“Genius will educate itself.” 2493:117). Clara Reeve, whose popular The Old English Baron (1778) was
one of the earliest historical novels, also wrote an important history of the
novel as a genre, The Progress of Romance (1785); she lived and worked
in Ipswich. Norwich nurtured Elizabeth Inchbald, who was fi rst an actress,
then a novelist, and later a great theater critic and editor; at Warrington,
Anna Barbauld was admired and cherished. But London was the center of
literary life, and when Wollstonecraft came to London after the unhappy
termination of her employment as a governess with the Kingsborough fam-
ily in Ireland it was with the determination to make a living as a writer.
She went to Joseph Johnson in St. Paul’s Churchyard, a bookseller with
a reputation for dealing kindly and professionally with women. He en-
couraged her to believe it was possible to make writing a career, to be an
independent woman who need not look to a husband for fi nancial support,
nor to an aristocratic or immensely wealthy patron like Elizabeth Montagu.
Johnson was able to keep her supplied with literary work. She described
herself as “the fi rst of a new genus,” which wasn’t true —Elizabeth Carter,
working for Edward Cave at the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s, had
equal right to such a title, as, more recently, had Fanny Burney, Hannah
Cowley, Hannah More, and Anna Barbauld among others —but she was
excited and knew little about the history of women writers, partly because
the bluestockings and their supporters had deliberately sought to veil what
they saw as a shameful past.
Women Writers in the 1780s and 1790s
The climate in which Wollstonecraft began her career was broadly friendly
to women writers at every level. Intellectual women like Montagu and
Carter, and the historian Catharine Macaulay, whose massive eight-volume
History of England had appeared over the twenty years from 1763 to 1783,
were “favourably received”— as Clara Reeve put it — as were novelists like
Frances Sheridan and Charlotte Lennox, and poets like Anna Barbauld
(Reeve 1769). Barbauld’s 1773 volume of poems had been an instant suc-
cess; Catharine Macaulay was feted in celebrations in Bristol and Bath in
1777 (Hill 1992). Hannah More’s play Percy, in 1777, established her as a
second-generation bluestocking under Montagu’s patronage. The welcome
given to Evelina in 1778 brought Frances Burney fame and social eleva-
tion. Virtuous female talent, which all these women were considered to
exemplify, was celebrated as a social good. Richard Samuel’s 1778 portrait
The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain depicted prominent women of arts