Beginning in the 1980s, a wave of paradigm-shifting, broadly post-structuralist essay collections established the centrality of the analysis of gender, desire and sexuality to the formation of what would become Early Modern Studies (rather than Renaissance Literature), but very few of these essays treated female-authored texts. The creation of early modern women’s writing as a distinct field required a parallel and asymmetrical labour, a strategic turning away from reinterpreting the masculine canon and a shared sense of the potential of working with this unfamiliar archive to productively unsettle our sense of the past and present. Australians have played an intriguingly prominent role in this process, none more so than Paul Salzman, whose collections of early modern women’s writing for Oxford’s World’s Classics series have been invaluable in making well-edited texts available and affordable. Salzman’s most recent contribution of this kind, Early Modern Women’s Writing: An anthology 1560–1700 (2000), an imaginative and wide-ranging representation of the field, is now set in classrooms all over the world.

His new book, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing, is a kind of critical and historical companion to this anthology. Crammed with judicious summaries of the current state of knowledge, and, for the most part, generous to a fault in noting and responding to the work of other scholars, past and present, it is destined to be poured over by specialists as well as by those seeking a reliable and readable introduction to an extremely complex field. From small beginnings in the 1980s, the study of early modern women’s writing has become a veritable hive of critical and bibliographical activity as its stakes have risen. Salzman’s interests are literary, but by no means exclusively so. Positioned at the intersection of literary history and what is now known as early modern cultural studies, this book addresses ‘those from a wide variety of fields and disciplines who want to know more about what women wrote in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how that writing was read, processed, interpreted, rewritten, and often rediscovered, from the time of its writing through to the present day’. ‘Women’s writing’ is a deliberately broad category, but, even so, the object of analysis is unstable. The rise of manuscript studies, in particular, continues to transform our sense of what Salzman calls ‘the scope of early modern women’s writing’ and its historical readership. At the same time, the development of digital resources to meet the changing education market is revolutionising access to previously obscure and unknown texts.

In the midst of so much new information and so many new texts, the field itself needs to be reassessed and historicised; this is part of the labour of reading which Salzman takes on. This is a difficult, syncretic task which Salzman manages with authority, clarity and great goodwill. He is especially skilful in communicating the fine detail of bibliographical and textual scholarship, and why it matters. Salzman’s style is intimate and personable, vividly describing his encounters with the materiality of early modern books and manuscripts as he situates himself among various communities of readers. In the chapter on the indomitable and embattled Anne Clifford, for instance, Salzman considers what she called her ‘Great Books’, a day-to-day diary, documentary record and genealogical compilation of her claim to the vast Clifford estates covering the period from 1649 until her death in 1676 at the age of eighty-six. Salzman writes: ‘It is difficult to convey the full impact of the Great Books to someone who has not seen them. They are huge folios and they are elaborately illuminated … The first volume is 200 folios long … it brings the family history up to the thirteenth century.’ Some of Clifford’s diary entries are well known in modern compilations, but Salzman’s account of reading them in their original context offers an entirely different sense of their character and purpose.

This is a book, as its titles stresses, about reading early modern women’s writing and the vicissitudes of textual transmission, in manuscript and print, on which reading relies. A series of case studies explore the critical fortunes and misfortunes of early modern women of notable literary ambition and achievement, including Lady Mary Wroth, whose scandalous prose romance, Urania (1621), positioned her as the self-styled inheritor of the literary mantle of her illustrious uncle, Sir Philip Sidney; Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who published a dozen lavishly produced volumes of experimental poetry, fiction, philosophy and memoir in the mid-seventeenth century; and Lucy Hutchinson, until recently known only as the civil war biographer of her husband, the prominent regicide Colonel John Hutchinson, but now revealed as a considerable manuscript poet and translator.

The final chapter compares Katherine Philips as successful royalist coterie poet and playwright with the prolific and tumultuous literary career of Aphra Behn: poet, playwright, novelist, editor and translator, famously credited as the first professional woman writer in English by Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1928): ‘The importance of that fact outweighs anything she actually wrote.’ As Salzman notes, Woolf does not acknowledge her lover, Vita Sackville-West, who had already made this observation in her 1927 book, Aphra Behn. Salzman’s scholarly appreciation of Sackville-West, who also edited the diaries of her ancestor Anne Clifford (1623), and his discussion of the interplay between Woolf and Sackville-West, are symptomatic of his desire to give credit where credit is due while at the same time following the paths of textual transmission to discover what they can tell us, now and in the past, about the relations between authors, texts and readers.