This volume explores the relationship between reading, writing and (self-)education in British women writers' works published between the 1770s and the 1830s. The fourteen contributions focus on Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Hannah Cowley, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Marcet, Anna Jameson, Felicia Hemans, Helen Maria Williams, Anne Radcliffe, and Georgiana Cavendish. The essays reveal the great variety of genres chosen by British women writers and their effort to find new ways of expression and self-development. The study of these diverse productions provides an analysis of these writers' contribution to women's place in the public space and to intercultural transfers.