Growing up, I remember assuming that, with the exception of Jane Austen, there were no female novelists until the Brontës and George Eliot came along – and even then, the pioneers had to adopt male names to get published.
Of course, I was wrong: there were thousands of female writers before the Victorian era (even if they didn’t quite make up the majority of 18th-century novelists, as was thought until a few years ago). Women bought novels in huge numbers – one reason why the form was considered less prestigious than poetry – and many of them wrote prose fiction, too: Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Lennox, Delarivier Manley, Mary Hays.
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