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Elizabeth Heyrick of Leicester was a major, under-recognised figure in the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. Her pamphlet publications address war, cruelty to animals, workers’ wages, prison reform, and other social and political topics as well as abolition. Her political thinking on many points startlingly anticipates later socialist positions. She also published … Read more

Mary Elizabeth Braddon made her name, scandalously, in the early 1860s as a founder of the intricately plotted sensation novel, and was particularly known for her transgressive heroines. Although still most strongly associated with this and the related genres of gothic, mystery and detective stories, she also contributed significantly during her 56-year career to the … Read more

Mathilde Blind was one of the leading poets of the later nineteenth century; her burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work. Her poetry combines great beauty of sound and image with vigorous narrative, delineation of character, emotional expressiveness, and engagement with intellectual ideas. It ranges from long … Read more

Matilda Betham-Edwards maintained a phenomenally high publishing output and covered most viable genres over the course of a career spanning the later nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. She was best known for her novels and her travel-books about France, but she also wrote poetry and children’s books, and edited and introduced the works … Read more

Isabella Beeton was the author of the classic book of household management which became a standard reference work for generations following her death—probably, says critic Michael Mason, “less common only than the Bible, Shakespeare and the poems of Scott in better-off homes.” It has been in print continuously since its appearance. Isabella Beeton was a … Read more

Anna Letitia Barbauld, writing and publishing in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, was a true woman of letters, an important poet, revered as mouthpiece or laureate for Rational Dissent. Her ground-breaking work on literary, political, social, and other intellectual topics balances her still better-known pedagogical works and writings for the very young. … Read more

L. S. Bevington was an essayist, philosopher and poet, one of a very small handful of publishing anarcho-communist women. She issued three collections of poetry, over thirty essays, and a small number of translations in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the course of her life, she developed into a vociferous activist for … Read more

Hélène Barcynska was a prolific popular novelist of the twentieth century, who had her greatest successes before and after the First World War and was still publishing after the second. Her autobiography, issued in 1941, lists thirty-eight novels she issued as ‘Oliver Sandys’ (plus six films) and twenty-one she issued as ‘Countess Barcynska’ (five filmed). Her … Read more

Valentine Ackland published very little in her lifetime, and has gone largely unrecognised since. Her lifelong partner, Sylvia Townsend Warner, was very supportive of Ackland and helped her to get her writing into print. This writing (which dates from four decades of the mid twentieth century) took the form of poetry, as well as political critique, … Read more

Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson began publishing before the end of the eighteenth century. Books for children were her first market niche: both short fiction and instructional works. She later moved into translation and into other kinds of fiction: both full-scale novels of her own, and chapbooks or bluebooks—short, sensational fiction for the young or less-educated, of … Read more