Author profiles

An active lecturer and author in support of abolition, women's rights, and racial equality in the mid-nineteenth century, FEWH was, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr , the first African-American professional woman of letters.

Writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, BH published seventeen novels, besides journalism and letters to the editor, short stories, a suffrage play and pamphlet, and children's books. Favourite topics with her, seemingly...

Classics scholar JEH devoted much of her career to radically unorthodox studies of the development of ritual and religion in early Greek culture. Her findings, issuing in both monographs and articles, were highly publicized and...

JH became in 1794 an early and unusual practitioner of the new genre of the guidebook. As a poet she begins in introspection and expands to consider, in briskly colloquial style, such topics as political...

Isabella Neil Harwood is now virtually unknown as an author, despite the popularity of some of her sensation novels and plays. Her career began in 1864 when she published the novel Abbot's Cleve or, Can...

Besides her poems and opera librettos dating from the late eighteenth century, AH published with the Minerva Press fourteen novels or romances as Ann (or Anne) of Swansea, beginning in 1810. A highly intelligent though...

FRH was a late Victorian religious poet, children's author, and hymn-writer. Her publications during her lifetime were sporadic, but a flood of her works reached print after her death. She composed more than seventy hymns...

CLH was the author of a single, sentimental, pompously styled novel published in 1788, as well as of unpublished works.

As a novelist (beginning anonymously in the late eighteenth century with a string of novels only recently identified as hers, and still publishing—under her name—forty years later), LMH is always didactic. But while some of...

MH is one of the best-known among the group of radical feminists surrounding Mary Wollstonecraft; she is notable for arguing from emotion, even passion, as well as reason. She wrote two novels, poetry, and a...

Matilda Hays was a novelist, translator of George Sand , editor, and contributor to periodicals. Her work spanned many genres and a variety of topics related to women's work and opportunities. One of her two...

EH was the most prolific novelist by number of titles (even ignoring those doubtfully ascribed) between Aphra Behn and Charlotte Smith . She also wrote poems, plays, periodicals, conduct books, translation, and theatre history. Her...

SH was the pre-eminent Irish poet of his generation, writing in a lucid style which is often dazzling and never obscure. A highly visible international figure in the later twentieth century and beyond, he was...

EH began publishing in the 1780s to supplement her family's income. She issued ten novels with her name or some other means of (at least later) identification, three translations, and a number of didactic and...

Héloïse was a woman of high intellectual ability who strove by several different means to reach beyond what twelfth-century convention allowed her. The texts of some letters addressed to her one-time lover on the topic...

A major Romantic poet and the most popular woman poet (or poetess as she and others expressed it) in English during the nineteenth century, FH published nineteen volumes of verse and two dramas. While most...

LLH was a Roman Catholic who became a prioress and published at least three devotional works during the early eighteenth century. She may also have written advice on teaching in the convent.