A review of Anna Jameson's Memoirs of celebrated female sovereigns (1831), gave Maria Jane Jewsbury the opportunity to declare some truths about humanity. It was clear from Jameson's history that the characters of men and women were formed by their education rather than their sex: ‘Power injures men no less than it injures women: when women are more rationally educated, they will make better queens; and when men are more rationally educated, they will make better kings.’ Jameson's queens also demonstrated women's power to improve the moral fabric of their times by promoting cultural progress and taking practical steps to improve the condition of society. ‘Power is power’, she explained, ‘and the power of disseminating opinions is not much less valuable than that of holding a levee or opening parliament.’ Jewsbury wrote from experience as she enjoyed the power to disseminate opinions, having been employed recently by the editor Charles Wentworth Dilke to write for the Athenaeum. She was also an accomplished poet and essayist, and only her untimely death from cholera in 1833 denied her the renown that Jameson would go on to enjoy as one of the first of a tradition of women of letters who shaped public moralism in Britain from the start of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout this period women of letters played a significant a role in shaping the public moralism at the heart of Britain's periodical culture by drawing out and debating with their contemporaries the lessons to be learned from history, literature and art. From the bluestockings to Virginia Woolf, these women moralists questioned the status quo, and did so in increasing numbers. This book is their history, told through the intellectual lives of Anna Jameson (1794–1860), Hannah Lawrance (1795–1875), Margaret Oliphant (1828–97), Marian Evans or ‘George Eliot’ (1819–80), Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–98), Beatrice Hastings (1879–1943), Rebecca West (1892–1983) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941).

Women of letters in this period have been understood in at least as many ways as the different fields in which they wrote. Jameson wrote some semiautobiographical fiction at the start of a literary career which spanned literary criticism, history, travel-writing and art history.