Women Writers of the English Renaissance.

Kim Walker. (Twayne's English Author Series, 521.) New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. 10 pls. + xv + 260 pp. $28.95. ISBN: 0-8057-7017-8.

Scholars interested in early modern women writers have reason to be pleased that Twayne has included a full-length study of women writers in England in its series of studies of individual English authors. Few critical studies of early modern English women writers are presently available. There is compelling need for a synthesis that contextualizes women, as one of many early modern subgroups of subordinated persons, for the understanding both of women's writings and of the full spectrum of writings of the period. While certainly out-of-date, the dispassionate, but alas unpublished dissertations of Ruth Hughey and Charlotte Kohler, dating from the thirties, remain critical background reading for anyone wishing grounding in the subject.

Though Walker does not provide an overarching synthesis, her book has many strengths. Generally, her treatments are complex and fresh. Without ignoring any important figures, she discusses some writers who have not been the subject of earlier critical scrutiny, thereby adding to our harvest of recoveries. She leaves us much the richer for her careful consideration of such writers as Mary Fage, Esther Kello, and Judith Man, none of whom has received significant critical attention until now.

There are eccentricities - why for example subtitle a chapter after a line on erudition by Rachel Speght and then defer discussion of Speght's important vision of female learning to another chapter? And there are, I think, some poor judgment calls, such as her omission of those mother's advice books that may be the only original sub-genre by Englishwomen of the early modern period. There is an unevenness in the space allotted various figures that is sometimes hard to understand. Here, the press might have deployed typography more helpfully to guide readers of a discussion ranging over dozens of figures. Some important scholarly work is ignored: how can Grace Milmay's diaries be discussed, for example, without any reference to the useful (partial) edition by Linda Pollock? And it is disappointing that Walker acknowledges the significance of manuscript leavings by early modern women but then discusses those already recovered unevenly. If she sometimes comes down on the wrong side as in her analysis of Elizabeth Middleton who, it now seems, may have been a plagiarist or 'copyist' rather than an author, and if her choice of authorities sometimes seems askew - these are the inevitable results of work in a still developing field.

In an important chapter, "'To beg their fees': The Emergence of the Professional Woman Writer," Walker corrects a widely current misconception that situates the beginnings of professional writings by Englishwomen in the seventeenth century. It is therefore particularly disappointing that she has limited herself, "primarily for reasons of space," to "the 80-year period 1560-1640," especially since the relative paucity of writings by women before 1560 (though these are very important as originative materials) would not have necessitated much more space than the current summary of contexts in her first chapter. To organize writings in the field in accordance with its own chronology, moreover, would agree with the feminist argument that traditional periodization does not necessarily fit women. That Walker ends her account in 1640 is far more defensible, given the deep disruption of English society by civil war and the profusion of works by women after that date. What can certainly be said is that the view taken in this volume is Walker's own, which is no mean feat; she has provided a useful addition to the shelves of all students of the early modern woman writer in England and has brought us further in our understanding of this elusive figure.

BETTY S. TRAVITSKY New York City