This is a beautifully produced and immensely valuable work by one of the most learned scholars of eighteenth-century British literature now writing. Susan Staves has already given the profession books and articles that have stood the test of time better than those of almost any other. Now we have A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, an instantly indispensable work that brings up to date decades of research and discovery and that will point a new generation of scholars toward the future.

Staves's eighteenth century starts in 1660 and ends in 1789; it takes place not only in the British Isles but, until the late 1770s, in British America as well. And its connections with Continental (especially French) writing are acknowledged. Its writing is not dominated by novels, in terms of numbers or imaginative investment. Instead, Staves recreates a world of women's writing where forms jostle cacophonously—fiction, poetry, drama, letters, historical writing, devotional writing, writing for children, philosophical writing, translation, literary criticism, pedagogy, partisan pamphleteering, sermons, conduct and advice writing, moral essays, and romantic escape literature. Staves's focus is not on theoretical issues or movements, but on primary works. She does not shy away from controversy, but it never interests her for very long. Most of all, what Staves's work challenges us to do is to read.

Staves boldly defends the often-maligned “presentist concerns” that drive much feminist analysis of the eighteenth century. She is eloquent on the “tension” between present-day feminists’ “desire to foreground progressive kinds of gender consciousness” in the writing of the past and the need “to represent the full range of women writers’ accomplishments, including many that are not about gender” (8). Staves remains alert to what counted as “achievements” in eighteenth-century minds, even if they would not be considered laudable or even interesting today. “Ruthlessly interrogating the works of earlier women writers primarily to fault them according to whether they commit solecisms in terms of modern feminist or democratic political standards,” she notes caustically, “is not the best way to construct a feminist literary history or a feminist canon. Nor do tortured readings of their works that reinvent earlier women writers as modern feminists contribute to good feminist literary history.” She sensibly advises feminist critics to “acknowledge that women of periods other than our own sometimes had other values” (439).

Above all, Staves argues, the writing of eighteenth-century women must be subjected to critical scrutiny and aesthetic judgment. Staves believes that feminist critics tend to be “ambivalent” about whether the very idea of a canon is elitist and exclusionary. She is characteristically unequivocal: “It cannot be a sin against feminism to say that some women wrote well and others wrote badly. … I do not see why a person like me who has spent the better part of forty years immersed in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature and history should not be capable of some useful discrimination between a good eighteenth-century poem and a bad one” (4). Being in hearty agreement, I can’t help wondering whom Staves is arguing against and why she sounds so defensive. Her introduction singles out for extended discussion only one critic, Sharon Harris, and only one text, Harris's introduction to American Women Writers to 1800 (New York, 1996) (3). Staves's energetic defense of “literary merit” is, regrettably, communicated in a disgruntled tone that ill befits the intellectual openness seen elsewhere in this book (4). Great energy and verve characterize the plot summaries, many amounting to miniature close readings, but when Staves positions herself in relation to contemporary criticism, she can sound exasperated, even resentful—puzzlingly so. “Literary criticism does need to focus on the works,” she declares in the disappointingly hectoring final line of this magisterial book; “that is what I have tried to do” (439).

Staves offers useful clarifications of each work's historical alignments, sources and analogues, and interpretive cruxes. She necessarily runs through many dozens of works, but does so with such clarity and discursive momentum that the reader seldom feels the kind of “plot summary overload” that can accompany less skillful prose surveys of primary material. Still, there are some weaknesses to the method. Staves is much better at summarizing the plots of prose fictions than of dramas, and detail sometimes gets the better of her larger arguments. But these are minor problems, unlikely to trouble readers who use the book as a reference work to be digested in small bites; as a series of reliable, brief introductions to various periods and works of women's literary history; or as a means of refreshing their memories.

The problem of selection is less troubling here than in many other surveys. This kind of work necessarily relies on a process of selection and exclusion based on considered and informed judgments. What really matters is that the samples were selected by a true expert, which Staves indisputably is. Yet the problem exercises Staves greatly, and she defends her choices at some length. It seems to me that she is overly concerned about an underwhelming problem: readers will be glad to have Staves's judgments. Still, I’d have been even gladder to know what principles of selection are at work here, in as specific terms as possible. Not many readers, I imagine, would fault Staves for her decision “not to consider everything written by women” over the course of a century, but many might wish for more complete explanations of what makes her consider some works and not others “most original, most intelligent, best written, and most significant”—words she largely fails to define (5). Staves's choices are perhaps best seen as well-informed provocations, instigations to examine the evidence firsthand, and statements through which to bring the question of literary value before students.

Staves usefully questions literary historians’ continued commitment to a critical tradition that separates “British” from “American” literature even before the American Revolution. It is difficult not to approve Staves's sensible decision to consider the literature of colonial British America as part of British literary history. Nevertheless, it seems oddly abrupt when, as Staves puts it herself, “American writers are present in my first six chapters, treating 1660 to 1776, then disappear” (6). Although it is true enough that after “the American Revolution … women writers in the former North American colonies … [were] part of another national literature,” it is not “therefore” also true, as Staves goes on to claim, that “the American women writers of the early Republic period … play no role in British literary history” (363). Nor need we accept other unstated assumptions: that the writing of colonial North America before independence can be entirely understood as “British,” or can be understood as “British” in the same sense that the writing of Britain is understood, or that the Republic established in the 1770s was likewise a cultural and ethnic monolith. The complex and far-reaching historical processes at work in colonialism make problematic the implementation of simple before-and-after rubrics. “British” and “American” need to be further complicated.

Staves explains her choice to organize the book chronologically rather than by genre. Dividing the seven chapters in this way “has the salutary effect of forcing me to advance only generalizations that … [the] evidence can support” and allows for a clear demonstration of a thesis that occupies her throughout: “that women writers were much more engaged with the nondomestic events and ideas of their time than one might suppose from the evidence of the domestic novel” (9). The descriptive headings that Staves has chosen for her sequential historical periods, such as “Romance and Comedy” or “Partisans of Virtue and Religion,” may seem imprecise. Taken together, however, the chapter headings present an implied narrative that assists the reader navigating this long, packed volume. Women entered public discourse in recognizably new ways after the Restoration. During the next few decades they produced works to define and defend their own virtue, to participate in partisan affairs, and to create pleasure; they sometimes took up discursive weapons coded as male, particularly satire, but more often contented themselves with a less-equal-than-others position in public discourse; and, as the century progressed, they came to excel in moralistic and sentimental writing, writing for children, poetry, and romance.

Each chapter begins with a chronological list of primary texts to be discussed, then offers its own introduction, where Staves describes key historical events with reference to women's writing. The body of each chapter is a discursive survey, where Staves not only considers primary works individually, but also gives careful attention to links among primary works and to larger patterns of literary-historical change. Staves's interpretive plot summaries, and her reviews of major interpretive issues, suggest a host of research questions. Which authors foreground particular shared themes? What relationship pertained between the scandalous memoirs of the mid-century and the scandal chroniclers of the early century? What is the eighteenth-century history of letter novels? To what extent did women writers support one another's efforts, and how did that support change across the decades? What relations pertained between women writers and their male counterparts? On such questions Staves is unfailingly illuminating, accurate, and suggestive.

Cambridge University Press is to be commended for the stellar production values in evidence here, and Staves is to be applauded for the pleasurable clarity of the prose. Despite its size, this enjoyable book is a model of careful reading, orderly thinking, and elegant presentation, both a work of interpretation and a useful reference tool. Staves brings texts to light and raises questions about them that will guide future scholarship. I go away eager to read or reread several of the authors discussed—a response that I expect other readers will share, and that is sure to please Susan Staves.