PAUL SALZMAN. Reading Early Modern Women's Writing.

Abstract

This book starts with important questions about the very category of ‘women's writing’ (p. 1). But Salzman's other purpose, to give an account of scholarship on early modern women writers so far, prevents his pursuing these questions in any depth. He notes that scholarly editions of women's writing tend to be of those texts that fit into traditional literary genres; it would have been interesting to read some speculation on the effect of this practice, and on how women's literary history might look if a different policy were followed. Rightly, Salzman questions the value of the traditional period boundary of 1660 which is particularly unhelpful when it comes to literature in manuscript or in non-canonical genres—as women's writing so often is (p. 3). Salzman states with confidence that many women did think that they were writing within a ‘female’ tradition, though he does not explore definitions of and problems with this category, or offer examples of women who were consciously writing in this ‘tradition’: more detail would have been very useful, as at present it is difficult to find female readers of ‘women writers’ in the early modern period, and thus there is little sense of any construction of a female tradition. In fact, the very category of ‘women's writing’ in the early modern period is more problematic than is allowed for here.