In this lively study, Carole B. Balin analyzes the writings and lives of five Jewish women writers who were active before the Russian Revolution. Each chapter centers on one woman but contextualizes her within the culture in which she wrote. Miriam Markel-Mosessohn attached herself to the Russian Haskalah. Hava Shapiro published short stories and newspaper articles in Hebrew over the course of her thirty-four-year career. Rashel Khin hobnobbed with members of the Russian intellectual and literary elite, which included Ivan Turgenev. Feiga Kogan was a Russian symbolist poet, and Sofia Dubnova-Erlikh, daughter of the historian Simon Dubnov, was an accomplished writer and political activist. The works and lives of these extraordinary writers offer a comprehensive view of nineteenth-century Russian Jewish women that is far more nuanced than the images of balabuste (housewife) or revolutionary currently held in the collective Jewish consciousness.