Ralph Ellison's claim that he used myths to “enlarge upon” real life and the fictional lives of his literary characters resonates with the approach of many of the women featured in American Women and Classical Myths. Editor Gregory A. Staley divides the book into halves. The first half features essays on particular American women who used classical Greco-Roman mythology in their writing, beginning with Phillis Wheatley at the end of the eighteenth century. The second half is interested in American obsession with particular female figures from mythology. Similar to Ellison's African American protagonists, real and fictive, the women featured in this volume confronted their minority or marginal status in American life and letters through the classics. They used classical mythology as a means of figuring their personal narratives (Ellison's “enlargement”), as a screen to protect their private selves, and as a way of gaining literary authority, a place in the tradition of American letters.

The first half of American Women scans the two centuries of women in American letters that begins with Phillis Wheatley's poetry. In the essay on Wheatley, Julian Mason locates her first poem in 1765. Mason's essay anticipates some of the themes that echo throughout the volume, such as the personification of America as a female, classical figure (Athena, Columbia, Liberty, and so on), or the use of Roman sources (Virgil, Ovid) over Greek ones. That is, reception as a theme – the Roman reception of Greece, Romantics' reception of the classics, America's reception of antiquity through Rome – is central to how we read everything from democracy and republicanism to individual agency and heroism. Like many of the essays, Mason's does not have a particularly theoretical focus. For example, it leaves out studies like Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s discussion of Wheatley in Figures in Black. Since American Women might fit well in the context of an undergraduate classroom, its practical focus is not necessarily a shortcoming. The study of specific writers ends with Judith P. Hallett's essay on twentieth-century author Edith Hamilton, after essays on Margaret Fuller, H.D., and Willa Cather.

It is noteworthy that Hamilton is pivotal to the widespread study of classical mythology in the American classroom. That she popularizes the classics while “‘whitewash[ing]’ the violence and irrationality in Greek mythical narratives” (127) is telling for what the discipline of classics has become at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Similar to the other women featured in the volume, Hamilton moved in a class of the “most socially prominent families” (109), and the inevitable narrowness of the book's social scope reinforces the idea of the classics as an elite discipline. One wonders about the classics' appeal to a broader array of American students and readers that would include additional black and Latino perspectives (or voices from Latin America).

The focus in the second half of American Women on mythological figures (Athena, Penelope, the Amazons) as themes in American culture hones in on the issue of how the past is rewritten in the present. We see the past through various contemporary prisms. As Caroline Winterer argues, the lionization of Antigone – “absent from America before approximately 1930” (161) – among Victorian women did not endure. Winterer posits “classicism's retreat from the political sphere to the private one” (175) by 1902 as the reason for the somewhat temporary appeal of Antigone. In Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch's essay, we see Athena emerge as an enduring cultural icon in America. In a scholarly fashion, Gregory A. Staley traces popular icons like Xena the Warrior Princess to the Amazons, a group that hovers between the realm of mythology and reality. Here too, and throughout, is the topic of gender orientation. From Herland to The Lesbian Body, myth endures as a way of figuring viable options for feminist expression. Lillian E. Doherty's observation regarding the use of Penelope in American writing might well apply to all: “These women value the freedom to escape rigid expectations, yet as poets they also value form, with which they seek to make sense of the flux of experience” (183).

American Women and Classical Myths makes a valuable contribution to the study of the classics in the twenty-first century, especially as teachers in American colleges and universities brace themselves for the inevitable changes in tide.