The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

"The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century." "In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was a likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir."--Jacket.