The Cambridge companion to womens writing in Britain 1660 1789 Women writers played a central role in the literature and culture of eighteenth century Britain. Featuring essays on female writers and genres by leading scholars in the field this Companion introduces readers to the range significance and complexity of womens writing across multiple genres in Britain between 1660 and 1789. Divided into two parts the Companion first discusses womens participation in print culture featuring essays on topics such as women and popular culture women as professional writers women as readers and writers and place and publication. Additionally part one explores the ways women writers crossed generic boundaries. The second part contains chapters on many of the key genres in which women wrote including poetry drama fiction (early and later) history the ballad periodicals and travel writing. The Companion also provides an introduction surveying the state of the field an integrated chronology and a guide to further reading Virginia Woolf observed that the fact non aristocratic women took to writing and publishing in the seventeenth century matters far more than I can prove in an hours discourse. Her words that women writing matters remain as relevant today as they did nearly a century ago. Narratives of literary history change as each successive generation of scholars and students refines revises and perhaps transforms the understanding of a literary period. Nowhere is that transformative process more evident than in the literary history of womens writing in England. In the early twentieth century some scholars championed individual woman writers through in part the recovery of primary texts: Myra Reynolds 1903 publication of the poems of Anne Finch (1661 1720) Montague Summers 1915 edition of the works of Aphra Behn (1640 89) or William McBurneys 1963 collection of novels from the 1720s that included texts by Eliza Haywood (1693 1756) and Mary Davys (1674 1732). Woolf herself briefly mentions women writers discussed within these pages from Behn Finch and H