Frances Brooke's first novel, The History of Julia Mandeville, is largely penned by the bel esprit Anne Wilmot, a well-read female character with a captivating command of language and energetic mental powers. Anne Wilmot's preference for the ‘innocent freedoms’ of the bel esprit was undoubtedly shared by the author of Julia Mandeville. Living in a time when a professional writing career was ‘an odd attempt in a woman’, Brooke ‘published almost every kind of economically profitable literary type’ with notable success. At the end of her life, she was considered to have been ‘courted by all the first characters of her time’, counting among her friends and supporters Samuel Johnson, Mary Ann Yates, Anna Seward and Fanny Burney. Ever aware of women's delicate social position and the limits they faced, Brooke contributed to their empowerment with representations of femininity that gave women a voice without injuring their reputation. In her fiction, the strongest embodiments of such a profile unite the independence of the unmarried woman or widow with the erudition of the bel esprit. This combination first emerges in Brooke's periodical the Old Maid (1755–6), published under the pseudonym Mary Singleton, Spinster. Here, as Min Wild observes, a virtuous and experienced spinster takes the liberty to ‘use the language and conventions of discourse unfit for Frances Brooke’. Only few years later, a similar female profile crystallizes in Julia Mandeville's widowed bel esprit, Anne Wilmot, whose ostensible coquettish whims sit beautifully with extensive knowledge of literature and cultural acumen.