Mary Steele, Mary Hays and the Convergence of Women's Literary Circles in the 1790s

Abstract

AbstractA circle of Dissenting women writers that began in the 1770s, centred on Mary Steele of Broughton and Elizabeth Coltman of Leicester, merged in the 1790s in London with a group of Dissenting literary women and men revolving around William Godwin, Mary Hays and Crabb Robinson, a phenomenon revealed almost exclusively through informal life‐writings and poems, most of which have remained in manuscript. This cross‐pollination of women's literary coteries reveals much about how eighteenth‐century women's literary networks were formed and perpetuated, how they overcame geographical boundaries and how they enriched the lives of their members and their male friends.