.."". the anthology is engaging and informative and should stimulate further research into this fascinating yet neglected area."" -- English .."". most interest are newly recovered materials... with several works appearing in English translation for the first time. The excellent introductions and reference notes along with the samplings of writings will pique the interest of students of both literature and history. A good readings text for college students and anyone interested in the development of literature and culture."" -- Library Journal This anthology demonstrates women's participation in the construction of criticism as a literary genre. The selected writings, by forty-one of the women who produced criticism between 1660 and 1820, include writers from England, France, Germany, and the United States. Edited by ten members of the Folger Collective who bear academic credentials in the research and teaching of literature, this anthology introduces the work of women critics during the formative years of criticism as a genre. Among the 41 writers included are a few who are well known, such as Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Phyllis Wheatley. But most interesting are newly recovered materials extracted from essays, novels, plays, letters, and poetry by less-well-known writers, with several works appearing in English translation for the first time. The excellent introductions and reference notes they provide along with the samplings of writings will pique the interest of students of both literature and history. A good readings text for college students and anyone interested in the development of literature and culture.?Linda V. Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ., Edwardsville Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. VIRGINIA WALCOTT BEAUCHAMP, retired Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, has written widely on English Renaissance writers and on women's diaries and letters. She edited A Private War: Letters and Diaries of Madge Preston, 1862--1867 (Rutgers 1987) and is a Coordinating Editor for Vives and His "Instruction of a Christen Woman," an edition of Richard Hyrde's 1529 English translation of the work by the Spanish humanist John Luis Vives. MATTHEW BRAY recently completed a dissertation at the University of Maryland on Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and the ideology of Romanticism. He is currently Director of Product Engineering at NISC, Baltimore, a publisher of CD-ROM bibliographic databases. SUSAN GREEN is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, where she is an editor of Genre. She has published articles on early women critic s and writers and is currently working on a book-length critical study of seventeenth century Englishwomen's writing entitled Thresholds of Culture: Reading Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn. SUSAN SNIADER LANSER is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of The Narrative Act (Princeton, 1981), Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Cornell, 1992), and numerous essays in publications that include Eighteenth-Century Life and Eighteenth-Century Women in the Arts. Her newest project is "Befriending the Body: The Economy of Women's Romantic Attachments in the Eighteenth Century."KATHERINE LARSEN is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Maryland. She has written on early women novelists and is currently completing a critical edition of John Dunton's Voyage Round the World. Her next project is a study of the cultural constructions of domestic and commercial textile production in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Writings of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. JUDITH PASCOE is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is completing a book on the theatricality of literary culture in the 1790s with a focus on the work of British women poets. Her essays, "Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith" and "Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace," are forthcoming in collections of essays on Romantic women writers. She is also at work on an edition of Mary Robinson's poetry. KATHARINE M. ROGERS, Professor Emerita at the City University of New York, has written The Troublesome Helpmate (Washington, 1966), Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Illinois, 1982), and many articles on eighteenth-century women writers. Her latest book is Frances Burney: The World of "Female Difficulties" (Harvester, 1990). She has edited Meridian Anthologies of early British and American women writers and, most recently, The Meridian Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Plays by Women. RUTH SALVAGGIO, Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, is the author of Dryden's Dualities (1983) and Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (1988). She teaches and publishes in the fields of eighteenth-century s