In this beautifully written study of five early modern Iberian women poets, Gwyn Fox offers a revisionary history of women's poetics as well as a challenge to conventional Renaissance hermeneutics. Combining modern gender theory and feminist historiography with medieval and early modern legal and religious treatises, her analyses of the five poets — Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza; Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán; Sor María de Santa Isabel, known as Marcia Belisarda; Leonor de la Cueva y Silva; and Sor Violante del Cielo, listed chronologically — propound what she calls a “contextually based exploration of [their] sonnets of love and friendship” (2). Central to Fox's interpretations is her belief that poetic expression in the early modern period did not rely solely on the practice of imitation but also addressed the poet's life experiences. She thus expands on the women poets’ lyrical disquisitions on love and friendship to encompass their involvement in a series of other themes, including politics, patronage, marriage, motherhood, and their relations to their children and siblings.

Because two poets — Sor Violante del Cielo and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza — have produced the most abundant writing (in the case of Carvajal, an extensive correspondence) and have been more widely studied, Fox focuses often on them throughout the book. Carvajal y Mendoza, for example, not only appears when Fox discusses various themes, but also merits an entire chapter. The book's remaining four chapters do not discuss the individual poets separately, but integrate their themes with the authors. (A helpful conclusion at the end of each chapter sums up the major points presented.) Fox delves deeply into each theme, not only contextualizing, but also historicizing her analyses by comparing these women's writings with a broad range of examples. Indeed, a bonus of this book is that it does not limit itself to the five women specified above or solely to their sonnets. Fox speaks knowledgeably about other women writers, such as Maria de Zayas and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, to name the most well known, and mentions lesser-known figures such as Inarda de Arteaga; she also discusses a play by Leonor de la Cueva and several romances and décimas along with the cultured sonnet form.

Fox's title points to her proposal that women poets attempt to escape from male poetic conventions even while appropriating them. Her close readings of individual poems are themselves subtle and nuanced; she shows that both religious and secular women writers were capable of penning lyrical and burlesque poems, with the latter participating in literary academies where topics were assigned to them as poetic exercises. Although she too often restricts the poets’ rhetorical strategies to testing Petrarchan poetics rather than contesting the male poets of sixteenth-century Spain, she offers original insights into the poems’ social purpose. On a sonnet by Sor Violante del Cielo to a friend and benefactor, for instance, she states that this kind of friendship poem substantiates women's close relationships, giving the lie to Montaigne's assertion that women were “incapable” of spiritually bonding together (158). At times, her readings depend on hypothetical situations that seem excessively biographical, especially when bearing in mind the poems’ literary tradition. As an example, while she cites Ovid's Heroides 1 as a possible source, she also considers the desolation of Arteaga's sonnet “Alegres horas de memorias tristes” due to “what must have been the lot of many women whose menfolk went to war or to the New World” (211). She thereby misses the opportunity to compare it to Garcilaso's “Oh, dulces prendas por mi mal halladas,” whose literary language is surely closer — temporally, emotionally, and aesthetically — to Arteaga's own than to Penelope's conflicted lament over Ulysses’ absence.

Since occasions for non-Hispanist readers to familiarize themselves with Spanish women's poetry are certainly few, it is fortunate that Fox has chosen some of their best writings. There are times when Fox's English version approximates the Spanish too literally or the latter is mistranslated (despite the perhaps-intended pun, the phrase “de tus glorias / coronista seré” [29] does not mean “[I shall be] the one / who crowns your glories”; neither does “dueño cierto” [203] mean “a certain master”; nor “mujer ligera” [234] a “loose woman”). These blemishes, however, do not detract from what are, in the main, elegant, sophisticated, and sensitive readings of early modern women's poetry. Fox's book appreciably complements Julián Olivares and Elizabeth Boyce's Tras el espejo la musa escribe: lírica femenina de los siglos de oro and, among studies of non-Spanish early modern women's writings, Patricia Demers's Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England; and Ann Rosalind Jones's The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620. It is a welcome and much-needed addition to early modern Spanish scholarship.