Judith Fryer's study of novelists Edith Wharton and Willa Cather is a rich examination of the actual and imagined spaces women inhabit, perceive, and create. Turning to the period of "America's coming of age," Fryer offers a woman-centered inquiry into an era whose traditional landmarks are the frontier, the rise of the city, and World War I.

Fryer draws her analysis from history, philosophy, environmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and geography as well as from literature, architechure, and painting. The book's conceptual bonds are women's structures of the period: the...