JR was a Scottish working-class poet who published in periodicals and in a single volume, 1877. Her work evinces a strong sense of class identity and of incisive protest against the violence and hardship suffered by working women in the nineteenth century.

The reputation of LRR 's letters sprang at first from her husband's political fame, but she was a letter-writer of high quality in her own right. Surviving letters probably represent only a fraction of those she wrote. Like many intelligent women of her time and rank, she used writing not only to communicate with relations and friends, but also privately, to shape her religious practice and her sense of her own life. She left diaries, essays, a catechism, and Instructions for Children.

James Malcolm Rymer was a prolific penny dreadfulist, novelist, and journal editor. Although he rarely published under his own name but instead employed a large number of pseudonyms, his works of fiction (which may have amounted to more than 120 titles) quickly became some of the most popular reading in mid-Victorian Britain. His works are often misattributed to the invented Elizabeth Caroline Grey or the actual Catherine Maria Grey .

Margaret Sackville was a prolific poet of the earlier twentieth century, whose work spanned a range of poetic genres from dramatic verse to epigrams and fantasy for children. She also wrote fairy-tales, plays, and introductory essays. She was admired during her lifetime and was a presence in Edinburgh art circles. As a young woman, she was active in peace politics, and the spare and angry strength of her war poems has attracted recent critical attention. She published an early anthology of women's poetry in 1910; her introduction to this volume speaks directly of the connection between women's social freedom and the freedom of the imagination.

VSW wrote prolifically and almost obsessively from her childhood in the early twentieth century. She began with poems, plays, and fiction about her family's romantic links to English history. As an adult she used these genres to describe or transform her own complicated love-life: lesbian relationships, triangular relationships, love between masculine women and feminine men. Her best-known poems, The Land and The Garden, create classically-descended georgic from the traditional labour of the Kentish countryside, and the related art of gardening. Many novels (some she called pot-boilers) use conventional style to delineate upper-class society, but she also made forays (first inspired by Virginia Woolf ) into the experimental. She wrote history, biography, travel books, diaries, and letters. She was a popular and productive journalist, both in print and on the radio, whose topics included literature, gardening, and the status of women (though she refused the label of feminist). Her gardening writings and her actual gardens remain her best-known works. Her masterpiece, the Sissinghurst gardens, are the most-visited in Britain.

French writer George Sand (Aurore Dudevant) wrote over one hundred novels and plays. Her correspondence fills twenty-five volumes. She averaged two novels a year after 1831. British writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot were strongly influenced by her writing, and her notorious life became one of the benchmarks by which women writers were judged.

MS 's literary career was truncated after only eleven years by her battle with breast cancer. During the mid-nineteenth century she published six works, including poetry, fiction, and two verse dramas.

Sappho , the female poet who stands at the head of the lyric tradition in Europe, has been a major figure of identification, of desire, of influence, of adulation, and of opprobrium in British women's writing, though little remains of her texts. All of her estimated 12,000 lines of verse has been lost except a handful of complete poems and many fragments, either quotations of her work by other writers, or scraps deciphered from papyri used to wrap mummies in ancient Egypt. This mutilated body of work amounts to somewhere around seven hundred intelligible lines.

MS was a later eighteenth-century poet in the Augustan tradition, who says she also wrote a great deal of prose.

SS , a religious diarist and letter-writer of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, offers insight into women's roles in family and community and into the part played by writing and reading in those roles.

ES published over ninety novels during the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of them about India, as well as a collection of short stories and a memoir of life under the British Raj.

DLS is best-known as a pre-second-world-war detective novelist, particularly as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. But the financial success she enjoyed from these novels permitted her to turn to other genres and topics later in her career, including plays and radio dramas on religious themes, other Christian writings, and an important translation of Dante . She also wrote poetry and reviews.

JS , whose fluent and polished style suggests that she was well accustomed to writing, was a late-eighteenth-century Scotswoman who left a single text: a letter-form journal of travels. With some relations she sailed from Scotland to the Caribbean (where they acquired some months' experience of the slave-based economy of Antigua), then to North Carolina in what was soon to become the United States of America, then home again via an extended visit to Lisbon in Portugal. Schaw is a sharp-eyed observer, intelligent, opinionated, and conservative or reactionary.

MAS , who issued her first publication in 1813, has period interest as an aesthetic theorist and a religious writer, an apologist for the French Jansenist movement connected with Port Royal , and later for the Moravians . Each of these groups of believers offered an example of religious leadership by women. She also has enduring interest as an autobiographer.

OS was a political and social activist as well as a writer. Her biographer Liz Stanley says she was internationally probably the best-known feminist writer and theorist from the 1880s through to the 1930s. Much of her writing strongly advocates a more democratic, just, free society, using to do so the art of allegory and the parable. Her early novels were followed by a large number of political essays. Later, she published the feminist testament which made her an icon in the women's movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. She carried on a voluminous correspondence with many family members and friends, the latter including Havelock Ellis , Edward Carpenter , and Karl Pearson . Several volumes of these have been published posthumously, as were two early novels which she deemed unpublishable during her lifetime.

AMS , living in seventeenth-century Utrecht, became not only a living proof of women's talents and capacity for education, as equal to those of men, but also a public advocate for opportunities for women to develop their God-given capacity. Later, as a leader of the religious sect of the Labadists , she renounced worldly learning and wrote only devotional works. Throughout her life she wrote letters in which she records the life of her mind and the development of her opinions.

Beginning a few years before the First World War (in which she was a pacifist), GHS published about thirty novels, mostly as Henrietta Leslie. Her typical writing is naturalistic fiction with a strong sense of social and political issues, but one or two of her works are experimental in symbolic style. She wrote a number of plays which never reached print; worked as a journalist, and published three travel books. Her autobiography appeared during the Second World War.

CADS was first a poet; then after a long break in her publishing career she produced almost twenty novels, including works that make her a significant regional novelist of the Cornish coast. She also wrote plays, a travel book, short stories, and books about the occult and her psychic experiences. Both her poetry and fiction express her feminist conviction of the necessity of women's sexual, personal, and financial freedom. Her work was progressive for its era, tackling taboo subjects such as domestic violence, adultery, and premarital sex. She achieved critical commendation, but never a particularly wide readership, and is chiefly remembered today for having founded the literary organization PEN .

CS published three anonymous novels over a span of almost thirty years, beginning under the patronage of her novelist cousin Lady Charlotte Bury . Meanwhile she had become an Evangelical Christian, who put her fervent belief into her final novel, and went on to books of direct religious instruction, published under her name. The first, a work of theology, appeared during her lifetime, and the other two, of instructional acrostics for children, after her death.

As well as an elegy printed during her lifetime and hymns printed after her death in 1793, MS published two ambitious longer poems about whose content she cared passionately: a polemical celebration of women's intellectual achievements (especially as writers), and an epic poem with Christ as hero.

SS , who published during the second half of the eighteenth century, wrote for money and never signed her name to her work. She is known as a novelist; but as a historian and translator she also deserves the appellation of woman of letters, and as one who chose to pursue an alternative, carefully-thought-out, woman-centred lifestyle she deserves the appellation of feminist. Her fictional writing does not repeat itself in form but takes on new technical issues with each title. Her concerns are always those of proto-feminism: the problems of middle-class women disadvantaged by poverty, lack of beauty, and absence of outlets for their talents, and the plight of lower-class women and the disabled.

The remarkable career of Walter Scott began with a period as a Romantic poet (the leading Romantic poet in terms of popularity) before he went on to achieve even greater popularity as a novelist, particularly for his historical fiction and Scottish national tales. His well-earned fame in both these genres of fiction has tended to create the impression that he originated them, whereas in fact women novelists had preceded him in each.

EJS is a poet whose work spans a long period. Writing during the 1930s, she published from the forties through to the nineties, always against the grain or fashion of the time. She has also translated poems from Italian. She published only six books (plus one booklet) of poetry. She has received very little critical attention, though she ranks high with anthologists and with her fellow-poets.

MS is the most famous of the seventeenth-century French authors of heroic romances: fictions of great length, which centred on the lives, loves, and philosophical disquisitions of aristocratic characters. She also wrote poetry and letters.