Tabitha Moonshine, Rock-N-Roller.

At her death, Barbauld was lauded in the Newcastle Magazine as "unquestionably the first [i.e., best] of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers" and the Imperial Magazine declared "so long as letters shall be cultivated in Britain, or wherever the English language shall be known, so long will the name of this lady be respected."[41] She was favourably compared to bothJoseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, no mean feat for a woman writer in the 18th century.[42] But by 1925 she was remembered only as a moralising writer for children, if that. It was not until the advent of feminist literary criticism within the academy in the 1970s and 1980s that Barbauld finally began to be included in literary history.

Barbauld's remarkable disappearance from the literary landscape took place for a number of reasons. One of the most important was the disdain heaped upon her by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, poets who in their youthful, radical days had looked to her poetry for inspiration, but in their later, conservative years dismissed her work. Once these poets had become canonised, their opinions held sway.[43] Moreover, the intellectual ferment that Barbauld was an important part of—particularly at the Dissenting academies—had, by the end of the 19th century, come to be associated with the "philistine" middle class, as Matthew Arnold put it. The reformist 18th-century middle class was later held responsible for the excesses and abuses of the industrial age.[44] Finally, the Victorians viewed Barbauld as "an icon of sentimental saintliness" and "erased her political courage, her tough mindedness, [and] her talent for humor and irony", a literary figure that modernists despised.[45]

Hannah Cowley (14 March 1743 – 11 March 1809) was an English dramatist and poet. Although Cowley's plays and poetry did not enjoy wide popularity after the nineteenth century, critic Melinda Finberg rates Cowley as "one of the foremost playwrights of the late eighteenth century" whose "skill in writing fluid, sparkling dialogue and creating sprightly, memorable comic characters compares favourably with her better-known contemporaries, Goldsmith and Sheridan."[1] Cowley’s plays were produced frequently during her lifetime. The major themes of her plays; including her first, The Runaway (1776), and her major hit which is being revived, The Belle's Stratagem (1780); revolve around marriage and how women strive to overcome the injustices imposed by family life and social custom.

In 1898, The Strand Magazine, one of the most influential publications of the Victorian fin de siècle, deemed best-selling author and editor L.T. Meade a literary “celebrity” and “one of the most industrious writers of modern fiction.” Beginning in 1893 and continuing into the first decade of the twentieth century, Meade’s medical mysteries and thrilling tales of dangerous criminal women appeared in the Strand. There they competed successfully not only with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but also with the works of some of the most popular writers of the day. The Sorceress of the Strandis one of Meade’s most compelling mysteries, and the first to feature the seductive criminal genius Madame Sara.

A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent is a 1762 novel by Sarah Scott. Millenium Hall was Scott's most significant novel. It was popular enough to go to four editions by 1778, and interest in it has revived in the 21st century among feminist literary scholars. The book takes the form of a frame tale and a series of adventures, as the narrator's long-lost cousin relates how each of the residents arrived at the female Utopia, Millenium Hall. The adventures are remarkable for their reliance on a nearly superstitious form of divine grace, where God's will manifests itself with the direct punishment of the wicked and the miraculous protection of the innocent. In one tale, a woman about to be ravished by a man is saved, literally by the hand of God, as her attacker dies of a stroke. The Hall the characters live in is a model of mid-century reform ideas. All the women have crafts with which to better themselves. Property is held in common, and education is the primary pastime.

At the same time, there is a nearly pathological revulsion at heterosexual sexuality in Millenium Hall. This antipathy is usually expressed in religious terms, as all of the sexual acts in the novel are either forms of rape or sin. Further, the characters in the novel who are married or who have children are so without any indication of romantic love between the partners. Instead of romantic love, the novel posits female friendship under a powerful duty to piety. Female friendship is true, but it is also emphatically clean by being non-sexual.