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This is an alphabetical list of female novelists who were active in England and Wales, and the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland before approximately 1800. Nota bene : authors of novels are the focus of this list, though many of these writers worked in more than one genre.
Elizabeth Inchbald was an English novelist, actress, dramatist, and translator. Her two novels, A Simple Story and Nature and Art, have received particular critical attention.
Sarah Green was an Irish-English author, one of the ten most prolific novelists of the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
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.
Chawton House is a Grade II* listed manor house in Hampshire on the South side of Chawton village, and the present building was started in 1580.
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".
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).
Maria Susanna Cooper was an English novelist, children's author, and poet, best known for her epistolary novels. Her writing, didactic and conservative, focused on appropriate roles for daughters, wives, and mothers.
Mary Scott's The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead (1775) is both a celebration of women's literary achievements, as well as an impassioned piece of advocacy for women's right to literary self-expression.
Sophia Fortnum was a British Gothic novelist, and poet.
Mary Charlton, Gothic novelist and translator, was a "leading light" at the Minerva Press.
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.
Ann Gomersall was a British novelist of the Romantic-era who paid close attention to economic and social issues in her writing.
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (1986), by Dale Spender, is a foundational study for the reclamation project central to feminist literary studies in English in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Medora Gordon Byron (1782–1858) has long been accepted as the pseudonym of "Miss Byron," a Romantic-era author of either five or eight novels, though recent scholarship has complicated that identification.
Elizabeth Hervey (1748–1820) was the author of seven novels, six of which were published and one of which exists "in a carefully-bound manuscript."
Mary Julia Young was a prolific novelist, poet, translator, and biographer, active in the Romantic period, who published the bulk of her works with market-driven publishers James Fletcher Hughes and William Lane of the Minerva Press. She is of particular interest as an example of a professional woman writer in "a market of mass novel production."
Elizabeth Purbeck and Jane Purbeck were English sisters and co-authors during the Romantic era who published six novels between 1789 and 1802.