While insisting upon the need to reexamine mid-eighteenth-century women writers, this study has to this point taken for granted the importance of the publications and professional lives of Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox. Perhaps the implication has even been that they merit this attention simply because their work has not been attended to sufficiently in the past. In a recent plenary presentation, Susan Staves argued that feminist literary critics have been reluctant to make value judgments about the work they are “recovering” or “rereading” or “restoring” for fear of a return to the exclusive universalizations of canon-making. Without by any means claiming to resolve the problems raised by a return to the discourse of aesthetic value, I want to take some steps in this chapter toward acknowledging the issue and determining how early “situated” critical commentary can be used as a guideline for reinstating women writers in a literary history that takes into account what might tentatively be isolated as transhistorical, but generically specific, criteria of aesthetic value.