CMS was one of nineteenth-century America's most prolific and versatile women writers. She published, among other things, novellas, advice books, religious writing, over one hundred pieces of short prose, six novels, eight works for children, a travel narrative, two biographies, and a translation from Italian.

Olive Senior is one of the most widely read Caribbean writers. Some of her books are required reading in Caribbean primary schools and in several international high schools and universities. She has published across genres—non-fiction, short stories, a novel, several volumes of poetry, and children's fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies globally and have been translated into several languages including Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Russian. Her first collection of short stories, Summer Lightning, won the inaugural Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in 1987.

MS , who lived and wrote in seventeenth-century France, is widely regarded as one of the world's great letter-writers. The standard scholarly edition contains 1,372 letters.

AS , living at a distance from London, was nevertheless a woman of letters, of the later eighteenth century and just beyond. She staked her claim to fame firstly on her poetry (though she was always willing to try genres unusual to her, like sermons and a biography of Erasmus Darwin ), secondly on her letters. In these and in her newspaper contributions she was also a literary critic, familiar with the criteria of both the Augustan and Romantic eras and gifted besides with an unfailing independence of judgement.

AS 's only published work was the novel Black Beauty, 1877, which received immediate acclaim and has been celebrated both as a key text advocating animal welfare and other social and political causes and as a best-selling classic of children's literature and of writing about horses.

ES was well-known during the mid nineteenth century as a novelist, travel writer, historian, author of devotional and educational works, and children's writer. Her novels challenged the idea that romance leading to marriage was the sole purpose of Victorian women's lives, and realistically portrayed the active and meaningful lives of single women. In her educational works she argued for improvements to women's education. Although her novels were widely read during her lifetime, especially by young women, they are now mostly forgotten.

MS wrote during the nineteenth century, predominantly in verse, often in ballad form, to instruct and improve children and members of the working classes. Her poems combine simplicity of language and structure with clear moral and religious instruction. Much of her work was first published in pamphlet or tract form and found wide distribution through middle-class philanthropic work with the poor.

AS , American poet of the mid twentieth century, flirted for most of her adult life with the idea of killing herself. Her poems are intensely personal, centred on death, as well as on psychic pain and the dilemmas of being a woman and especially a wife. Some are re-tellings of fairy tales. She also wrote a single play, several books for children, short stories, and a novel which she never finished.

KS is best known for her novels, which engage with political and aesthetic complexities of Pakistani culture. She also contributes short stories to anthologies of both British and Pakistani fiction. Her writing frequently examines topics of history, nationality, family relations, and feminism, with recurring motifs of displacement, nostalgia, and cultural alienation. Her political pieces include an extended polemic essay on Muslim archetypes, and innumerable journalistic comments on Pakistani history, political movements, and culture. Novelist Aminatta Forna has noted the duality of KS 's influence as both writer and public intellectual.

JS is a poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, who has also published anthologies, verse for music, and a book of critical prose based on a lecture series.

ES , whose career occupied the end of the nineteenth century and the first several decades of the twentieth, wrote books for children, journalism, polemic (on behalf of suffragist, internationalist, pacifist, and other movements), novels, travel books, biography, and studies of education, poverty, and other social issues. Her output for children alone amounted to more than twenty books as well as stories counted in the hundreds. Important in this field, and as a suffragist activist and publicist, and with a high professional reputation as a journalist, she made less impression as a novelist (although her fiction is original and inventive). She was later forgotten more completely than almost any of her contemporaries of equal stature.

JS , who published in 1671, stands in a line of militant midwife-writers, close to Elizabeth Cellier before her and followed after a longer lapse of time by Elizabeth Nihell . Like theirs, her text is proto-feminist.

FS is best known as a journalist with strong views on imperialism, who influenced both official policy and the British public through her position as colonial editor for the Times. She believed that journalism was the best way for her, as a woman at that time, to exercise political influence. She was also the author of four works of children's fiction, of three books on the political history of states in the British empire, of addresses to various bodies, and of countless articles for newspapers and journals other than the Times.

GBS was a drama critic who called for reform of theatrical practice, and a dramatist who attached to his plays on publication, lengthy prefaces expounding the social and dramatic issues opened by the play itself. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him a polemicist, and says that much of the drama of his time and after was indirectly in his debt for his creation of a drama of moral passion and of intellectual conflict and debate.

HS , a wealthy London businesswoman (midwife and moneylender) in the mid-sixteenth century, published either two or three pamphlets attacking the minister of her church: not on religious grounds but in a quarrel over property.

MS , long known almost exclusively for Frankenstein, is now being read for her later novels and her plays, as well as for her journals and letters. Her editing, reviewing, biographical, and journalistic work entitle her to the designation woman of letters. She is an important figure among women Romantics, and a channel for the reformist ideals of the 1790s forwards into the Victorian era.

PBS is one of the six major (male) English Romantic poets.

NS , a Scotswoman, published between 1928 and 1934 three novels and a volume of poems. A volume of nature-writing or memoir about her relationship with the Cairngorm mountains proved unacceptable during the 1940s, and although it appeared as The Living Mountain in 1977, Shepherd never published another book, but confined herself to literary articles in the Aberdeen University Review. Her novels, which render everyday experience in remote, rural locations with modernist intensity and particularity of detail, received critical acclaim on first appearance but were then forgotten until the publishing house of Canongate initiated a revival in 1987.

FS was a novelist and dramatist whose adult writing career was cut short after less than seven years. She was a leading practitioner of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. She also wrote poetry.

MMSwrote and signed more than 350 books (mostly for children, but including several adult novels), and left almost a score of fat volumes of diary. Some of her children's books, despite their uncompromisingly hell-fire message, remained current for several generations and were vividly remembered by many impressionable children, some of whom grew up to be writers. Her former high repute as a children's writer is at least as well deserved for her autobiography and diary, and her biographer Naomi Royde-Smith seriously admired some of her novels. She also wrote poems. The British Library lacks many of her books; the holdings of Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian are better.

CS , an American-born Canadian novelist of the twentieth century, a low-key but passionate feminist, published a collection of poetry as her first book. Her earliest novel features as minor character a novelist whose stock-in-trade is to be Canadian but who is by birth (secretly) an American. Her novels probe the freight of meaning in the small change of ordinary lives, especially those of women, and the way that an ordinary person becomes an artist. They delight in self-reflexiveness, and combine self-conscious artistry with a disarming appearance of transcription from life. CS also wrote short fiction and plays.

ES wrote but did not publish what seems to be the earliest female biography in English to be written as a memoir of someone known and loved, although it is also, as the life of an inspirational nun by another nun, something approaching hagiography.