Dodds, Lara, and Michelle M. Dowd. Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History, Oxford University Press, 2025. vii + 190 pp. $105. (hardcover) ISBN: 9780198941286.

In Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History, Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd position early modern women writers not as a “countercanon” (51, 52), niche area, or even optional reading but as a defining feature of studying early modern literature broadly. In their latest book proposing a feminist formalism, Dodds and Dowd deconstruct long-held discussions of canon and feminist theory, pointing to a dire need for scholarship—and even classrooms—to approach early modern women writers with a feminist formalism, alongside the male contemporaries that have and continue to dominate anthology tables of contents and syllabi.

Dodds and Dowd defined feminist formalism in their 2022 co-edited introduction to Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing as “a methodology that both attends to the structural, rhetorical, and other formal techniques of a given text and takes gender as a central category of analysis” (1). This 2022 predecessor text sets up the issue that their latest book takes up, that “most early feminist scholars on early modern women’s writing turned to cultural, biographical, and other contextual methods rather than formalism as their primary critical lens” (3), and that “the new formalism in early modern studies, in other words, needs early modern women’s writing” (5).

In their latest book, in order to dismantle the longstanding, male-centric canon, in a three-chapter Part I, titled “Old Questions,” they probe three key questions: “What is Women’s Writing?,” “Are We Post Canonical Yet?,” and “Is It Any Good?” These chapters address questions that have persistently plagued the field. Each chapter provides a case study, providing an example of an early modern woman writer whereby a feminist formalist approach is not only better practice in terms of scholarship, but offers revisions to the larger field and even the canon itself. The first chapter “What is Women’s Writing?” calls for understanding women’s writing “as capaciously and fluidly as possible” “by embracing a feminist critical practice that revels in ambiguities and discrepancies rather than in homogeneity or clear divisions” (33). The first chapter uses Lucy Hutchinson as the case study. The second chapter on canon, I anticipate, will quickly fill every graduate student’s comprehensive exam reading list. Dodds and Dowd assert that early modern women writers “(at best) exist parallel to rather than coexistent with the traditional literary canon, standing apart from it rather than reshaping it from within” (52). Herein, Dodds and Dowd explore significant teaching anthologies, namely The Norton Anthology of English Literature and the gender inequities within it, which will have many professors rethinking the texts they assign their students. The chapter ends with an optimistic reminder that “the canon itself can be changed but, perhaps more importantly, the process that brings it into being can be changed as well” (57). Anne Lock’s sonnets serve as a poignant case study to their point about flawed texts: “the first published sonnet sequence in England, a fact that is often conveniently left out of the standard narrative” (64). In the final chapter of the “Old Questions” section of the book, “Is It Any Good?,” Dodds and Dowd discuss the damage of “detraction.” They argue that “women writers need the kind of treatment—including careful critical editions—that male writers received in the past” and, simultaneously, that that treatment “may be something different from those effects privileged by traditional notions of literary value” (78). This final chapter uses a combination of Margaret Cavendish’s poetry, Mary Wroth’s poetry, and a recipe, “To Make Marmalade of Apricocks,” wherein Dodds and Dowd double back on their questions of the limitations of canon through the recipe genre. The idea of the recipe genre as “dynamic” takes new life when the writers playfully conclude the chapter with, “we urge you to try the apricot marmalade. It is good” (88), thereby modeling a fun, interactive scholarship, one centered on dynamic relationships not only for the early modern writers who wrote them, but the readers who have read them, and the readers currently reading their book—and trying the apricot marmalade.

In Part II, Dodds and Dowd transition to applications in both scholarship and pedagogy (93). The fourth chapter, which begins Part II, “New Directions,” explores how Critical Race studies and gender studies “have not been fully integrated” (96). In this chapter, Dodds and Dowd provide two case studies through Mary Wroth and Hester Pulter. In chapter 5, “Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Case for Feminist Formalism,” Dodds and Dowd “suggest that feminist formalism”—using the same definition from the 2022 publication—“provides an especially useful apparatus for advancing the conversation about early modern women’s writing because it marries the traditional questions of formalism, including questions of style, genre, and literary history, with the political and cultural concerns of feminist inquiry” (118). The authors call for a “fuller critical archive of close readings of early modern women’s texts” and remind readers that the “new formalisms of the past two decades” have “not typically foreground[ed] gender or women’s writing.” For them, a feminist formalism “takes the synergy between form and gender as central to its sustained textual examination” (123). As case studies, chapter 5 explores Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam and, to demonstrate that feminist formalism “can be productively combined with other critical approaches, including queer theory,” Elizabeth Brackley and Jane Cavendish’s play, The Concealed Fancies (134). In the final chapter of Part II, Dodds and Dowd look to “Early Modern Women in the Classroom: Pedagogy, Innovation, and the Future of Literary History.” This chapter begins with “a history of the transformation of teachers and students as much as it is of tools and traditions” (144). This section points to teaching editions, weighing their benefits from one possibility to the next, also emphasizing important digital collections of early modern women’s writing, such as the Women Writers Project, again making this book a necessary text for any graduate student or early career scholar for both its dense literary histories and for its enlightened weighing of texts and other teaching tools. Even seasoned professors may benefit from this chapter’s aid in re-evaluating classroom approaches.

The book concludes with a short, “Coda: The Future We Need Now,” where Dodds and Dowd look forward, stating, “we can, in other words, chart a new path forward in literary studies that begins by centering women’s writing and, in doing so, reframes the terms of the discussion from the outset” (164). This book is a treasure trove for students and scholars seeking to understand scholarly movements within early modern literature broadly speaking as well as many other movements within the field, ranging from New Historicism, New Criticism, Race Studies, Gender Studies, and Formalism.

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