This lively and wide-ranging collection of essays edited by Marjanne Goozé focuses on mostly nineteenth-century women writers who “reframe, revalue, redefine, renegotiation, subvert, reject and otherwise challenge social, legal, educational, and developmental gender models” (11). While the volume takes the question of Bildung as its central guiding thread, it is significant that nearly all the texts included in the volume take this Bildung as something closer to an éducation sentimentale than an Ausbildung. Concomitantly, this means that they tend to focus on literary texts as mediators, purveyors, or indices of Bildung—hardly any of them have anything to say about the very concrete proposals for educational techniques, educational reform, and educational equality to emerge from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the resulting emphasis on “strategies” for “subversion” of dominant constructions of gender relations can get a bit repetitive at times, the texts nevertheless highlight and illuminate an astonishing variety of texts from women authors ranging from the aristocratic Sophie von la Roche to the Swiss factory worker Verena Conzett.

Of course, part of the problem of “separate spheres” was that women writers not only could not aspire to Bildung as defined by their male counterparts, but dominant ideology prevented them from propounding a theory of Bildung, to reflect on the topos, except by implicitly addressing such issues in genres generally considered more appropriate to women, such as the letter and the moral weekly. Anca L. Holden's contribution to the volume focuses on Marianne Ehrmann's journals and moral weeklies, which focused on charting out a path of Bildung the eighteenth century emphatically reserved for men. Laura Deiulio's essay on the letters of Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Pauline Wiesel reads letter writing as a venue for an alternative, specifically feminine form of Bildung, while Tamara Zwick's consideration of the letters of Magdalena Pauli and Johanna Sieveking posits letter-writing as always already subverting the public/private distinction (the “separate spheres” of the volume's title) that subtend the standard nineteenth-century narrative of Bildung. Another such genre was the personal memoir, and accordingly, Wendy Arons's article (which readers of the German Quarterly will already be familiar with), on the actress Karoline Schulze- Kummerfeld's two autobiographical texts from the last decades of the eighteenth century, charts how Schulze-Kummerfeld could locate herself as actress and woman in a discursive environment that valorized anti-theatrical authenticity and insistently gendered that authenticity male.