Carolyn Sorisio - Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (review) - Legacy 17:2 Legacy 17.2 (2000) 229-230 Book Review Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Edited by Karen L. Kilcup. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. 352 pp. $39.95/$19.95 paper. Ralph Waldo Emerson reacts to the news of Margaret Fuller’s death in an often-quoted journal passage: “I have lost in her my audience.” Emerson positions Fuller as his private reader, yet as Lindsey Traub argues in an essay in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, Emerson acknowledges Fuller’s role as a cultural critic and author elsewhere in his journals. Nonetheless, Emerson’s public work relegates Fuller to the...