I have insisted throughout this book on the general interpretive principle of writerly agency in explaining generic choices, publication modes, and plot structures. In other words, while not divorcing these authors from their material or discursive contexts, we must consider more seriously the potential in reading them as professionalized subjects, as agents in the public sphere of letters. Such an approach, at its simplest, merely recognizes what their closest contemporaries took as a given. As Charlotte Lennox prepared The Female Quixote for publication, for example, she received a letter from Samuel Richardson which encouraged her to think professionally: “You are a young Lady have therefore much time before you, and I am sure, will think that a good Fame will be your Interest. Make therefore, your present work as complete as you can, in two Volumes; and it will give Consequence to your future writings, and of course to your Name as a Writer.” Richardson's argument here clearly suggests that Lennox consider herself primarily as a young writer rather than as a “Lady” author. As my chapter epigraphs have demonstrated, extant correspondence, paratexts, and reviews support my claim that Charlotte Lennox, as well as Sarah Fielding, Frances Brooke, Sarah Scott, and Frances Sheridan were directly engaged as actors in the public sphere of letters and its material medium, the literary marketplace.