Introduction In A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, in order to write, a woman needs her own income and her own room. Woolf also imagined that Shakespeare had a sister. As creative as this sister might have been, her life in Renaissance England would have denied her every opportunity to write, to be an artist like her brother. Some women of that period did write, and some of that writing remains: The journals of Margery Kempe are in print today, and Elizabeth I left written records of her reign. But the fact remains that until the 18th century, literacy rates among women were low, and evidence of women's writing is sparse. Woolf also claimed that a revolution in literature began with the simple fact that in the 18th century, the middle-class woman began to write. In the English canon, we might move Woolf's date back a few years. Although Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is generally considered the first English novel, some critics prefer to give that distinction to Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). Which title claims first place is less important, however, than the fact that Behn was the first woman to make writing her profession. And although more writing by men has remained in the eye of the public, in the past several years many literary critics have been on a kind of archaeological dig, unearthing a rich heritage of writing by English women. The 18th century saw an increase in women's literacy and a corresponding rise in the number of female readers and writers. Although poetry and drama remained primarily male preserves, the novel had a number of female practitioners. The 'conduct' novel, with its emphasis on behavior and marriageability, targeted women readers, and Fanny Burney, whose first novel, Evelina, appeared in 1778, was one of the most successful authors of her time. Other women, more obscure now than Burney, also enjoyed wide public recognition: Sarah Fielding (the novelist Henry's sister), Amelia Opie, and Elizabeth Inchbald are examples. The 'Gothic' novel, characterized by exotic settings, seemingly supernatural occurrences, and young women in distress in dark castles, was one of the most popular forms at the end of the century. Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794) and The Italian (1797), was a favorite and is now considered the best of the Gothic writers. Jane Austen's first novel, Northanger Abbey (written around 1798 but published in 1818), satirized the excesses of the Gothic novel, though some Gothic conventions would persist well into the 19th century. Austen tends to dominate discussions of women's literature of the early 1800s, but other women were writing at the time as well. The Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth was a contemporary of Austen's, and there were a few prominent female poets at the time as well, including Felicia Hemans and Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose poetry was for the most part sentimental and placid. But the poetry of Joanna Baillie, a contemporary of William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, shared their passionate Romantic sensibility. Along with literary Romanticism, feminism grew out of the revolutionary movements of the late 18th century. Mary Wollstonecraft, the wife of the radical philosopher William Godwin and the mother of the novelist Mary Shelley, is generally regarded as the first English feminist author. In her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she advanced the philosophy that a "rational" education would produce women who were not only better wives and mothers but also the social equals of men. The first part of this philosophy was typical of early feminism, but the second part was revolutionary. As the 19th century progressed, women writers often viewed their gender's subordinate position as an index of other problems confronted by society, including poverty and labor unrest. Beginning in the 1830s, women novelists began to address these issues, and women ventured into other types of writing to do so as well. The journalist Harriet Martineau wrote widely in the 1830s on political economy. Fiction writer Caroline Norton agitated for the reform of divorce and property laws in 1854's treatise English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century. Martineau and Norton exemplify the diversity of women's writing in the 19th century with their concern for both broad cultural topics and issues of particular interest to women. Female Victorian novelists such as the Brontës, Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot displayed a similar variety. Although women wrote more novels than other types of literature, two of the most lasting Victorian poets were women. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially in her book-length poem Aurora Leigh (1857), and the Pre-Raphaelite Christina Rossetti, in her rhythmic poem "Goblin Market" (1862), addressed male subordination of women, especially as it related to issues of creativity faced by women artists. By the middle of the 19th century, feminists had several male allies, most famously John Stuart Mill. His The Subjection of Women (1869) is often paired with Wollstonecraft's Vindication as fundamental feminist philosophy. But feminists also had a number of female antagonists. By mid-century, too, the image of the "Angel in the House" came to dominate mainstream representations of women: Even some feminist writers did not depart from the ideal of the woman whose life was wrapped up in the private sphere of the home and who may have sought influence over her husband's public life through good moral example, but never public participation in it. The 1860s saw the rise of an organized feminist movement in England, a response to the "angelic" strictures advocated by writers like Eliza Lynn Linton and, earlier, Sarah Stickney Ellis and Mrs. Beeton whose cookbooks and guides for household management have remained in print since the 1850s. Josephine Butler and Frances Power Cobbe were two of the most prolific writers on women's rights in the 1860s and the following decades. Their advocacy not only of voting rights for women but also of health, education, and legal reform set the tone of British feminist writing into the early 20th century. Novelists came out on various points of the feminist spectrum: The "New Women" of the 1890s, such as Mona Caird, Vernon Lee, and Sarah Grand, tended to embrace radical reform, while more conservative writers like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Flora Annie Steel advanced more measured positions. The span of women's writing over the century is perhaps most clearly exemplified by two women travel writers who spanned it. In 1827, Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans filtered her observations of the "new world" through an Austenian lens of civility and propriety. In 1892, Mary Kingsley, of the prominent Cambridge University Kingsley family, traveled alone in West Africa on scientific expeditions, gathering materials for her studies of fish. Abby Wolf is a lecturer in the History and Literature program and in Women's Studies at Harvard University.