Betty A. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period.

Betty A. Schellenberg is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Acknowledgements; Note on citations; Introduction: 'building on public approbation'; 1. Frances Sheridan, John Home, and public virtue; 2. The politicised pastoral of Frances Brooke; 3. Sarah Scott, historian, in the republic of letters; 4. The (female) literary careers of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox; 5. Harmless mediocrity: Edward Kimber and the Minifie sisters; 6. From propensity to profession in the early career of Frances Burney; 7. Women writers and 'the Great Forgetting'; Coda; Notes; Bibliography; Index.