Paul Salzman's project is hugely ambitious. He makes a bid to represent early modern women's writing in all its diversity from 1550 through 1700, as well as its circulation (manuscript as well as print) and reception in its own time and also through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In the process, he attempts to answer the question of whether there is a useful category of “early modern women's writing” or whether that heuristic inevitably limits a sense of its breadth and range. (He notes that during the seventeenth century, women writers and their readers made use of the category “woman writer” in productive ways.) Because of the tremendous outpouring of critical studies, as well as discoveries of new works especially in manuscript, in the past twenty years, this goal may not be possible to accomplish short of a twelve volume set. To create positive connotations for Virginia Woolf's description of Margaret Cavendish's thought as a giant cucumber taking over the garden, the field of early modern women's studies has proved remarkably fruitful, engendering new vegetation at a rapid rate while more established plants grow to command wide visibility. To be fair, Salzman himself at one point notes that this book can serve “only as an introduction to that rich variety” (10) of women's writing. Reading Early Modern Women's Writing indeed provides a most useful introduction to those outside the field, in its summaries of the works and lives of a range of women writers extending (unusually for this area) beyond the interregnum, in its rich synthesis of the best current critical thought on these writers, and in its presentation of newly complicated issues of print and manuscript transmission. For scholars already familiar with these writers, there are also eminently helpful tidbits, especially of a bibliographical nature, such as where to find a unique copy of an annotated text (complete with shelf number) and where a collection has been moved in recent years. It is only in the tracing of works and reputations through successive centuries that the study becomes occasionally a little thin, sometimes focusing more on the “what” (i.e., an eighteenth-century anthology includes a poem) than on the more complicated “why” (why this writer? why this poem?). Determined by complex cultural shifts, such questions cannot be thoroughly explored in a single volume, although Salzman makes a valiant attempt. My discussion below features valuable bits of information—to continue my metaphor, gorgeous multicolored orchids—that Salzman has generously bestowed.

Chapter 1 represents the scope of early modern women's writing, covering religious and secular works as well as moving beyond the literary to prayers, advice books, radical tracts, spiritual and secular autobiographies, diaries, letters, cookery books, and other how-to manuals. He notes the narrowing of this range in such works as George Ballard's eighteenth-century Memoirs, which includes only virtuous and learned women, in order to stress the importance of the categories set up for “woman writer.” Chapter 2 contrasts the high visibility of works by aristocratic women such as Queen Elizabeth and Mary Sidney with those by lower-status women such as Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer. Celebrated as America's “tenth muse,” Anne Bradstreet introduces an anomaly into correlations by social class. This chapter traces the changing meanings of a poem by Queen Elizabeth through miscellanies; it also provides a Web site useful for teaching Whitney's poetry (4). After surveying the life, loves, and works of Mary Wroth, chapter 3 discusses an anonymous ode (unknown to me) addressed to her in the Wyburd manuscript construing Wroth's absence from court as her rejection of court ideology; the discussion of the relative merits of two manuscripts of Love's Victory is also noteworthy. Chapter 4 explores the public (i.e., legal) purposes generating Anne Clifford's manuscript diaries and other acts of “fierce memorializing” (108); various works, including manuscript letters to her mother, are currently housed in the Cumbrian Record Office in Kendal. Among its prophets and visionaries, chapter 5 discusses Eleanor Davies, Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fell, and Jane Lead. Less interesting to me than the expected conclusions—the Quakers fostered Fell's reputation while, with her Philadelphians, Lead fell into relative obscurity—is the location of the only remaining later volume of Anna Trapnel's prophecies in the Bodleian (with shelf number) and the accessibility of all of Lead's works on a quirky Web site (http://www.passtheword.org). Chapter 6 contrasts the royalist Margaret Cavendish and the puritan Lucy Hutchinson, with an excursion into women's drama, appropriately foregrounding the recent publication of Hutchinson's long poem Order and Disorder, although disappointingly omitting mention of her short autobiography. Chapter 7 expertly navigates the complex manuscript transmission of poetry by Katherine Philips, as it describes her later positioning as a virtuous woman as against the disreputable Aphra Behn. In this chapter, these representations become rich and suggestive, as in Salzman's hypothesis that Vita Sackville-West's study of Behn was “something of a gauntlet” thrown down to contest Virginia Woolf's allegations of her deficiencies in sexual response (218). Paradoxically, current critics stress Behn's political role and elevate Katherine Philips for the same-sex erotic appeal of her poetry, while simultaneously noting her political importance.

While beyond the scope of this book, a thorough exploration of the implications of current criticism on early modern women writers for twenty-first-century sensibilities would be informative. We deserve to become agreeably smug about our attention to early modern women writers in the last two decades. In the past few years, I have perceived a swerve from the erotic, at least from the heterosexual erotic, toward the political in such writers as Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. While the political roles of these writers are indisputable, I wonder sometimes whether feminist critics (among whom I number myself) have become somewhat embarrassed by heterosexual erotic love. What do we make of the long-overdue resurgence in work on early modern religious discourses? In addition to its useful surveys and generous research tips, Salzman's project encourages introspection into the workings of our own modern culture.