The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

While many nineteenth-century women writers - such as George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, the Brontés - are now widely written about, the women who paved the way for them in the eighteenth-century are only now being given the attention they deserve.

A book of subtlety and distinction, a reminder of just how far feminist literary scholarship has come

This book achieves far more than the rehabilitation of forgotten authors... Instead, she investigates the broader mechanisms of fame, the formation of authorial personae, and the mysterious reasons why some names rise while others fall...This is a subtle, persuasive and engrossing study

Inspirational...reveals a rich history of literary women who not only made a living from writing but were treated as the equals of their male peers... [It] should be a set textbook in English classes

Educated at the Universities of Lancaster, London, and Kent, Norma Clarke is a Research Fellow in the English Department, Kingston University, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the History Department, Royal Holloway College, University of London. She is the author of five novels for children, numerous articles and several books, including Ambitious Heights (1990) and Dr Johnson's Women (2000).

If Aphra Benn is widely regarded as the first important woman writer in English, who was the second? In literary history, the eighteenth century belongs to men: Pope and Swift, Richardson and Fielding. Asked to name a woman, even the specialist stumbles. Jane Austen? She didn't publish until 1811. Aphra Benn herself? She died in 1869. 
 
The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century. 
 
Eliza Haywood, Catherine Cockburn, Elizabeth Elstob, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Thomas, Anna Seward... In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these and other writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was as likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir.

Norma Clarke

"This entertaining, scholarly book suggests how they [women] disappeared and why figures such as Lennox deserve to be remembered."

Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was an important feature of his life and theirs.  He was willing to treat women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew well:  Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney.  It explores their relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of letters.  It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted their Victorian successors.  Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means the case.  Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how impressive and varied their achievements were.

Norma Clarke

Praise for Dr Johnson's Women

"This entertaining, scholarly book suggests how they [women] disappeared and why figures such as Lennox deserve to be remembered."

Books by Norma Clarke

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