In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct transnational category in Europe between roughly 1650 and 1810 using network theory and feminist literary history (or histories). The network mapped out here comprises some fifty women working in French, English, Dutch, and German over the course of the long eighteenth century. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each other's works, attended literary salons, and fashioned a transnational body of literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Cheek's study does not get lost in the details. On the contrary, it has an important part to play in one of the perennial questions posed in women's studies: Where does something that many readers identify as “women's writing” fit within European or world literature? As Cheek herself observes, more investigation is needed into how and why women's writing came to be so adept at surviving and multiplying. Network theory offers an important new step. Undergirding Cheek's account is a potent synthesis (from Pierre Bourdieu and others) that describes the emergence of set codes from forces related to history, habitus, market, community, and the world of letters. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional women—literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts.

In literary histories, a focus on the exceptionalism of a woman who writes well and is acknowledged by the male gatekeepers to publishing and literary recognition can reflect a preoccupation with male writers as centers of power and patronage. To combat this persistent trend, Cheek advocates recentering the networks around unpublished exchanges—in salons, for example. As a case in point, she invites us to reconsider David Garrick's formidable network, which includes Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Isabelle de Charrière. They all knew Garrick, but they did not know each other's works because of Garrick. Shifting focus enables a greater apprehension of the alternative edges (as Cheek puts it), or links, in networks. In the Riccoboni-Brooke-Inchbald- Charrière cluster, after all, the connection was not theater but translation. Translation afforded these women entry into the writing profession. A major argument running through the book is that women's writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation, and was not simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and mononational literary forms. Viewed as an invitation rather than a challenge, argues Cheek, women's writing can be better appreciated as the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity. As a distinctive category, in this view, women's writing thereby anticipates the global literary marketplace's segmentation of affinity-based reading publics that continues in and beyond the modern academy.

Catherine Ingrassia once cautioned scholars against a tendency to place women writers in a separate, exclusively female literary tradition, and certainly not as an alternative literary history (thereby inadvertently reinscribing older, patriarchal models). Betty Schellenberg also advised against measuring literary worth within a model of genius as this favored male exceptionalism. Cheek's new study amply follows this and other forms of advice in positing an identification of what she calls the “capital of virtue” (37) in women's occupation in the literary field. She decouples literary value from monolingualism and from the print marketplace while providing a means of acknowledging texts that are recognizable not solely in relation to an author function but in relation to the work they perform for a group of readers and writers. The interest in tying the capital of virtue to the emergence of women's writing lies precisely in identifying how literary affinity groups beyond language and love of country complemented national literatures in the formation of an autonomous world literature. Seen in this way, the capital of virtue provides means of describing not only women's writing but of establishing a contrast with the ideal of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is lumped in with men's writing—in passing Cheek calls it “manly” (40). This gesture threatens to unsettle the major role Wollstonecraft and others played in the shaping of eighteenth-century feminism in precisely the transnational terms prioritized here. Beyond that, Cheek does not shy away from accounting for political differences. Indeed, in chapter 2, she amply demonstrates the value of putting the English radical Mary Hays in dialogue with the French moderate Madame de Genlis.

More broadly, chapter 2 is especially important as it shifts the start of the timeline for the textual incorporation of feminine virtue through moral reasoning back to the late seventeenth century, earlier than the mid-eighteenth-century sensibility shift associated with the rise of a composite elite. Chapter 3 is yet stronger, for me, not least of all because it contains detailed readings of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne that recontextualize the nostalgic appeal of the city of ladies in the new world of the protorealist novel. Chapter 4 will appeal to scholars interested in education theory and practice in the period. Sharing a title with the book itself, Chapter 5 is something of a miscellany chapter insofar as it covers many different ideas, from a discussion of the novel as a vehicle for comparing national gender roles to an account of the complexities of identity formation for women writers in exile after the French Revolution. Chapter 6, finally, is short but no less dense. Functioning as an afterword, in effect, it expertly brings the book's themes, concerns, and claims to a head. In sum, Cheek deftly traverses an astonishing range of materials across different languages. Her ability to speak to the importance of translation without converting it into an easy alignment of one national dictionary with another marks her book with a combination of accessibility and accuracy. Heroines and Local Girls will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in women's writing in the long eighteenth century and how literary texts cross national boundaries.