Women (Re)Writing Milton, edited by Mandy Green and Sharihan Al-Akras, collects fifteen chapters that examine the many ways that female writers, artists, and critics have been inspired by Milton and his works. The chapters cover a wide range of material, from Lucy Hutchinson’s seventeenth-century poetic riposte to Paradise Lost to a 2019 public reading of Milton’s epic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In addition to great chronological scope, the volume also engages with “rewritings” in different media—including literary adaptations, translations, artistic renderings, criticism, and performance—and in different cultural and linguistic traditions. The Milton of this collection is truly a global Milton. In her foreword to the book, Laura Knoppers identifies four motivations for women’s rewriting of Milton: opposition to Milton’s patriarchal and misogynist views; the enlistment of Milton as an ally for women, often through the character of Eve; a highlighting of the radical implications inherent in Milton’s text; and the appropriation of Milton’s cultural capital in service of a female creator’s artistic or political ends. The writers and artists featured in the collection demonstrate these approaches to different degrees, sometimes displaying contradictory attitudes within the same work.An ever-present critical interlocutor throughout the volume is Milton’s bogey. Coined by Virginia Woolf and brought to prominence in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Milton’s bogey is a symbol of the nexus of religious, social, and political ideologies that define women as inferior, sinful, and dangerous. Building upon Woolf, Gilbert and Gubar propose that Milton’s bogey—the canonical expression of a patriarchal social and literary order—served as an obstacle to women writers, while Milton apologists such as Joseph Wittreich in Feminist Milton (1988) argue that Milton serves to inspire to female artists. Women (Re)Writing Milton lies implicitly in the latter camp; its focus on rewriting tends toward a recuperative reading of Milton and his works. Likewise, the centering of the poet and his writing suggests that Milton is inherently enabling for women writers, artists, critics, and rewriters, even as these women reject the influential creation myth of Paradise Lost.The volume opens with three chapters on literary responses by English women writers. In “Lucy Hutchinson’s Irrepressible Eve,” Allan Drew explores how the different genres of Paradise Lost and Order and Disorder shape each poet’s Eve. Milton’s epic theodicy allows for or even demands an “irrepressible Eve,” a character that exceeds the limited role attributed to her in Genesis. Hutchinson’s poem, by contrast, is a meditation, which requires a more “static” and “emblematic” Eve (19). In the Preface to Order and Disorder, Hutchinson writes that she “tremble[s] to think of turning Scripture into a romance,” a critical stance that has been widely understood as a direct criticism of Paradise Lost. Yet the affordances of narrative poetry make Hutchinson’s Eve into a rounded character who shares more with Milton’s Eve than Hutchinson’s theories of religious poetry would seem to allow. Drew concludes his chapter with reflections on what it means to view Order and Disorder primarily as a response—even if a negative one—to Paradise Lost. This frame inevitably emphasizes what Hutchinson shares with Milton, perhaps to the detriment of the complex contexts of Hutchinson’s poem. It’s a question that hovers over Women (Re)Writing Milton: is it possible to center women’s appropriations and adaptations without reinscribing Milton either as the bogey or as a standard of literary greatness?In addition to Drew’s chapter on Hutchinson, two other chapters in the volume examine women’s poetic rewritings of Milton. Thomas R. Tyrrell’s “Soaring in the High Region of her Fancies: The Female Poet and the Cosmic Voyage” highlights three eighteenth-century female poets who used Miltonic blank verse to create works of a “devotional sublime” that could accommodate discoveries in astronomy and physics. In the twentieth century, translation of Milton’s sonnets became one of the few outlets available to the Hungarian poet Ágnes Nemes Nagy under the nation’s Communist regime. In “I Am Not ‘Masculine’ I am Weak: Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s Translation of Sonnet 23,” Miklós Péti demonstrates that the experience of translating Milton’s poetry had lasting resonance in several of Nemes Nagy’s posthumously published poems. In Én láttam ezt (“This have I seen”) the poet returns to the dream vision of Milton’s sonnet and rewrites it as if from the perspective of the deceased wife. These chapters on poetry must stand as a prelude to a more comprehensive study of the influence of Milton’s poetry on female poets from the nineteenth century to the present. Like Gilbert and Gubar’s influential The Madwoman in the Attic more than forty years ago, the essays in Women (Re)Writing Milton suggest that women’s rewriting of Milton’s epic often involves a transposition into other genres.Genre and gender converge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which, as a point of origin for the gothic and science fiction, is perhaps the most important conduit of Milton’s influence into contemporary literary and popular culture. Mandy Greene’s “Two Great Sexes Animate the World: Laying the Spectre of ‘Milton’s Bogey’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” reexamines Shelley’s debts to Milton, arguing that the “absent presence” of Milton’s Eve is at the heart of that novel (51). Knoppers’s Foreword introduces readers to Kirsten Bakis’s 1997 novel Lives of the Monster Dogs, which evokes Milton through Shelley’s epigraph—”Did I request thee, maker, from my clay/ To mould me man?”—in its tale of hapless beasts who seek to overcome the conditions of their creation. The creature’s questioning of the Creator and the ethics of creation, expressed so eloquently by Milton’s Adam, has served as an enduring inspiration for writers who seek to revise the origin myths of Genesis and Paradise Lost, particularly in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In her essay, Larisa Kocic-Zámbó’s demonstrates that Shelley’s Romantic Milton fuels Kim Wilkins’s Angel of Ruin, a rewriting of the writing of Paradise Lost that replaces Milton’s Muse with a fallen angel and creates a fictional genealogy of female re-writers that stretches back to Milton’s daughter Deborah. Renata Meints Adail’s account of Beatriz Bracher’s Anatomia do Parais begins with the novel’s male protagonist, a student of Paradise Lost, who comes to view the women in his life through an “anatomy of sin” learned from Milton’s poem (141). Yet as Meints Adail argues, this naturalistic rewriting eventually highlights female agency as the Brazilian novelist’s female characters eclipse the male protagonist, transcending the model of Milton’s Eve.The artistic and political possibilities inspired by Milton’s Eve represent the strongest through line in Women (Re)Writing Milton, though, as Stephanie Spoto claims in her chapter “Queer Opening: Eve’s Readers and Writers,” little agreement exists on what these possibilities are. Does Eve represent the constraints of misogyny and patriarchy or is she, as Drew suggests, “irrepressible,” figuring alternatives that may have exceeded her creator’s intentions? Spato’s critical history of feminist and queer interventions highlights these alternative perspectives, which unlock the possibility for creative disobedience in the tradition of Milton scholarship. In Women (Re)Writing Milton, attention to the writings of female critics and artists unsettles what we thought we knew about Milton’s texts and the traditions he drew upon. As Shannon Miller argues in “Beyond Milton’s Daughters: Dorothy Dury, Lady Ranelagh, and the Question of Female Education,” seventeenth-century women’s writing on marriage, conversation, and education reframes Milton’s writings on divorce. The question of how Milton’s writing itself draws upon the intellectual work of women was explored in Miller’s important book Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writers (2008) and remains an underexamined topic. In other chapters, Reginald A. Wilburn and Angelica Duran explore female Miltonists’ use of the poet for political and professional projects. Wilburn demonstrates how the African American writer Elizabeth Josephine Brown included, and in some cases omitted, allusions to Milton in her biography of her abolitionist father William Wells Brown. In Duran’s examination of Emilia Pardo Barzán’s Milton scholarship, the late-nineteenth-century critic and novelist contextualized Milton in relation to Spanish critical traditions and Catholicism. Paradise Lost travels to the Middle East in Sharihan Al-Akhras’ account of female Arab novelists—the Egyptian Nawal El-Saadawi, the Saudi Rehab Abuzaid—and their refraction of the story of Eve—and Milton’s Eve—in their works. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate resoundingly the story of Milton’s global reception, which has until recently highlighted male critics, translators, and writers, remains incomplete.The final section of the book turns to women’s “rewriting” of Milton in nonliterary forms: the illustrations of Paradise Lost by Jane Giraud, Carlotta Petrina, and Mary Elizabeth Groom, female-directed performances of Comus and Paradise Lost at the Globe Theater in London, and the collective experience of a marathon reading of Paradise Lost by teachers, students, and community members. These chapters are a welcome inclusion, as they demonstrate the importance of women’s contributions to cross-media receptions of Milton’s works.Women (Re)Writing Milton does not offer a comprehensive account of women’s intellectual and artistic reworkings of Milton, but rather vivid glimpses of the variety of responses Milton’s writings provoke in his female readers. This snapshot approach allows for a representation of the truly varied response to Milton among female artists across traditions and media. This book thus makes the argument for the importance of women’s contributions to Milton’s reception even as it may obscure the relative importance of authors, genres, or historical moments as well as the distinctiveness of women’s responses to Milton in relation to broader trends in reception history. Women (Re)Writing Milton provides an excellent foundation for future studies in Milton’s reception that further plumb the historical contexts that enabled (or in some cases disabled) women to take up the task of his rewriting.