A vindication of the writing woman, Dale Spender. Part 1 The women: Aphra Behn's Oronooko - the politics of gender, race, and class, Heidi Hutner; preparatives to love - fiction as seduction in the works of Eliza Haywood, Ros Ballaster; Sarah Fielding's self-destructing utopia - the adventures of David Simple, Carolyn Woodward; Elizabeth Inchbald - not such a simple story, Kathariine M. Rogers; Charlotte Smith's feminism - a study of Emmeline and Desmond, Pat Elliott; Charlotte Lennox's the female quixote - a novel interrogation, Helen Thomson; Fanny Burney - the tactics of subversion, Judy Simons; daddy's girl as motherless child; Maria Edgeworth and maternal romance; an essay in reassessment, Mitzi Myers; Joanna Naillie and Mary Brunton - women of the manse, Mary McKerrow. Part 2 The issues: the witchery of fiction - Charlotte Smith, novelist, Mary Anne Schofield; romancing the novel - gender and genre in the early theories of narrative, Ros Ballaster; of use to her daughter - maternal authority and early women novelists, Jane Spencer; violence against women in the novels of early British woman writers, Katherine Anne Ackley. Part 3 The achievements: the triumph of the form, Rosalind Miles; afterword - the wages of writing, Dale Spender.