The broad focus is on Anglo-Saxon writing from Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States, with many of the longer pieces providing a transnational overview. The brief to cover women’s historical writing is broad and inclusive. It comprises what women wrote as historians, or more often as commentators on their own past and the present. In a great many cases, the Companion’s own authors set these ideas against a larger overview of the historiography of the particular field in order to explain where the women’s contribution fits and, even more interestingly, how the female take on the topic changes or enhances the standard understanding. For example, in a fine essay on Modernity, Angela Woollacott explains the complex ways in which modernity has been understood: the chronology, the requisites of structural and economic change, and the effect of a changing geographical horizon that came with European exploration. She also highlights newer notions of modernity that situate individual subjectivity at the core. According to these, a modern existence offered the possibility of self-fashioning via education, travel and economic mobility. Woollacott tracks the intellectual history and its significance as women writers recorded their own efforts and those of other women who were negotiating the political and cultural changes that modernity brought.

Glenda Sluga’s essay on Nation – an equally broad overview that provides a sophisticated guide to historiography from the eighteenth century to contemporary Australia – examines the way in which the discipline of history was recast and, as the nation state evolved, the voices of women historians were reduced to a ‘whisper’. Sluga is able to identify women intellectuals such as Madame de Staël, or Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West who were writing incisive commentary on the nation and nation-building in novels, autobiography and travel records. In a thoughtful overview, Claire Hooker ponders the state of women historians of science and whether there was ‘anything special about them’, only to conclude that the answer ‘probably is no’ because both male and female historians were ‘shaped by the same post-war social and intellectual currents’ and were driven by the same ‘interminable curiosity and passionate pleasure’ in attempting to understand the world.

The national surveys of women’s historical writing are particularly interesting. As well as the four principal nations, there is a thoughtful essay on what connects women writers across the Dominions. Patricia Grimshaw and Shurlee Swain highlight the paradoxical position in which, as white members of former colonies, women were flummoxed by the plight of the non-white population and by the dispiriting fact that they themselves were marginalised when they attempted to write themselves into the national debates, but were also ignored when they described female experience that was separated from the mainstream masculinist narrative.

There are also broad surveys that deal with women’s historical writing in France, Italy and Japan. Vera Mackie lays out a fascinating overview that covers Japanese women’s response to their surroundings from the diary-keeping of the mid-nineteenth-century reforming Meiji Restoration to the later genre of autobiography and then the full-blown historical revisionism that has challenged the nationalist xenophobia that characterised Japan’s own view of its place in the world. She argues that the defeat in World War II produced a ‘new institutional relationship between individual and state’ that in turn forged a ‘new discursive context’ in which women wrote about themselves as workers and as members of leftist political parties and, from the 1970s, as activists in a women’s liberation movement whose preoccupations with sexuality, identity and reproductive control were the same as those in the West. In deftly laying out a field that is not easily available to the non-Japanese reader, Mackie’s essay is immensely useful.

In a similar vein, the strand of writing on new imperial studies – Empire, Orientalism, post-colonialism – is particularly valuable. As in the best essays in the collection, the longer pieces on Empire and its aftermath signpost the core issues in the subject area overall and the shift they have undergone over time and how, against this background, women writers, some historians and contemporary commentators, male and female, have used the lens of gender to make sense of the colonial and post-colonial experience.

Very occasionally, there is a slippage from a British example to the presumption that it constitutes the universal case, though even here the writing is never without interest. For example, the entry on Local History deals only with England and argues, rather curiously, that because women have a ‘sharp eye for detail’, prefer ‘to paint on a small canvas’ and tend to be ‘free spirits who roamed wherever their interests took them’ they were the original candidates for local history. The entry on Royal Lives is similarly British-specific. The author claims that writing about the royals is a sex-segregated activity dominated by women authors. This in itself is a noteworthy fact, though it would probably strike an eighteenth-century French person as decidedly odd, in light of the public pillorying that Marie Antoinette received in the regular press and through the vast pamphlet literature.

As is inevitable, the choice of who is in and who is out is an interesting one in itself. My own favourite women writers and historical players – Vera Figner, Emma Goldman and Olympe de Gouges – did not make the cut for a separate entry, even though they certainly saw themselves as influencing the world and explaining its history to their contemporaries. Figner, after issuing a terse manifesto decrying the rot at the heart of Russia, fired a shot at Tsar Nicholas I to rid the world of a tyrant. Half a century later, the Russian exile Emma Goldman wrote reams of commentary and historical analysis to show that the anarchist way was ideal. Olympe de Gouges had the temerity in 1790 to write The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, for which hubris her Jacobin colleagues sent her to the guillotine. De Gouges is treated in Roger Markwick’s fine essay on Revolution and is an important element of the essay on Modernity; there could scarcely have been a greater blow struck for female transformation than the declaration that women as citizens were entitled to full political rights.

Among the biographical entries one finds familiar and obscure names. Thus, as one would expect, Christine de Pizan, the fourteenth-century Venetian poet and historian, receives a longish thumbnail, as do the two generations of the Pankhursts, Emmeline, the mother and the founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and her four daughters: the eldest, Christabel, the strategist of the militant suffragist protest that included setting fire to public buildings and breaking plate-glass windows.

For my money, what makes this such a valuable collection are the longer and often quite marvellous essays on the big topics of literary, political and intellectual history. The focus is on women’s writing about history, which often has the consequence of writing from a different place and in a different medium from mainstream history (for example ‘secret history/ies’). The other essays provide a different take on the bigger historical events across several centuries. From Abolition, Ancient World and Art History down the alphabet through the Enlightenment, the Family to War, Women’s Liberation and World History, this is a book that provides a lively and sophisticated guide to several centuries of intellectual and cultural history as it was penned by women who were bent on making sense of the world around them and of their own place in it. With the guidance of the collection’s present-day authors, all specialists in their various fields, the reader garners a clear understanding as to why these phenomena have mattered to women writers and what their significance is today.