The value of this edited collection of essays is its cumulative effect. The general methodology throughout the collection is a case study approach, where an individual woman, a small group of two to three women, or an individual text, are described and discussed for their unusual, uncommon, or exceptional circumstances. As more and more female voices are recovered, and their experiences are revealed, it becomes clear that there are many new and underexamined narratives of empire in the early American world that are worthy of our time and attention.

There are sixteen chapters in all and they begin and end with the work of two distinguished scholars in early American women's writing: Annette Kolodny's chapter, “Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: First Foremother of American Empire,” opens the collection with an assessment of the first European woman to give birth in America, and it ends with Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola's “Bodies of Work: Early American Women Writers, Empire, and Pedagogy,” which takes the anthologizing of female writers as its focus. While the two chapters’ subject matters differ greatly, their methods have important similarities. Kolodny's chapter begins as a recuperation of a lost voice, but the study quickly develops much wider implications when it addresses issues of genre conventions, competing Norse and Christian ideologies, issues of print culture, readership, and the reinventions of the sagas in North American magazines and periodicals. This chapter presents the story of an unusual and extraordinary woman, certainly, but it is also an assessment of print culture and expansionist, national identities: Kolodny concludes that the same story contributes to national histories as it is told and retold to assert notions of empire within Norse and Christian, Nordic and American frameworks. Stodola's chapter more obviously positions itself within a print-culture paradigm, focussing as it does on anthologies and the anthologizing of women's literature over the course of many decades. This final chapter is an authoritative account of the ways that form – i.e. the dominance of poetry – often dictated choices for anthologies, and it offers a fair assessment of the ways in which scholarship is motivated and shaped by the canons that anthologies create.

As a whole, though, it's fair to say that the collection takes a broader, cultural approach, rather than a print-culture approach, uncovering largely unknown or forgotten women of the empire. There are stories of escape, cross-dressing, violence, devotion, religion, adventure, crime, midwifery, captivity, disease, and domestic abuse, to name a few. All of these experiences, taken together, draw attention to the limited spaces of resistance, subversion, and self-assertion afforded women in and around the Atlantic. Categories of race and class are also clearly defined in the relative limitations placed on women throughout the Atlantic world. Although the force of the collection is to uncover or recuperate new narratives, some familiar faces do crop up: Ann M. Brunjes's chapter offers a new assessment of Sarah Kemble Knight's travels and her attempts to define a public space and public speech for women, while Denise Mary MacNeil focusses on The Female American (1767), making a case for the potentially powerful interventions of a transcultural female identity. By contrast, Lisa M. Logan recovers narratives of the violent domestic experiences of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston through their memoirs. Sarah Schuetze, Thomas Lawrence Long, Samantha Cohen Tamulis, and Rochelle Raineri Zuck offer analyses of disease, midwifery, medical discourse, and colonial natural environments respectively, whereas Joan Bristol, Tamara Harvey, and Teresa Strouth Gaul focus on religious discourses and the ways in which they codify, contain, and, to a lesser degree, empower female bodies. The accumulation of case studies of significant or exceptional women in these relatively short essay chapters, one after another, serves to establish a continuous and multifaceted assessment of women's experiences of empire, from early colonial times through to the new republic.

This is a significant and substantial intervention in the field of early American studies, helping to restore the narratives and experiences of many more women than our anthologies and reading lists more often allow.