How did women writers, despite obvious disadvantages, engineer their entry into the literary market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenty centuries? An examination of women's correspondence with publishers such as Georg Joachim Göschen and Friedrich Nicolai goes some way towards providing an explanation. These letters, all unpublished, reveal the full extent of women's proactive pursuit of publicaiton, in defiance of contemporary gender ideology. They also indicate the way in which wome...