As part of Catharine R. Stimpson's “Women in Culture and Society” series, Elizabeth Abel's book, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, elegantly and expertly combines feminist theory, literary criticism, and anthropology. The result is an adventurous, provocative, and compelling discussion of how one of this century's most original artists understood and judged the evolution of psychoanalytic thought in its heyday, when dissent was volatile and groundbreaking. It is certainly the best psychoanalytic study ever published on Woolf, but Abel's book does more