What difference did women make to the book trade during the long eighteenth century? Female authorship and female readership burgeoned during this period, and some women were also active in the trade itself. If this had not been the case, if women had been illiterate and if writers, publishing workers and readers had all been male, would the production and consumption of books, what Robert Darnton calls ‘the social and cultural history of communication by print’, have developed differently?

Such hypothetical questions are clearly unanswerable, up there in the lunar sphere along with questions about the survival of Queen Anne’s son and Wolfe’s defeat on the Plains of Abraham. Nevertheless, just asking them may help to clarify the issue of what is being investigated in a study of women and eighteenth-century print culture. Any account of women’s contributions to the eighteenth-century book trade and the practices of reading and writing, or of the difference between their experience and that of men, keeps one eye on the unanswerable questions.