Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, ER published anonymously a series of historical novels (which she called romances, but which deliberately blur the boundary between history and fiction) and two plays. She also published short stories and a poem. When her first play was banned from production by the censor, she wrote for its published text a satirical self-justification of great verve and energy. Most of her historical fictions are attached by their title to some actual figure with high recognition value, but their romance and adventure elements are often accompanied by social critique and even satire. They sold extremely well both in and beyond England, and were respectfully praised by reviewers who initially supposed them to be the work of a man. ER set some of her later novels in modern London; these contemporary works, too, are characterized by sharp social observation. It is surprising that she has so received so little critical attention in modern times.

FMR published six novels during the 1880s and 1890s that are daring both in subject-matter and handling, broaching such topics as women's status, seduction, and illegitimacy. She also produced a political history of Ireland and translations from French. In 1890 she was regarded as one of the leading authors of the day, but her reputation has worn less well than that of her sister.

IHR 's diary acquired notoriety after it was found to contain details of her relationship with a younger, married doctor and after it was made public in the Divorce Court (at a moment when divorce law was undergoing reform). The court case turned on the question whether these details were cold fact, imaginative exaggeration, or pure invention. The diary was later destroyed. IHR wrote and even published a few other texts, poetry and perhaps essays, but these remain obscure, while the diary is the focus of Kate Summerscale 's Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace, 2012.

MR , scandalous woman and Romantic poet, was also a forceful and emotional, radical writer in many other genres: novels, scholarship, memoirs, drama, periodical essays, and translation. During the last two years of her life her level of productivity was almost frenetic, and the quality of her writing was adversely affected.

RMR had great success as a popular Irish novelist and leading Minerva Press author, using her own name and often listing her previous titles. She also published a couple of novellas, though most of the novellas attributed to her are probably not hers. She first appeared in print in 1789, but reached her highest rate of productivity in the 1820s under pressure of financial troubles.

MR , though she is still known to history primarily as her father's daughter, was celebrated during her early-sixteenth-century lifetime for her letters and her translation of a theological treatise by Desiderius Erasmus .

AMKR 's characteristic style is one of finely tooled alliteration. She meant this style to be taken seriously, but it has led to her being anthologised frequently in books of bad writing. Active at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, she produced three novels (one added to and published posthumously) as well as books of poetry, and broadsheet verse with commentary (often scurrilous).

CCR , who flourished in Scotland during the late seventeenth century, is known as a spiritual autobiographer; in fact the contents of her Memoirs show that throughout her lifetime she used writing as a tool for private and public analysis.

CR wrote and published poetry ranging from religious poetry, love lyrics, and sonnets to narrative and dramatic verse. She published five successive volumes of verse, three collected editions, and many individual poems in anthologies and periodicals, from the 1840s until her death in the 1890s. She occupies a liminal position in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite movement: deeply influenced by and indebted to it, she developed a voice and preoccupations in many respects distinct from those of its male members, partly because of her equally strong absorption in the High AnglicanOxford Movement. Goblin Market, the poem for which she is best known, has frequently been re-issued as a children's fable, but has also been convincingly read as a complex exploration of religion, gender, and sexuality. Some of her other verse was specifically aimed at children. Her attempts at prose fiction, of which a volume appeared in her lifetime and another posthumously, were not as well received as her poetry. CR 's devotional writing, which intensified towards the end of her life, includes hymns and other religious verse, as well as six volumes of religious commentary presented from a distinctively female standpoint. A writer who combined abiding interest in symbol and correspondence with stylistic austerity and metrical innovation that presaged modernism, CR is recognised as one of the major poets of the Victorian period.

It is widely suspected that MR may have been the dominant partner, the chief creative spirit, in the partnership of Somerville and Ross which occupied the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (though the opposite view has also been argued). Their most memorable works—an important novel and a collection of classic comic stories set in the west of Ireland and centred on fox-hunting, as well as other endearing Irish sketches and travel writings—were completed before her death, and Somerville's publications after Ross died are permeated with an elegiac tone. They themselves poured scorn on their public's desire to teize apart the individual strands in their collaboration.

The still unidentified novelist Mrs Ross , known only by her surname, published a rush of titles—seven—between 1811 and 1816. Her work is racy, highly-coloured, and heavily moralised. Later works once listed as hers have now been re-attributed to Elizabeth B. Lester .

FAR , a schoolteacher by profession in the early nineteenth century, published mostly with instruction in mind. She began with a textbook on botany (designed to sanitize that topic after the work of Erasmus Darwin had made it controversial for females) which included inset poems. After another poem, she reverted to prose for books of religious tone on pagan mythology and the classics of European literature.

ESR wrote witty, topical, satirical poetry during the 1690s, followed later in life by letters, essays, fiction (often epistolary), and a wide range of poetic modes, often though not invariably with a moral or religious emphasis. Her reputation as a moral and devotional writer during her lifetime and for some time afterwards stood extremely high. Current critical debate is establishing the element of proto-feminist or amatory fiction (what Paula Backscheider calls experimental, subversive, and transgressive) in her prose against the didactic-devotional element.

JKR , late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century author of children's books which are phenomenally popular, has published the fastest-selling series in history and has made a fortune from her writing. Her Harry Potter series features an alternative world mapped out in elaborate detail, in which magic of all kinds is a serious practice and the focus of an intricate school syllabus, and in which her hero and his friends confront the forces of evil. She also has published in other genres: detective fiction and the literary novel.

SHR , who was active during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has some claim to be regarded as both an English and an American writer, though her American allegiance came to predominate with time. Many of her works are now very rare, especially the English editions. She was professional in her outlook and conscious of writing as a woman, given to self-referential prefaces and taking every opportunity to discuss and praise her fellow, British, women writers. As well as eight novels, her output included fictional sketches, seven theatrical works, poems, social commentary, textbooks, and conduct literature. Biographer Dorothy Weil comments that she writes both for and about women, addressing themes important to the situation, education, and rights of women.

Maude Royden , famous as an early twentieth-century campaigner for women's status in the ministry of the Church of England , was also a preacher, suffragist, feminist, and anti-war activist. She published at least fifty works in forty years, most of them polemical. Her pamphlets, sermons, and speeches range in topic through religion and Christianity, women's role in the Church , sexual morality and birth control, female suffrage and women's rights, pacifism, and national and international politics. She established the interdenominational fellowship the Guildhouse in 1920, preached there, and published the monthly Guildhouse Fellowship. From the 1910s until the late 1940s, she published many letters to the editor of the Times as well as articles there. Her autobiography details her unconventionally shared life with the Rev. Hudson Shaw and his wife .

NRS 'a most important literary work included serving as midwife to the writings of others. She also published prodigiously, from early in the twentieth century: nearly forty novels, besides short stories, anthologies and compilations, biographies, reviews and criticism, four plays, and books about railways and other forms of transport.

BR was an immensely, steadily prolific later twentieth-century novelist (with a couple of dozen titles, the last published in 2003). She also wrote for the stage, film, and television. A vivid memoir appeared posthumously. She is adept at satiric comedy, which both in early and later work she often achieves by moving out of naturalism into physical impossibility and absurdism. Early works in her fantasy style often employ extreme versions of stereotypically presented Jewish family life; in later works they are more likely to involve psychiatric topics. Several of her novels look at life in institutions (schools, orphanages, old people's homes); a few deal with the sweep of international, multi-generational history.

Primarily a romantic novelist, BR produced nearly eighty novels over the course of her writing career as well as large numbers of short stories. Her fiction focuses on young girls and love. She also produced an autobiography and four books of deliberately haphazard memoirs which pay loving tribute to Wales. Her career spanned all but about three decades of the twentieth century, during most of which she published an average higher than a book a year.

CR is a leading poet of the later twentieth century and beyond. As well as a dozen poetry volumes she has published a novel, short stories, plays, translations, and reviews of literature and music. She has also edited poems and anthologies. Her poems deal often with issues of place, belonging, and displacement, with natural and human-made environments both beautiful and degraded, with women's experience of every kind (especially the insouciant courage of young women confronting a dangerous and unfair world), and with a personal past set against a politically threatened future.