The Professionalisation of Women Writers in Eighteenth Century Britain is a full study of a group of women who were actively and ambitiously engaged in a range of innovative publications at the height of the eighteenth century. Using personal correspondence, records of contemporary reception, research into contemporary print culture and sociological models of professionalisation, Betty A. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period, focusing on those women who have been most obscured by literary history, including Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox.

This index provides valuable information on the vast majority of reviews of poetry, fiction, and drama during the first 25 years of modern, formalized book reviewing in England. Forster introduces readers to the wealth of material in the two major review journals (Monthly Review and Critical Review), the two major magazines (Gentleman’s and London), and 11 other periodicals. She includes in her 3,023 entries information on format, price, and bookseller’s name taken from the books themselves. In her Introduction, Forster surveys some material concerning the reviewers’ public attitude to their self-appointed task to provide a background against which the reviewers’ literary judgments can be examined.

Based on a listing of novels, authors and publication details from 1696 to 1796, the study traces the pattern of growth of women's fiction and offers an explanation fot the rise of women writers as a group during this period.

The Ladies' Diary was an annual almanac published in England from 1704 to 1840. It was designed to provide useful information to women; the subtitle reveals the purpose, Containing New Improvements in Arts and Sciences, and Many Entertaining Particulars: Designed for the Use and Diversion of the Fair Sex. It contained meteorological and astronomical information, recipes, health and medical advice, scientific information, and mathematical puzzles and problems. Readers were encouraged to, and did, send solutions and original problems and puzzles of their own for publication in the next year's issue. Frank Swetz, one of the founding Editors of Convergence, the MAA's online journal of the history of mathematics, wondered about the historical and sociological conditions that supported The Ladies' Diary. In this volume he unearths the story of the Diary's creation and of the community of people surrounding it. We learn who the editors were and something about the contributors and readers. Swetz explores the sociological and cultural circumstances that made this unique almanac full of mathematics popular for over a century. As a dynamic forum for mathematics learning, teaching, and understanding, the Diary remains a milestone in the development of British mathematics.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Sarah Fielding (1710-68) was the second most popular English woman novelist, rivaled only by Eliza Haywood. The History of Ophelia, the last of her seven novels, is an often comic epistolary fiction, narrated by the heroine to an unnamed female correspondent in the form of a single protracted letter. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and valuable appendices that contain contemporary reviews of the novel, Richard Corbould's illustrations to the Novelist’s Magazine edition, and excerpts from Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa.