In nineteenth-century Britain, public debates about the nation's moral health and about men's and women's responsibility for it were shaped decisively by a tradition of female moralists. This book looks at the cultural criticism of eight of the most significant of these writers: Anna Jameson, Hannah Lawrance, Margaret Oliphant, Marian Evans ('George Eliot'), Eliza Lynn Linton, Beatrice Hastings, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, providing a detailed and compelling account of how their writing on history, literature and visual art changed contemporaries' understanding of the lessons to be drawn from each field at the same time as they contested and redefined contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity. It recovers these moralists' understanding of themselves as part of a tradition of women of letters stretching from eighteenth-century bluestockings to their own time, and the growing consensus across the political range of periodicals that women's intellectual potential was equal to men's, and not determined by their sex. Benjamin Dabby is an independent historian.

Introduction
Anna Jameson and the use of picturesque history
Hannah Lawrance and the claims of women's history
Margaret Oliphant and the lessons of eighteenth-century history
Anna Jameson, cultural authority and public moralism
Beautiful and useful arts in Hannah Lawrance's cultural criticism
Marian Evans's cultural criticism in the context of women's public moralism
Eliza Lynn Linton and feminism at the turn of the century
Beatrice Hastings, Rebecca West and women's rights at the turn of the century
Virginia Woolf's common reader and her social criticism
The contexts of conclusions
Bibliography