Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Paul Salzman (review)

The writings of early modern women have been anthologized and edited in significant ways over the last several decades, with Betty Travitsky's The Paradise of Women (1981) being followed by editions including Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Verse, edited by Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone (1988), and Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Women, edited by Elspeth Graham, Elaine Hobby, and Hilary Hind (1989). The editors of Editing Early Modern Women point out that it is also twenty-five years since W. Speed Hill's provocative claim that "the recovery and editing of early modern women's writings was at odds with prevailing editorial trends" (1), which seems like an appropriate moment to reflect on the ways early modern women's writing has been brought to the forefront and carefully edited.

This collection of thirteen essays, plus the Introduction (chapter 1) by editors Sarah C. E. Ross and Paul Salzman surveying its contents, is organized into a four-part structure. The introduction raises key questions that run throughout the volume, including how we might edit texts which have no editorial history or that do not fit into the "conventional taxonomies of 'literature'," and how "can digital methods of editing, archiving, and amassing early modern texts facilitate multiple editorial and literary-critical aims" (3). Part 1: "Editorial Ideologies" has essays by Susan M. Felch, Danielle Clark, Ramona Wray, and Elizabeth Clarke; part 2: "Editing Female Forms: Genre, Gender and Editing" contains essays by Suzanne Trill, Diana G. Barnes, Leah S. Marcus, Marion Wynne-Davies, and Marie-Louise Coolahan; part 3: "Out of the Archives and into the Classroom" has essays from Mary Ellen Lamb, Sarah C. E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and Pamela S. Hammons; part 4: "Editorial Possibilities," is a single coauthored contribution from Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith.

Together these essays cover a wide range of genres and topics, including letters, plays, and poetry but also forms such as a prayerbook and matters arising from the urgent issue of editing in a digital age. The essays discuss writers ranging from the less well-known—such as Elizabeth Melville, Anne Southwell, and Elizabeth Trywhit—to the better-known—such as Elizabeth I, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Mary Wroth. While the collection favors single author editions, such as Herbert, Cary, Wroth, and Austen, there are contributions on multiauthored editions, such as Ross and Scott-Baumann's on the female poets from the Civil War era, Diana G. Barnes on editing women's letters across three centuries, and Marion Wynne-Davies on editing early modern women's dramatic works.

Ramona Wray's essay speaks to the volume's aim of responding to the work that has been undertaken in the twenty-five years since W. Speed Hill's comment as she analyzes the history of modern editions of Mary Cary's The Tragedy of Miriam as it is "exemplary of the trends and problems associated with the theory and practice of textual editing as it has been employed in relation to women writers over the past twenty-five years" (61). In doing so, Wray finds a the majority of earlier editions "emphasized its necessary role as a play by a woman in a way that may have crowded out other approaches to it" and instead proposes what Ross and Saltzman suggest is a "classic strategy for canonical inclusion" of placing such works in a context which sees theatre history as "being as important as gender" (13). Keeping a focus on plays, Wynne-Davies, in "Editing Early Modern Women's Dramatic Writing for Performance" deals with pre-Restoration plays and maps their fascinating editorial history since 1853.

The volume's cohesion is enhanced by the fact that the essays are often in dialogue with one another and often reference ideas raised by fellow contributors in the collection. So, for instance...