SOURCE: Wineapple, Brenda. “Unparalleled Lives.” Women's Review of Books 18, nos. 10-11 (July 2001): 34-5.

In the following review, Wineapple offers a generally favorable assessment of Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage.

Everybody's doing it: in the fourteenth century Boccaccio did it in tales of 106 famous women that extol their dominion and inventiveness—as well as some more predictable virtues, like long-suffering patience. (They've just been freshly translated by Virginia Brown and republished by Harvard.) More recently Phyllis Rose did it in her slim collection, Writing of Women (1985), and Susan Ware did it in her ambitious Letter to the World (1997), celebrating seven women who, as she put it, shaped the American century. Sylvia Brownrigg did it too, though in her Ten Women Who Shook the World (1997), the women, though not their ability to shake, are fictional. And just last year, Claudia Roth Pierpont's women did it in a best-selling...