Book excerpt: The present volume covers 30 Pre-Revolutionary French women, providing a representative sampling of their manifold and varied contributions to intellectual and cultural history. This volume is unique in its grouping of essentially French writers from the Pre-Revolutionary period. The authors included here range from those prominent because of their social position or literary fame, to those slowly becoming part of a new canon of Old Regime women writers - authors whose works were known to their contemporaries but who have slipped into near invisibility in the following centuries until their recent rediscovery and reassessment.