Mary Ann Hanway was an eighteenth-century travel writer and novelist. She has been proposed as the anonymous author of Journey to the Highlands of Scotland (1777). [1]
Hanway was also the author of Christabelle, the Maid of Rouen (1814), in which a woman's father loses their family's fortune, and she joins a nunnery, [2] [3] Ellinor (1798), and Andrew Stuart (1800). [2] Hanway did not always find the process of writing easy, declaring in the preface to her 1809 novel Falconbridge Abbey , that "four years it has been procrastinated, from a series of ill health, having laid dormant in my desk for six months together!". [2]
Hanway declared in Ellinor that "There are very few arts or sciences that women are not capable of acquiring, were they educated with the same advantages as men". [4]
Jonas Hanway, was a British philanthropist and traveller. He was the first male Londoner to carry an umbrella and was a noted opponent of tea drinking.
Minerva Press was a publishing house, noted for creating a lucrative market in sentimental and Gothic fiction in the late 18th century and early 19th century. It was established by William Lane at No 33 Leadenhall Street, London, when he moved his circulating library there in about 1790.
Ann Julia Hatton, was a popular novelist in Britain in the early 19th century and author of Tammany, the first known libretto by a woman.
Catharine Selden was an Irish writer of Gothic novels in the early 19th century.
Isabella Kelly, née Fordyce, also Isabella Hedgeland (1759–1857) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Her novels have been said to resemble those of Ann Radcliffe.
Sarah Green was an Irish-English author, one of the ten most prolific novelists of the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
Elizabeth Helme was a prolific English novelist, educational writer, and translator active in the late 18th and early nineteenth centuries.
Elizabeth Thomas [née Wolferstan] (1771–1855), novelist and poet, is an ambiguous figure. Details of her early life are missing, and her authorship of some of the works attributed to her has been contested due to the use of pseudonyms.
Selina Davenport was an English novelist, briefly married to the miscellanist and biographer Richard Alfred Davenport. Her eleven published novels have been recently described as "effective if stereotyped".
Emma Parker was an Anglo-Welsh novelist of whom very little is known, although her work was generally well-reviewed during her lifetime. Her epistolary novel Self-Deception explores the cultural and religious differences between the English and the French.
John Francis Moore was a sculptor who was active in late 18th century Britain. His works include two memorials in Westminster Abbey.
Margaret Minifie was a "a minor eighteenth-century sentimental novelist" whose career has tended to have been overshadowed by that of her sister, Susannah Gunning. A number of Minifie's works have historically been attributed to Gunning but recently, critics have sought to disentangle their two histories.
Maria Elizabeth Robinson was an author and editor. Her mother was the celebrated writer Mary Robinson, and Robinson edited and saw her unpublished works through to publication after her death.
Amelia Beauclerc was a British Gothic novelist.
Mary Charlton, Gothic novelist and translator, was a "leading light" at the Minerva Press.
Christian Carstairs was a Scottish poet who published anonymously.
Anna Maria Mackenzie was a prolific author of popular novels active during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She was closely associated with the Minerva Press.
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen, by Dale Spender, is a foundational study for the reclamation project central to feminist literary studies in English in the late 1980s and 1990s.