MR , who published her first book in 1939, is best known for her historical novels, and is also noted for her strong interest in same-sex love. In her present-day novels, a large proportion of characters have sexually-ambiguous names which reflect the ambivalence of their orientations. Biographer David Sweetman claims that her historical novels helped many people to come to terms with their sexuality, giving lesbians and male homosexuals a historical past while offering non-homosexuals a sympathetic world where heterosexuality was neither the only, nor the dominant, sexual type.MR 's writing has been acclaimed by critics past and present: Bernard Dick has called her one of the most creative historical novelists of our era and the only bona fide Hellenist in twentieth-century fiction. Aside from her fiction, MR wrote several short stories, articles, and introductions.

RR established herself as a leading crime novelist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To the intricacies of plot characteristic of the genre, she adds a capacity to scare her readers, and a sophisticated focus on the psychological and emotional aspects of criminal minds and the minds of those committed to the notion of justice. She is also attentive to contemporary English life and keenly interested in books and language, which feature importantly in her fictional worlds. She published sixty novels and was translated into twenty-five languages.

FR , active in the later eighteenth century, was the author of poems (one printed), a published treatise on aesthetics, essays diary entries, and a memoir of Samuel Johnson which reached print years after her death. She was also a painter of miniatures, genre pieces, portraits, and history paintings. Yet she has the misfortune of being remembered mostly in context of the eminent men she knew, particularly her brother Sir Joshua Reynolds .

MHVR , is remembered for her leading role in the struggle for suffrage and equality, as a founder of the Six Point Group , and the woman who made possible the very influential Time and Tide: An Independent Non-Party Weekly Review. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls her the leading feminist during a long stretch of the twentieth century. She wrote letters, pamphlets, editorials, a memoir, and two collections of essays, travel writing and reviews.

Jean Rhys wrote a number of novels and short stories focusing on her own geographical and emotional alienation, as well as an unfinished autobiography. Her fiction from between the two world ward was largely forgotten when her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, brought her major success. After this her novels and short-story collections were translated into many languages, including French, Dutch, Belgian, Swedish, German, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Italian, Yugoslavian, Japanese, Czech, Spanish, and Turkish. Her autobiography was translated into French. Several of her novels and stories have been adapted for radio, film and television.

AR ranks as one of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century feminist movement, and as one of the most influential contemporary American poets (though her political activism impeded the usual workings of the canonisation process, producing a counter-flow against the voices raised in praise of her work). Like other great poets she has produced a body of theorising and critical prose that goes hand-in-hand with her poetry, and that has been almost equally clarifying and liberating for women seeking to understand the dynamics of history.

DR was in her time, and remains, a singular novelist. Her fiction has never conformed to accepted categories, and still challenges literary critics. Her major work, the series of novels comprising Pilgrimage, is now being read as essential to the development of twentieth-century literature and feminism for its thematic and technical innovations. In addition to Pilgrimage, she wrote non-fiction monographs including art criticism, and contributed numerous reviews, essays, sketches, short stories, and poems to periodicals. She also translated several texts from German and French into English. The term stream of consciousness was first applied to literature in a 1918 review of DR 's work by May Sinclair .

Elizabeth Richardson, Lady Cramond (formerly Ashburnham), was a seventeenth-century devotional writer (of prayers and meditations, maxims, and a treatise on life and death, as well as letters) over a period of almost forty years. She had a strong commitment to the religious education of her daughters, and for them, and for other readers too, she left a published mother's legacy made up of revisions of earlier writings.

In a publishing career that began in 1895 and first registered with the public in 1908, expatriate Australian HHR produced six novels (three of which make up an epic trilogy), a collection of short stories, and an enigmatic volume of memoirs. Her literary forebears were more continental European than either English or Australian, and her intellectualism and experimentalism produced a mixed reception, but her reputation as one of the important writers of the earlier twentieth century now seems secure.

SR 's three epistolary novels, published between 1740 and 1753, exerted an influence on women's writing which was probably stronger than that of any other novelist, male or female, of the century. He also facilitated women's literary careers in his capacity as member of the publishing trade, and published a letter-writing manual and a advice-book for printers' apprentices.

CR was a prolific professional novelist and story writer during the latter half of the nineteenth century. She published forty novels, plus tales (in journals, annuals, and her own collections), two travel books, and essays in periodicals. She was best-known in her own day for her domestic novels, sensation novels, and local and mystery novels. She has become more prominent in recent times for her highly-regarded ghost stories. She is unusual both in her depictions of the male-only business and financial aspects of London life, and in choosing lyrical country settings from the immediate area of London, both to the north-east and the south-west.

MR was a talented amateur poet, diarist, letter-writer, and writer for children during the Romantic period. She published in 1788 a travel book about the Caribbean which is remarkable for its scientific observation, a critical obituary notice of Robert Burns , and a verse anthology in which she included some of her own work. She remains known primarily as a friend of Burns.

LR , an American who spent crucial years of her astonishingly productive life in England and Europe, was an important modernist poet, critic, and theorist, who regarded her poetry as a tool in the search for truth. One of the remarkable features in her career was her capacity to inspire and energise other writers to contribute to her large-scale collaborative projects: a kind of encyclopaedia, a periodical, an unusual dictionary. Generally oppositional, unconcerned about being out of step with most avant-garde opinion, she maintained her own viewpoint tenaciously as the only correct one, and claimed to have influenced and been borrowed from by many of the most distinguished names of her generation. She refused to let her work appear in all-women contexts. When she lost confidence in poetry as a vehicle for the truth (moving instead towards aspects of the study of language), she almost entirely gave up writing it, and allowed reprinting of her own earlier work only with prefatory material to explain her new and different position.

AR was a twentieth-century poet and verse playwright whose work has been called metaphysical. She also edited and wrote introductions and commentary for literary works by others, produced translations of opera libretti, and left memoirs which were published after her death. Writing about personal experiences (including childbirth), about her faith, and about public or political concerns (much of her earlier poetry is filled with dread and darkness connected with the two World Wars), she links this world closely with her belief in God. AR creates a meditative quality in her poems through complexly structured metaphor. Critic Kathleen Morgan comments that she writes as one who experienced the happiest of family relationships. . . . and her life within that of the family is related to the larger life of the individual child of God.

As an art historian, journalist, and public figure, ER played a major role in shaping modern art criticism. Many of her publications introduced readers and artists to new influences from German art, while others confirmed the importance of the Italian masters. Through her literary and art-history reviews, she influenced Victorian public taste. Produced over a span of sixty years, her work includes travel writing, short stories, essays, and three translations. She was also a talented editor.

JR , born in Jamaica and living from her student days in England, began publishing in the 1980s. She has dealt with the experience of uprooting and resettlement in four novels, a number of short stories, and a jointly-edited anthology.

ATR produced, mostly during the later nineteenth century, twenty-one books of fiction, essays, and literary memoirs. Her biographical prefaces to her famous father 's novels are best known, but she was also a major biographer and critic of others, particularly women. Her fiction, which regularly treats gender inequality and limited female options, has not been given its due.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, EAR published nine novels (the last one posthumously), as well as shorter fiction, a work of topography and one of naval history, and a book for children. Her earlier fiction was better received than later works. She became extremely well known as a broadcaster and film reviewer.

Emma Roberts , a professional writer of the earlier nineteenth century, launched her career with history and contributions to periodicals. Travelling to India provided her with the unusual opportunity to become a specialist on that country. During her years in London between her two visits to India she produced History, biography, poetry, tales, local descriptions, foreign correspondence, didactic essays, even the culinary art,in addition to editing and introducing works by others. Through most of her output, India was her primary subject.

JR , about whom nothing is known, was the author of a single tragedy, translated from the French, performed and published in 1723.

MR wrote from youth until old age, mostly during the later nineteenth century. She usually remained anonymous, though she did eventually give permission to the firm of Tauchnitz to put her name on some of their editions of her novels. She produced at least thirty-eight books, including children's writing and non-fiction (from biography and history to grammar). Most of her novels have foreign settings and characters; most are historical, and carefully researched in the British Museum , with every detail (of dress, for instance) carefully verified.

MR began to write during the later twentieth century: diaries, journalism, and collaborative scenarios and improvisations, for street theatre in connection with the burgeoning women's movement of the 1970s. She has had a few plays performed since, but has published poetry, twelve novels, short stories, reviews, and a memoir. Her fiction often includes fantastic elements, and hauntings presented as fact, in its characteristically fractured narratives with perceptible sources in her own life experience. Recently responses to her work have tended to polarise: avowed feminists love her; others loathe her.

In the twenty years from 1763, RR published four significant translations from French (all but one of them fiction). She contributed tales in both prose and poetry to The Lady's Magazine, and issued a volume of similar material and a verse tragedy. Her most unusual work was a volume of sermons, titled thus because a male friend had offered to preach what she wrote.

AMFR 's long career occupied the late decades of nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. It spanned two countries, England and France, and two languages, English and French. Robinson was generally known as a poet, but published successfully in several genres. Eight poetry collections and one novel bear her name. She also published several biographies (including one of Emily Brontë ) and historical essays. A literary critic and translator, she was a useful cultural guide to French readers of English literature—where she gave women writers a prominent place in the literary ranks—and for English readers to the literature of France.