The ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 is a peer-reviewed, freely available online journal launched in 2009 by The Aphra Behn Society with the support of the University of South Florida. The journal has a distinguished board of editors (including leaders in the field such as Kathryn King, Jessica Munns, Laura Runge and Kirsten T. Saxton) and focuses on the relationship between women and the arts in the long-eighteenth century, especially in the fields of literature, the visual arts, music and performance art. ABO is published annually, with each volume focusing on a special topic: themes addressed so far include ‘Women’s Poetry’ (Vol. 1); ‘Open Access’ (Vol. 2); and ‘Geographies of Women’ (Vol. 3, forthcoming).

The journal’s contents are searchable in two ways, either by individual volume number or by selecting one of the following section headings which group the relevant contents of all published volumes: ‘Scholarship’, ‘Pedagogy’, ‘Pedagogy Share, ‘New Media’, ‘Reviews’, ‘Notes and Discoveries’, and ‘Ask Aphra’. The conventional journal contents of scholarly articles and book reviews are here complemented by other useful resources. For example, all essays included in the journal have a comment feature where online readers can engage with an essay, and its author, directly. Indeed, ABO places a special emphasis on the uses of digital technologies within research of the period, with its section ‘New Media/Women on the Web’ bringing together articles on e-resources and digital projects. The journal also has a strong pedagogical focus, providing an innovative space to discuss teaching practice in the international Higher Education sector, with attention paid to both undergraduate and graduate teaching of the long-eighteenth century. Pedagogical articles in the journal are complimented by a section entitled ‘Pedagogy Share’ in which academics who have contributed essays on pedagogy share their own teaching materials on the period. This is an incredibly useful resource and provides an interesting insight into the range of approaches taken in teaching eighteenth century studies. A section on ‘Notes and Discoveries’ is a new addition to the ABO website, and whilst content is yet to be added it promises to hold a similar function to Notes & Queries, albeit with a more specific focus on discoveries relating to women and the arts in the long-eighteenth century. The most inventive feature of the ABO site is, without doubt, its ‘Ask Aphra’ page. In this section a virtual ‘tea-table’ of women (Flora, Antipodea, Arabella and Urania) “offer their Experience, liberal Genius, extensive and diverse Knowledge, and flatter themselves that they might be both Useful and Entertaining to the Academic who finds her or himself in Quandaries personal, public, or otherwise.” Concerns addressed in this homage to Haywood’s Female Spectator so far range from the issue of ‘publication after tenure’ and ‘finding readers’ to the correct dress for a job interview: as Aphra herself notes, “With so many options from Mantua Makers and Macy’s alike, what does one wear?” Humour aside, this is a refreshing addition to the ABO site which plays as much upon the similarities as the differences between eighteenth century society and our own. ‘Ask Aphra’ complements the journal’s more traditional scholarly content, with ABO proving to be a refreshing and intellectually stimulating online resource with the clear potential to develop into an important repository for scholarship on women and the arts in the period.