Revising Women

Reviews / Votes

In her preface, Backscheider makes high claims for this collection as the fruit of several lifetimes' feminist rereading of 18th-century fiction. These claims turn out to be justified by a truly extraordinary book.
-Choice These are valuable essays. Those who are interested in eighteenth-century English women, whether or not they are literary scholars, will find much to interest and stimulate them in this book.
-Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg, Albion Written to illustrate the maturity of a discipline, the essays in Revising Women demonstrate that women writers used fiction to participate in debates taking place in the public sphere.
-Nora Nachumi, JASNA News The project that has engaged Paula Backscheider, one of the most prolific and prominent scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies, is one that I believe is both heroic and potentially enduring: to reconcile the sort of thick description she favors-historical-biographical narratives that take full advantage of extant archive material and reveal richly detailed portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture-with the lessons learned and opportunities afforded by recent literary theory.
-Richard C. Taylor, NWSA Journal These essays reinforce the need to reevaluate female authorship of the eighteenth century.
-Rikki Noel-Williams, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature