Lisa A. Freeman in The Scriblerian

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the number of digital Restoration and eighteenth-century archives and databases has proliferated.  . . . . With diminishing resources for many universities, however, distinctions need to be made. Worth the investment, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present . . . should be considered indispensable for all scholars of literary history. . . . Much to their credit, the project’s editors, Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, have given great consideration to Orlando‘s macro- and micro-organizational principles. Ranging across factual, conceptual, critical and interpretive tags, their customized markup system provides in-depth information on the lives and works of women writers as well as their political, literary, economic, and cultural contexts. With the goal of creating a “comprehensive scholarly history of writing by British women,” it provides individual investigators with a productive tool for generating chronologies and “herstories” that we could only have dreamed of writing in an earlier era . . . . Fortunately, the editors here do more than most to explain their choices and to discuss the potential implications of their markup system. Thanks to their collective intellectual labors, users will have access to as many rooms of their own as they can imagine.

Lisa A. Freeman. “Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (review)”. The Scriblerian, 44: 2, 45: 1 (Spring and Autumn 2012), 87-9.