Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency Inventing Genre by Paula R. Backscheider, and: Women and Poetry: 1660–1750 ed. by Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (review)

120 Leapor’s Poems Upon Several Occasions (1748). Organizing her coverage of these years around the metaphor of family relationships, Ms. Staves devotes most of her discussion to the way three women negotiated their careers with powerful male siblings or surrogate fathers. Chapters three and four, which I found especially instructive , offer discussions of several plays by Susanna Centlivre, a verse tragedy by Trotter , and the poetry and prose of Mary Wortley Montagu. All of the chapters follow a four-fold plan: a chronological outline of works to be covered; an introductory overview of the period; a detailed commentary on writers and works; a summary conclusion. Overall, while Ms. Staves resists the simple rise-and-fall plot driving other feminist histories, she does not eschew plot altogether. Her book tells a story of the ‘‘rise of the woman writer,’’ whose combined achievements and compromises she calls ‘‘bittersweet.’’ Her history is consistently useful and inspiring from its Introduction to its Select Bibliography. I faced disappointment only twice during my reading: first, when I consulted the Index to search a topic relating to Cavendish and was directed to a page that discussed Lennox; second, when I looked in vain for material on Jane Barker’s Galesia Trilogy (1726). As a nonconformist (exiled Catholic) and a talented eccentric, Barker would seem to deserve a place, but these are small faults. While not the first work to call for a fresh, more positive approach to feminist literary history , it exemplifies a new direction for the history of eighteenth-century women’s writing. Deborah Heller Western New Mexico University PAULA R. BACKSCHEIDER. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. Baltimore: Hopkins, 2005. Pp. xxvii ⫹ 514. $65; $35 (paper). Women and Poetry: 1660–1750, ed. Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton. Basingstoke , Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xii ⫹ 258. $32.95 (paper). Like the speaker of Keats’s ‘‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,’’ I have encountered a new and exciting world through reading about a subject I thought I knew. Indeed, I have done my share to bring this world to life; some of my career has been devoted to Anna Letitia Barbauld’s poetry, in particular. A full sense of eighteenth-century women’s poetic culture, however, was not present to me heretofore . I admit that it never even occurred to me to wonder much about the existence of such a culture beyond manuscript circulation. I suppose I was content to experience Barbauld and other women poets one-by-one, as they came to my attention in anthologies or in scholarship. More to the point, my energies—and those of many of my professional colleagues—were devoted to seeing and demonstrating how women poets who published fit into the world of Dryden, Pope, Swift, Thomson, Johnson, Gray, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. These two books have altered permanently my own perspective, even as they have radically remapped and redefined the field. 121 Of course, these projects are indebted to decades of scholars recovering women’s poetry of the past. The Palgrave volume edited by Ms. Prescott and Mr. Shuttleton, in fact, includes essays by many of the major critics from the 1970s onward—Donna Landry, Kathryn King, Germaine Greer, Margaret J. M. Ezell, Claudia Thomas Kairoff , Valerie Rumbold, and Jane Spencer. This volume, in addition, features brief introductory essays that focus our attention on individual poets; and here, too, we are in the presence of scholars who have already made significant contributions to the field—the editors themselves, Jennifer Keith, Carol Shiner Wilson, Susan Wiseman , and Rebecca M. Mills. This collection of first-rate scholars forcefully argues for the significance of eighteenth-century women’s poetry. Concerning itself with ‘‘a transitional period of women’s literary history,’’ this work concentrates on the ‘‘emergence of the professional woman poet within an expansive print culture.’’ The volume highlights the poetry and practice of Behn, Killigrew , Barker, Chudleigh, Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Montagu, and Leapor. As Ms. Prescott and Mr. Shuttleton point out, other poets could have been chosen and some important poets (Katherine Philips most notably) are left out. But, the editors are not, as they say, ‘‘engaged in...