Each section of this anthology centres on a century of women poets. The essays discover not only the poet but the woman in her time. There is also a wide selection of the poems themselves. Boland sets out to find how the woman's life indented her experience as a poet, making us read back into the canon differently. We find ourselves partially reconstructing the canon out of the woman poet's reconstruction of the poem. The destination of these arguments is the central adventure the book describes: the ways in which the earlier centuries led towards the reductive identity of "the poetess", and how, at the start of the 20th century, this chrysalis-like identity was finally discarded. The book maps Boland's own journey. "As a poet whose working life began without the benefit of this poetry, and whose later reading was enchanted and strengthened by it", she says, "I think I am able to see these poems with a strange double-vision: as the young woman poet I was, imbued with standards and precepts whose secret effects meant I did not read them or think about them or -most importantly - think with them; and as the older woman who knows that without these poems a crucial perspective on everything else we read or write in poetry is missing".