"An invaluable resource for scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."
The New England Quarterly  "This survey produces one revelation after another. . . . [Baym] positions her recovery project, like the best of them, as a start ... and convincingly demonstrates that plenitude is its own argument."
Times Literary Supplement, Christine Bold "Rigorous and refreshing insights into books by women.  Impressive."
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature "Nina Baym's work is fundamental to the field; her scholarship is meticulous and astonishing, her documentation is excellent, and her writing is consistently clear and interesting. As the first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West, this will become a standard and classic text."
Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx "Demonstrates the vitality and diversity of early western women's writing. Highly recommended."
Choice "A must-read for all students and scholars of this field."
Legacy "Baym has recovered a plethora of well-known and less-known women writers by scouring footnotes, catalogues, cultural histories, and bibliographies to assess women's contribution to America's western scene, debunking a myth that women wrote less about the West than other places. Women Writers of the American West is a must have for scholars and nonscholars alike."
American Literary Realism "An important scholar of women's writing and longtime editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Baym seems to know just about everything as she lays out the précis of the many volumes, calmly and with little overt politicizing addressing the many controversies, issues, debates that have occupied western and American studies for the past forty years."
Western American Literature "Baym's book is indispensable for the American literature scholar because it redefines notions of what literature of the American West is: it is more than work created by authors from the geographic area west of the Mississippi River; it is more than work created about that geographic region; it is more than an Anglo experience; and it is certainly more than a male experience."
Resources for American Literary Study "The chapters in this edited volume are uniformly good and interesting, making the book well worth reading."
Journal of Latin American Studies