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This ambitious, clear-eyed, and beautifully written book redefines and reinvigorates feminist aesthetic thought. The Beauty of Choice is an exquisite hybrid of art and criticism: it is art as criticism, and criticism as art. It is something that only Wendy Steiner could have written—a crowning achievement. -- James E. Young, author of <i>The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between</i> The Beauty of Choice is a major conceptual achievement by an influential intellectual who is creatively reaching beyond the theoretical boundaries of their previous scholarship. Its style is accessible, its brevity is a virtue, and it is a pleasure to read. -- Whitney Davis, author of <i>Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond</i> A beautifully written work of thrilling originality – and timeliness. With examples ranging from Heian Japan, via Chaucer to #MeToo, Wendy Steiner opens up a vast panorama of women’s empowerment through the beauty of choice and the choice of beauty. -- Simon May, author of <i>Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion</i> What do women most want? This is the beguiling question that sets this deliciously readable feast of a book into motion. Drawing brilliantly upon myth, literature, art, philosophy, opera, biblical stories and even evolutionary biology, Wendy Steiner has woven together centuries of cultural history in lavish answer to this question, in this way illuminating the interconnections between aesthetics and female agency; art, choice and female desire. The Beauty of Choice is a wildly inventive mix of erudition and insight, research and storytelling, a gorgeous and impassioned call to arms written in prose and clear as an alpine lake. At a moment when the cornerstones of humanistic inquiry are under siege, this is a hymn to all who believe in the human artistic impulse. Read this book and marvel. -- Andrea Barnet, author of <i>Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters Changed our World</i>

This ambitious, clear-eyed, and beautifully written book redefines and reinvigorates feminist aesthetic thought. The Beauty of Choice is an exquisite hybrid of art and criticism: it is art as criticism, and criticism as art. It is something that only Wendy Steiner could have written—a crowning achievement. -- James E. Young, author of <i>The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between</i> The Beauty of Choice is a major conceptual achievement by an influential intellectual who is creatively reaching beyond the theoretical boundaries of their previous scholarship. Its style is accessible, its brevity is a virtue, and it is a pleasure to read. -- Whitney Davis, author of <i>Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond</i> A beautifully written work of thrilling originality – and timeliness. With examples ranging from Heian Japan, via Chaucer to #MeToo, Wendy Steiner opens up a vast panorama of women’s empowerment through the beauty of choice and the choice of beauty. -- Simon May, author of <i>Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion</i>

This ambitious, clear-eyed, and beautifully written book redefines and reinvigorates feminist aesthetic thought. The Beauty of Choice is an exquisite hybrid of art and criticism: it is art as criticism, and criticism as art. It is something that only Wendy Steiner could have written—a crowning achievement. -- James E. Young, author of <i>The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between</i> The Beauty of Choice is a major conceptual achievement by an influential intellectual who is creatively reaching beyond the theoretical boundaries of their previous scholarship. Its style is accessible, its brevity is a virtue, and it is a pleasure to read. -- Whitney Davis, author of <i>Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond</i>

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Wendy Steiner is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania as well as an opera librettist and multimedia artist. Her many acclaimed books include The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (1995) and Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001).

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