ABSTRACT
Writing was one career which even a fairly conventional education opened up for women. But to write, or at least to publish, was for the eighteenth-century woman a transgressive act. Though the gendering of mental qualities associated femininity with imagination and creativity (see, for example, 3.2, 3.3, 3.7), publishing exposed an essentially private activity to the public gaze, blurring the conduct-book delineation of separate spheres. The effect, even according to sympathetic contemporary commentators, was a troubling confusion of gender roles: a favourable reviewer sees Elizabeth Carter’s poems, for example, as yet further evidence that ‘the men prate and dress; the women read and write’ (see 4.11); and for Samuel Johnson, in a famous formulation, the increasing numbers of women writers were ‘Amazons of the pen’.1
