"Women Write Back" explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's responses to texts written by well-known Enlightment figures. Hilger investigates the authorial strategies employed by Karoline von Gu nderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Kru dener, and Helen Maria Williams, whose works engage Voltaire's "Mahomet," Johnson's "Rasselas," Goethe's "Werther," and Rousseau's "Julie." The analysis of these women's texts sheds light on the literary culture of a period that deemed itself not only enlightened but also egalitarian.