SP was a protégée (rather than a servant) of Charlotte, Countess Fitzwilliam (c. 1750-13 May 1822), to whom she dedicated her first publication. Lady Fitzwilliam was also a patron to Barbara Hofland and Eliza Kirkham Mathews .

JP lived as a professional writer, supporting herself and family members.

HO 's early success with Icarus Girl, for which she received an advance based on only twenty pages, has meant that she has been able to work as a professional writer ever since leaving school, with occasional teaching stints. She has been extraordinarily prolific: in the years 2005-16 she published two plays, five novels, and one short-story collection.

TO seems to have become an actor in or soon after 1670 and a playwright in 1675. As a young and very nervous actor he was assisted and encouraged by Aphra Behn . She is said to have assured him a part in her first play to be staged, The Forc'd Marriage, but the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography points out that this must have been a revival, since Otway was still a student when it first appeared. As a writer, especially of tragedy, he scored some notable successes and appeared to have a brilliant career before him, though he disliked the cut-throat atmosphere of the theatrical world, and at one point left it and bought a commission in the army.

AO took up gardening as a suitable day job to combine with writing. Her mother's reputation no doubt helped her to secure work on many famous gardens. She apprenticed with the National Trust at Cliveden, and worked there and at Waddesdon and Clovelly Court in Devon. At the last, where she was employed in 1994, her wages were a hundred and fifty pounds a week and use of a two-room cottage tied to the job.

DO also visited Brussels and the Hague, for the purpose of diplomatic negotiation on the affairs of the royal family. She was instrumental in arranging the marriage of William and Mary.

She chose, however, to work at casual jobs all around Britain: domestic and clerical, and as a matron looking after children at boarding-schools (schools which were progressive rather than traditional).

In July 1797 Isaac Taylor the elder responded to the harsh economic climate (caused in turn by the war with France) by beginning to employ his children in his engraving business instead of apprentices. He paid them wages (which was not the practice in many family businesses). AGT's later comment suggests how far this was out of step with usual gender roles. She said he thought he was fitting us for self-support in after life, not otherwise than feminine. The implication is that others, then or later, saw their work as unfeminine. From 1797 she and Jane alternated a week of engraving with a week of housekeeping. During their non-engraving weeks they each in turn saw to the cooking, washing, and getting up the fine linens. Ann later turned down a job as a governess; but well-meaning people were always advising the sisters to teach instead of engraving.

She may have worked as housekeeper or in some similar capacity for the Earl and Countess of Donegal. Back in London she entertained various projects for small-scale business opportunities: first to become a sales outlet for a patent medicine called Daffy's elixir, then to run looms for the manufacture of fabric. Her husband bought looms in October 1745, and by the following month she was collecting subscribers for The Art of Cookery, and also writing the book. Her success as an author did not preclude other ventures: in 1747 she and one of her daughters opened a dress-shop in the favourable location of Tavistock Street, where she wooed her smart clientele with entertainment events. One of these in December 1749 was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

In the 1930s EG worked (perhaps in a voluntary capacity) for the National Canine Defence League as an official visitor to their clinics (which were ready to deal with any animal in distress, not exclusively dogs) and was well known among her friends for her photographs of cats, produced in her own highly makeshift dark-room. She also at some time or other attended meetings of the Theatrical Ladies Guild .

CG spent her time at Lyttelton mainly in social and domestic pursuits, although she still employed several servants, including the nursemaid Mary Powles . She also assisted her husband in his correspondence and supported his work.

After working at medicine and teaching, OG became a hack or low-level professional writer by joining the ranks of the freelances who wrote for Ralph Griffiths on the Monthly Review. His works of high literature (two long poems, two comedies, periodical essays, and a single novel, besides his History of England, which was long a standard educational text) eventually brought him literary fame and exercised a continuing influence on writers both male and female in most of these genres. Of his total output they are only the tip of the iceberg, whose underwater part consists of large numbers of reviews, biographies, translations, science writing, and other commissioned works. Some appeared pseudonymously.

After AG 's husband's death she laboured with her hands (she does not say at what) for seven years.

EG taught design and applied art (weaving, leatherwork and embroidery) at home, first at Ely and then in Oxford.

CG had a career, probably brief, as a stage performer, and then became a journalist. She contributed to a wide range of popular periodicals as well as writing plays and fiction.

Her blindness must have made it hard for her to be useful on the farm, but she contributed to the family budget by knitting stockings, which she would do while walking about in the open air.

TG spent most of his life as a don at Cambridge, first at Peterhouse and latterly at Pembroke Hall . Though satirical poems suggest that he hated Cambridge, he left it only for holiday trips and for two years in London when the British Museum first opened, reading there. He never lectured, but he became deeply learned in several fields of study.

HG worked through the London Blitz as a firewatcher with the Auxiliary Fire Service .

Whether this was a house or lodgings, she had at that time at least one lodger there.

From what little is known, CMG became a silver-fork novelist who signed most of her own contracts. (Her husband signed her first contract with Richard Bentley , but she signed the second.) She began writing novels after the birth of her last child, and published Alice Seymour. A Tale in 1831 (which the British Library Catalogue wrongly attributes to the fabricated Mrs Elizabeth Caroline Grey).