About the Author

William J. Scheick, J.R. Miliken Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Design in Puritan American Literature.

Reviews

"A provocative book which corroborates some of our earlier ideas about female writing in colonial America and finds some new ways of looking at familiar verse and prose." -- Seventeenth-Century News

"Addresses the question of how to understand colonial women's writing given the gendered constraints they faced in their creative endeavors." -- American Literature

"Colonialists and specialists in American women's writing, as well as those who believe in an ethos of looking closely and with respect at the object of study, will come away from this book enriched and encouraged." -- Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"It is hard to see that criticism can do more: this is a book which should be read by anyone with an interest in colonial writing; I hope it will be turned to by others well beyond the field." -- Journal of American Studies

"Offers material of great interest to students and scholars interested in emergent women's voices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America." -- Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography

"Provocative, tightly argued, and well written.... It models a productive blend of solid historical and cultural contextualizing with the often neglected practice of close, attentive reading." -- William and Mary Quarterly

"Reveals a great deal about the presence of female voices and the struggle between orthodox and individual authority." -- Rocky Mountain Review

"Scheick convincingly demonstrates the ways in which these early texts express the uncertainties of female authorization in colonial America." -- The American Cultural Association Journal

"Scheick has made an important and welcome contribution to the growing literature on early American women, writing, and authority." -- New England Quarterly

"Should prove a useful book to a variety of readers. Scheick nuances and complicates past feminist readings of authors like Anne Bradstreet, while contributing new readings of writers like Mary English, Esther Burr, Elizabeth Hanson, and Phillis Wheatley." -- Teresa A. Toulouse

"Small and compact, with an excellent index and bibliography, this book joins such similar titles as Amy Lang's Prophetic Women and American Women Writers to 1800, ed. by Sharon Harris. Highly recommended for both undergraduates and advanced scholars." -- Choice

"The book is short, to the point, timely and rooted in careful attention to primary texts." -- South Atlantic Review

"This is required reading for scholars in the period." -- Year's Work in English Studies