Women's work challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour (as material reality and philosophical concept) shaped the lives and writings of a number of women authors working in the second half of the long eighteenth century

Jennie Batchelor is Reader in Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of Kent

Introduction
1. The 'gift' of work: labour, narrative and community in the novels of Sarah Scott
2. Somebody's story: Charlotte Smith and the work of writing
3. The 'business' of a woman's life and the making of the Female Philosopher: the works of Mary Wollstonecraft
4. Women writers, the popular press and the Literary Fund, 1790-1830
Coda: reading labour and writing women's literary history
Bibliography
Index