Salonnieres, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France. By Anne E. Duggan. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 288 pp. Salonnieres, Furies, and Fairies is a compelling study of how seventeenthcentury French writers used literary production to dialogue with one another over issues of class, gender, nobility, religion, politics, morality, and individual subjectivity. Over the course of six clearly written chapters, which weave the stories of the individual writers into a complex sociohistorical context, Anne E. Duggan tells a story (20), beginning with Madeleine de Scudery and the public influence of salon women, moving on to the patriarchal reaction of academicians like Boileau and Charles Perrault, and finally focusing on Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's response to the decline of the salon, the nobility, and the moralist discourses responsible for late seventeenth-century parental and spousal domination. In doing so, Duggan opens up three important paradigms regarding the study of early modern French literary history. Ehe first of these, to which Duggan herself calls attention in the preface, emphasizes the tendency of feminist criticism to study early modern women writers exclusively through the narrow scopes of their (female), their sociocultural milieu (the salon), and their spheres of sociopolitical influence (the private or particular). Drawing upon observations from the works of Scudery, Lafayette, Villedieu, Bernard, Maintenon, and d'Aulnoy Duggan challenges the notion that women writers in the wake of Scudery: strove to create an ecriture that was beyond person and beyond class, but not beyond gender (DeJean, Ten- der Geographies 92, qtd. by Duggan 17), illustrating how early modern women categorically differ from one another on a range of issues that may or may not be gender-related - including the religious persecution of the Catholic counter-reformation (d'Aulnoy vs. Maintenon), the derogation of the haute noblesse (d'Aulnoy vs. Scudery), and even the sociopolitical implications of marriage (d'Aulnoy vs. Lafayette and Bernard). As such, Duggan not only takes issue with Joan Dejean's claims regarding early modern gendered writing, but she also opens up Nancy Miller's theory that seventeenth-century women writers used their works to contest the traditional plots made available by an exclusively male-orchestrated dominant tradition (Subject to Change 8, qtd. by Duggan 17). Illustrating a range of examples in which female authors challenged one another's works, Duggan brings forth several contexts in which women writers articulated ideological points of view on equal footing with men, positioning themselves not as women, but rather as members of particular social classes, religions, regions, and political affiliations. A second important paradigm that Duggan's study addresses concerns the essentialist scope within which important seventeenth-century academic quarrels are generally studied. Addressing this paradigm on two levels, Duggan first takes issue with the nature of the authors and treatises involved. As Duggan demonstrates, the well-known Querelle des Femmes, a debate over the role of women in the public sphere that officially took place between Boileau and Perrault toward the end of the century, was in fact a reactionary quarrel. It was not primarily motivated by classical texts of the remote historical past, as Boileau's position on the ancient side of the quarrel might suggest. Instead, the important sociocultural influence of women writers like Scudery, whose historical novels or fables both asserted and modeled the active participation of women in public affairs, provided an important initial impetus for the debate. By the same token, as Duggan points out, serious engagement with Boileau's misogynistic contribution to the quarrel did not stop with Perrault's Apologie des femmes; rather, it was ultimately taken to task by late seventeenth-century writers, including d'Aulnoy in the context of her novel Histoire d'Hypolite (1690) and her subsequent fairy tales. …