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Mary Ward, seventeenth-century religious reformer and founder of a religious Order, used her writings (letters, autobiography, prayers, notes, and speeches) as a means to forward her radical ecclesiastical administration. She also wrote devotional works for her own spiritual life, and familiar letters. Go to Orlando>

Mary Robinson, 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. Go to Orlando>

Iris Murdoch, active from the second world war till almost the end of the twentieth century, was best known as a philosophical novelist with a wild sense of comedy. Her twenty-six novels foreground philosophic issues similar to those discussed in her well-regarded academic publications. She contributed to many periodicals, and wrote plays for stage and … Read more

Vera Brittain From her university days before the First World War, Vera Brittain was determined to be a writer. Her career as a novelist never fulfilled her own expectations; it was not until the publication of Testament of Youth, the first of her volumes combining autobiography with social and cultural history that she achieved significant … Read more

Emmeline Pankhurst‘s writings, produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, range from published political speeches to autobiography. All concern her lifelong struggle for women’s emancipation. Go to Orlando>

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. An occasional or amateur author during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who wrote in a number of genres: poetry, fiction, diaries, travel writings, and letters. Much of her work remains unpublished and her canon, both in prose and poetry, is far from certain. Go to Orlando>

Queen Elizabeth I was a scholar by training and inclination (who wrote translations both as learning exercises and for recreation), as well as a writer in many genres and several languages. As monarch she wrote speeches, and all her life she wrote letters, poems, and prayers. (Some of these categories occasionally overlap.) Once her writing … Read more

Jane Austen‘s unequalled reputation has led academic canon-makers to set her on a pedestal and scholars of early women’s writing to use her as an epoch. For generations she was the first—or the only—woman to be adjudged ‘major’. Recent attention has shifted: her balance, good sense, and humour are more taken for granted, and critics … Read more

Mary Shelley, 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 … Read more