Publishing over forty years of the nineteenth century, professional woman of letters CN produced poetry and songs, four novels, stories, and a few unsuccessful plays. She edited annuals and periodicals, where she also published work of her own, including reviews. The circumstances of her life led her also to publish on the social-reform topics of child labour, divorce law, and married women's property, in pamphlets, letters to the Times, and well-researched monographs. Though she thought of herself as primarily a poet, her polemical writing is now her best-known, just as her contribution to reforming the laws for women in Victorian England has now overshadowed the scandal that dogged her in and beyond her lifetime.

After the untimely death of her only daughter at the end of the seventeenth century, FLN edited a memorial volume of the daughter's pious meditations, mostly transcribed from her extensive reading as a glorified common-place book. She later produced two volumes of her own of the same type, though their proportion of originally-authored content is higher. She also published a book of poems embroidered on chair cushions.

FN wrote novels and short stories from the middle to the late nineteenth century, frequently combining sensational and supernatural elements. Many of her stories are set in her native Cornwall, and draw on the culture and stories of the region.

KN was a philosophical writer, novelist, translator, poet, and critic of the mid twentieth century. Her importance for literary history lies in the position she took up in The Emperor's Clothes, 1953, which challenged the predominance of T. S. Eliot and of traditional religion in general in English critical thinking of the time.

Ann Oakley is one of the most influential feminist voices of twentieth-century English sociology. She has worked primarily on the life-experiences which differentiate women from men, like housework, child-bearing, and the operation of gender in the family. She has edited broader collections of essays reflecting on the travails and achievements of the women's movement, and has commented trenchantly on medical culture, the workings of the welfare state, and the epistemology of knowledge in the social sciences. She has also written autobiography, family memoir, novels, and many articles in academic and non-academic journals.

Irish nationalist CGOB wrote poetry (through the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth, including many sonnets and a closet drama), a single novel about a Fenian uprising, and a number of essays, some published in periodicals and some left in manuscript, about Irish issues, particularly the terrible conditions under which people were emigrating to the USA.

Throughout her career, contemporary Irish writer EOB has published novels, short stories, drama, screen and teleplays, poetry, travel writing, and children's books. Her imaginative writing, in which she experiments with linguistic and narrative conventions, almost always presents a woman's perspective. She often deals with such themes as personal and national identity, love affairs, exile, memory, and death. She is not a writer who caters to her readers' comfort, but concentrates steadily on the darker sides of life.

KOB , twentieth-century Irish writer, was successively a journalist, playwright, novelist, essayist, travel writer, and biographer. She was, she said, influenced by the singing voice and by dance music. Masefield said, Don't despise dance music; it is the music hearts break to. Her fiction often focuses on an Irish female protagonist's search for love and freedom. She shows such a quest as generally unsuccessful: love does not prove lasting, and spiritual and physical freedom often turn out to be mutually incompatible.

FOC 's writing career began in the mid twentieth century and was interrupted far too soon by her illness and premature death. Her short stories (two volumes) and two novels or novellas spring from an ultimately faith-based vision of human evil and the power of grace, and represent a unique vision of narrow, old-fashioned life in the American South.

JOF , twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish novelist and short-story writer, has also published translation, memoir, and women's history, and has written an afterword to the memoirs of her writer father. Her fiction deals with the confrontation or the blurring of different cultures (most commonly involving Irish culture, but sometimes Italian) and of competing political visions, with memory and forgetting, and with idealistic violence and terrorism. She herself says her topics include politics, fairness, bullying, Church tyranny and those who opposed it.

EO is mainly recognized as a poet who wrote sometimes innovative lyrics on a wide range of topics from experiences of motherhood to contemporary politics. Beginning in the 1840s, she published five volumes of poetry, a few short stories, and a memoir of her friend Elizabeth Barrett Browning .

Anne Ogle published two novels and a short story. She was best known for her popular first novel, A Lost Love, published in 1855.

AOK was first heard of by name in 1804 as a writer of highly successful verse for children; she had already in all probability edited her father 's dramatic works. She went on to do distinguished and unusual work of her own as novelist, writer of biblical paraphrase, and author of instructive works (particularly on history and geography), as well as editing her father's plays.

As the breadwinner for her constantly extending family, MO was astonishingly productive. She published (sometimes by name, sometimes anonymously, often with no name but with allusion to her previous works) ninety-eight novels, and three times that many articles for Blackwood's and other magazines. She was equally prolific in short stories and in works of information: biography, socio-historical studies of cities, art criticism, historical sketches, literary histories, and a characteristic, fragmented autobiography, selective but nonetheless revealing. She also did translation and editing. She consistently foregrounds issues involved in Victorian expectations of womanhood: the relationships of daughter, sister, wife, and mother (especially the last).

TO , one of the leading lights of the twentieth-century feminist movement in the USA, prided herself on being a proletarian writer. She published very few books: a short-story volume, a novel, a book of essays, jottings and quotations about the silencing of writers, and an anthology on mothers and daughters. It is unusual for such a slim output to have such a profound effect on a generation of readers. TO was prolific, though, in poetry and political (pro-Communist) journalism and speeches during the 1930s and much later in essays and lectures, many of them about forgotten women writers.

CO , daughter of a historian, published a single book of poetry in the wake of the First World War. She then turned first to historical novels, then to historical biography, with one book of non-biographical history and some works in the same genres for children.

FON was an Irish poet of the later eighteenth and very early nineteenth century of whom almost nothing is known. She seems to have written both for fun and for much-needed money, and used a wide range of mostly low genres: satire, burlesque, and acrostics, as well as nature poetry, political poetry, and poems to patrons.

AO , who was publishing at the end of the eighteenth century and during the earlier nineteenth century, is best known as a novelist, but was also a dramatist, poet, and short-story writer. The opinions expressed in her writings are often reactionary in gender terms, though she was brought up a Unitarian and later became a Quaker and an active Abolitionist.

EBO , a best-selling novelist of the early twentieth century, is best-known for The Scarlet Pimpernel, her romance of aristocrats during the French Revolution. This was a play before it was a novel, and according to its author provoked a polarised response, with ecstatic audiences and fiercely disapproving critics. Apart from almost a dozen Scarlet Pimpernel sequels, she published many other historical romances, a few thrillers with modern settings, one historial biography, and her memoirs. Her short stories include a pioneering volume about a woman detective, who, as an amateur relying on her intelligence, intuition, and feminine guile, regularly out-performs her male professional associates.

Through the mid part of the twentieth century GO was prominent as a reporter on the social and political scene: he was one of those whose reporting helped to shape opinion and whose accounts now seem vital to understanding those times. Several of his essays have canonical status as much on historical as literary grounds. He published novels as well as non-fiction, but his two most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are continuous in aim and effect with his polemical writing. The impact of these two novels was immediately felt and is still being felt in the twenty-first century.

DO , widely known as a writer of love-letters, has been more admired by romantics than by feminists. She can be a sharply comic and often satirical observer of social custom and individual idiosyncrasy, as well as an acute commentator on public affairs and literary topics.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ouida published 44 volumes of fiction, primarily novels, but also novellas and short stories for both children and adults. Often publishing more than one book a year, she was also a prolific essayist who wrote on matters of politics and literature. Her first, three-decker novels, from the 1860s, often centred on the adventures of military men and were characterized as sensation novels. After she moved to Italy in the early 1870s, she wrote a number of novels concerned with the conditions of the government and population (especially the poor) of that country.

JO , a scholarly Roman Catholic of the early seventeenth century, left a single religious work which was published after her death. Her rhetorical style includes elements of the sermon and the dialogue, as well as translation.