We are delighted to announce the publication of Women Writers in Review, a collection of more than 600 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reviews, publication notices, literary histories, and other texts responding to works by early women writers, transcribed and encoded in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup language. The Women Writers in Review interface offers sorting by the reviews’ sources, by the authors and works that they reference, by their genres and formats, and by tracked tags such as the topics they discuss and their evaluations of reviewed texts. We have also published an API, so that researchers can query and access the Women Writers in Review data and resources in JSON or HTML.

Women Writers in Review was created as part of the Cultures of Reception project, which was designed to investigate the discourse of reception in connection with the changing transatlantic literary landscape from 1770 to 1830. The Cultures of Reception project was generously funded by a Collaborative Research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We hope that Women Writers in Review will enable researchers to address a wide range of questions, which might include: how do periodical reviews in this period imagine the relationship between the local and transnational writing spaces? How do reviews work to constitute for women authors a sense of a reading public? What are the differences that mark reading and reviewing practices across various regions and localities? To what extent does geography affect patterns of reference to women’s writing during this period? How do reviews, anthologies, and other similar sources gender particular spaces or locations of reading? And, we hope, many others!

Over the next few months, we’ll be posting on some of our favorite reviews, as well as some of the research we’ve been doing with the collection. For now, we can share a tip about the site: you’ll find some of the liveliest and most humorous reviews among those that have been marked as offering very negative evaluations of their subject matter.

We are also looking for faculty and graduate students who are interested in using Women Writers in Review in their classrooms to develop sample assignments using the collection. If you would like to learn more about becoming a pedagogical development consultant for the Women Writers Project, please contact us at wwp[at]neu[dot]edu.

To begin exploring the collection, please visit the main page or read this explanation of the site’s features.