This expression of affection and gratitude is addressed to the author Mary Berry from her ‘dear Friend’, poet and playwright Joanna Baillie, in acknowledgement of Berry's Social Life in England and France, from the French Revolution in 1789, to that of July 1830 (1831). On reading Berry's proofs, Baillie would have found herself positioned alongside Byron in a literary review of the era as poets who ‘amazed a busy and calculating world with bursts of original pathos and poetry, worthy of the more poetic ages of society’. This letter offers a glimpse of a literary friendship characterised by manuscript exchange, mutual encouragement, and a collaborative approach to constructing a public reputation. For in her role as biographer and historian, Berry worked to secure Baillie's place within the canon while establishing herself as a commentator on the literature of her day. But Baillie's reference to ‘this time of the day’ also reminds us of these friends’ shared status as older women writers (both nearing seventy by 1831) who conversed, published, and together attempted to secure their literary afterlives into the nineteenth century.

Devoney Looser's research has shown that attending to the full careers of eighteenth-century and Romantic women writers who ‘were active well into the nineteenth century’ can ‘refigure’ ‘our visions of literary history’ by complicating ideas of ‘periodization, authorial and generic trends, or the literary marketplace’. Looser's detailed case studies of long-lived female authors provide ‘new insights about authorship across the life course’ in highlighting the circumstances and challenges literary women faced in old age and their cultural and critical reception during their own lifetimes and beyond.