exploited the performative and sociable dimensions of the letter in the creation and expression of friendship, and developed epistolary selves in dialogue with their writing in other genres.

One of the most imaginative aspects of Women of Letters is the attention to its subjects' afterlives. Bigold's use of the flexible OED definition of an afterlife as both “a subsequent or future life” and “the later period of one's life” is highly suggestive for thinking about literary legacies because it recognizes the potential for agency in shaping a posthumous reputation. For a writer like Carter, whose “entire corpus has an aura of futurity” (171), an “afterlife” might therefore begin prior to the death of the author. As a consequence, we must be alert to how far editors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries responded to a self-image of the author's own making in the creation of their exemplary biographical subjects. Bigold takes a balanced attitude toward Theophilus Rowe, Thomas Birch, and Montagu Pennington (editors of Rowe, Cockburn, and Carter, respectively), recognizing them as our “allies” (238) in the recovery of a history of women's writing while also examining the ideologies regarding female authorship, femininity, and literary value promoted by their editorial work. Women of Letters, therefore, reminds us that in telling the stories of women's “writing lives,” we must consider the life of the mind and the life of the text, and Bigold is an ideal guide to both.