up many modern misconceptions. This noteworthy volume will undoubtedly be avaluable resource for both players and scholars for years to come.

Žak OzmoRoyal College of Music

Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to thePresent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://orlando.cambridge.org.2006.

The Orlando textbase is one of those online resources that can swallow hours of yourlife in pleasurable, work-related browsing. This seductive capacity to devour time mayor may not be a good thing, depending on whether you should actually be planning alecture or marking essays, but it is certainly enjoyable and, joking apart, Orlando isalso undoubtedly useful. Those working in the long eighteenth century will find it aninformative and in some respects unique research tool, with much of interest forscholars of the period.

Most obviously, it provides an online dictionary of British women writers in theperiod, from the internationally famous to the very obscure, from Jane Austen toHannah Wolley (whose cookery and conduct books appeared in the 1660s and 1670s,and of whom I confess I had never heard until I spent some time experimenting withOrlando). In my browsing there was only one omission that surprised me – that ofFrances Boscawen, the Bluestocking hostess and letter-writer. However, given the vastarray of material provided, and the huge nature of the undertaking, it is probablychurlish to leap on a single absence. And as is the way with online projects, Orlandois ongoing: as the ‘What’s New’ category on the home page reveals, entries arefrequently being added, revised and updated. (I should point out that the textbase alsoincludes selected relevant male writers and non-British women writers.) Entries aredivided into sections – ‘Writing’, ‘Life’, ‘Works By’ and so on – and provide not onlygood, full summaries of an individual’s biography and works with links that allow youto cross-reference other entries but also thorough information about the sources ofthe details included. Bibliographic citation links allow you to see where just abouteverything has come from, and also mean that anyone coming fresh to a particularwriter has a useful starting-point for building up a bibliography. This is one of themany ways in which Orlando provides something very different from the variousprinted dictionaries, encyclopaedias and guides to women’s writing available.

Orlando has three main categories relating to kinds of search: ‘People’,‘Chronologies’ and ‘Tag Search’. All these can be limited by date in a number of ways– by an author’s lifetime, by a monarch’s reign and by a variety of historical periods.Scholars workings in the long eighteenth century can choose from nine possibilitieswhich allow you to focus on, say, the Restoration or on the eighteenth century proper,on shorter periods such as ‘Cartesian Protofeminism, 1689-1706’ or the‘Revolutionary Period, 1775-1800’, or on the whole period from 1660 to 1821.Searching for a particular writer is easy – simply click on ‘Name’ under ‘People’ andtype in whoever you’re looking for. There are various other kinds of search and waysof searching on offer which arguably take a little longer to grasp, at least for thistechnologically challenged reviewer. There are helpful ‘tutorials’ which take thenovice user through sample searches, however, and it quickly becomes apparent howthe possibilities could be helpful for researchers, students and teachers of literature

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alike. Writers can be searched for by occupation, genre and place (and indeed by acombination of these three things) as well as by name, so that an interest in womenwho combined writing with acting, for example, or regional interests, can be followedup. Pursuing my own interest in women writers of comedy, a search by genre in‘People’ came up with thirty-five in the eighteenth century, and my attention wasdrawn to both Penelope Aubin and Charlotte Lennox, both of whom (in myignorance) I have always listed mentally under the single heading ‘novelist’ but bothof whom, I now discover, wrote comedies. Intriguingly, Aubin’s one play (The MerryMasqueraders; or, Humorous Cuckold, 1730) was ‘bawdy and flippant’, which, as theentry points out, ‘may come as a surprise’ after Aubin’s ‘at least ostensibly high-minded novels’. Also under ‘People’ you can search entries for names, and see wherea writer you’re interested in comes up apart from in her own entry. And so FrancesBoscawen may not (yet) have an entry of her own, but if you search entries for hername you find twenty hits, so she is not entirely omitted, and her role as subscriber tothe works of other writers comes to the fore.

‘Chronologies’ is a feature of obvious utility for teachers and lecturers and allowsyou to create custom-made chronologies with the many possible date limitations andincluding any or all of four different ‘event types’. In moments you can construct (forexample) a chronology of events relating to comedies by women in the eighteenthcentury – mainly, of course, performances, but private readings, letters discussingcomposition and journal entries also come up. ‘Tag Search’ may be potentially themost intriguing and yet the trickiest search possibility to learn to use in the mostfruitful way. Using the tags developed by the project, you can search for materialrelating to particular aspects of lives or writings, such as health or religion, genres orcharacter types. At its simplest, this allows you to investigate, for example, howfrequently widows figured as protagonists in literature of the period: choose the tag‘Character Type or Role’, limit it with ‘Widow’ and choose the further attribute‘Protagonist’, and twenty-eight hits result. My probably rather ham-fisted attempts atvarious tag searches suggest that they can be somewhat hit-and-miss but also thatpractice improves your chances of turning up useful results.

Overall, if you are prepared to have patience and take time (as the ScholarlyIntroduction admits) to learn your way around, Orlando offers a great deal to anyoneresearching in the long eighteenth century. And in the process you pick up all kinds ofuseful bits and pieces: if it weren’t for browsing in order to write this review, I wouldn’thave found out that Burney’s play The Woman-Hater (c.1801), on which I’ve beenworking, had its world premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in December2007. I hardly know which is more disappointing – that I completely failed to find thisout sooner, or that I missed the opportunity to see the play in performance. But at leastI’m up to date now.

Gillian SkinnerDurham University

Images du féminin dans les utopies françaises classiques. Marie-FrançoiseBosquet. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2007. 451. £65/€99/$132. hb. 13-978-0-72940-902-5.

Marie-Françoise Bosquet’s erudite study fills a significant gap in research on theimages of women in the French utopias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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© 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies