Sophie Gee

They're calling the shots.

And Virginia Woolf, one of the great friends of Secret Life of Books, in a room of one's own, singled out Aphra Behn for being the first woman who allowed others, other women, to speak their minds.

So it was this trio, Behn, Manley and Hayward, that put women on centre stage in novels and suggested that it was they who dominated and controlled weak rulers.

weak male rulers.

And the other thing about all of these women is that they themselves were unmarried at least for long periods of their lives.

Their status as women who were also professional writers was very unfixed.

They existed somewhere between being sort of courtiers and being courtesans.

It was very suspect to be a female professional writer at the time.

They were quite socially provocative and they all made a lot of money from their own writing.

So we have that trio.

In the middle of the century, you get the rise of these big dominant male voices, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

And then they're going to be followed by writers like Laurence Stern, who wrote the wonderful Tristram Shandy.

Richardson and Fielding's novels, again, are about often women being treated really badly by men.

But it's the male novelists who are kind of telling the story.

And there's a backwriting, there's a backlash from lots of female novelists in the middle of the century.

And the main names that I want to check are Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding's own sister, who wrote lots of books, including The Adventures of David Simple, which was a big success, Sarah Scott, and Charlotte Lennox.

And I'm singling out Charlotte Lennox, who wrote the brilliant Female Quixot, which is a delightful sort of parody of Don Quixote by Cervantes.

It's about a

young woman named Arabella, who's very much like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.

She reads too many novels.