The publication in 1778 of Evelina by Fanny Burney was a landmark for women's writing and the development of the English novel. During the next 60 years women novelists not only produced some of the most enduring masterpieces of English fiction but also fundamentally changed the shape and function of the novel. In this study the author, herself a novelist, looks at these writers and their extraordinary contribution to literature. She examines the special problems faced by women writers, and the way in which these were turned to ultimate advantage. Emerging from obliquy and obscurity, women writers such as Burney, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, Elizabeth Gaskell and others who reshaped the novel from the male picaresque tradition in a way which has had a lasting influence.