This collection begins to fill in a long-neglected area of Vladimir Nabokov's work. The place of “women” in Nabokov might be considered something of an embarrassment, with the author's derision of “lady-writers,” and his “frankly homosexual” preference for male translators. This collection takes Nabokov's proclaimed and jealously-guarded masculinity as a starting point, while also attempting to offer glimpses of ways that Nabokov may have intuited truths about “women,” or his own perspectives on them, that were beyond his more superficial and self-assured pronouncements. The essays also examine the roles played by women as characters, muses, and alter-egos, or even foils explored by narrating characters themselves.

The volume's editor, Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, opens the eleven-essay collection with an overview of the history of scholarship related specifically to women (or females) as females in Nabokov's work, and synthesizes this history into a “state of the art” that serves as the backdrop for most of the ensuing studies. In fact, this collection offers a feeling of greater integration than is common in such books, even when the theme is so distinct. Rakhimova-Sommers deserves special credit for that quality. The introduction defines “several tracks” that the female subject in Nabokov typically follows: “vulnerable, frustratingly elusive seductress” (xx); the “cruel to deviant, and even potentially lethal” woman (Margot of Laughter in the Dark) (xx); the “intellectual and emotional bodyguard” or “partner of genius” (xix), such as Mrs. Luzhin, Clare Bishop, or Zina Mertz; and the “fleeting women,” or “absent or absented women,” who “leave a reader wanting to know more” (xix). This last category, in particular, leads several of the volume's contributors to consider the places where Nabokov's works appear to belie his presumed confidence about women's capabilities as artists. Women are shown in some of these essays to be “textual nomads,” not quite anchored in the works they inhabit, and in some respects (as in Sofia Ahlberg's essay, 3–18) represent a kind of contraband brought by Nabokov into the male world of artistic authorship.

Not wanting to duplicate the editor's summaries of all eleven contributions, I will focus on just a few that strike me as especially representative of what is best in Nabokov's Women.

Matthew Roth's essay, “A Small Mad Hope: Pale Fire, Haze Shade, and the Oedipal Disaster,” offers another in Roth's lengthening series of revelatory rereadings of Pale Fire and its subtexts. Roth uncovers the contemporary history of cultural expectations—largely driven by Freudian theory in the 1930s–50s—for father-daughter relationships, and proposes that what recent discussion has identified as a very deficient parental attitude toward Hazel's emerging adult self and its romantic prospects, may in fact conceal Shade's attempt to airbrush away a much darker kind of despair on his daughter's part. This reading has the potential to completely reconfigure how we view the novel (even though it also allows for a somewhat awkward father-daughter union in the afterlife, where Hazel, on this theory, succeeds in displacing Sybil as Shade's creative partner). Since the essay must have been written almost simultaneously with recent explorations of Hazel's possible homosexuality, it will be worth all readers’ efforts to consider these two new approaches in detail. Rakhimova-Sommers’ essay on mermaids and rusalki in Nabokov—characters who often have failed to cross the boundary into marriage and motherhood, hence entering a kind of purgatory or otherworldly afterlife, resonates significantly with these questions as well.

Olga Voronina offers a deeply reflective reading of Véra Nabokov's role in her husband's work, informed by her role as editor and translator of his letters to his wife in Letters to Véra. In addition to demonstrating how Mrs. Nabokov's role as her husband's ideal addressee in non-fiction often metamorphoses into her barely detectable watermark in the fiction itself, Voronina shows that on at least two occasions (drawn from a single text, Véra's description of a seaside excursion with Dmitri, their son) Nabokov actually builds some of his own writing on her foundation. This fact complicates the common perception that Véra's artistic role in their partnership was passive and secondary. The fact that she destroyed almost all of her texts leave us with a complete mystery regarding what other secret communications from the love of his life Nabokov may have included within his own verbal constructions. This point stands out even more vividly in Voronina's elucidation of hidden messages from Sineusov's dead wife in the story “Ultima Thule,” where the narrator's words serve as scaffolding for words his wife is sending him from behind the scenes.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney's essay on the role of gender-crossing motifs in Nabokov's works strikes me as particularly fresh and insightful; she demonstrates that although Nabokov does sometimes figure important authorial characters as females, when he does so, they are more simply men dressed up as women, rather than men truly attempting to imagine and embody womanhood or femininity—that is, they are transvestites, not drag queens.

All of the essays here make clear that for Nabokov, “woman” is always “other”; womanhood is never explored fully from within, as if even the effort to do so would be illegitimate. After all, for someone of Nabokov's era, the one thing a man could never be is a real woman (in contrast, say, to being homosexual). David Rampton claims that Nabokov's incomplete depictions of the female experience show us the limits of his art; Voronina and Sweeney offer tentatively benevolent variations on that theme, suggesting that deliberately or by chance, Nabokov's works hint at the surplus of reality that he is unable to explore in person.

One towering female character who is mostly ignored in the collection is Ada (of Ada), and with her the question of whether Nabokov's career in art shows any kind of evolution in his treatment of female characters and their conscious interactions with the world. Rakhimova-Sommers notes that this collection is merely a first step in a large field of investigation. I have only hinted at its many treasures, and it points toward a rich future of continued discovery.