A comparative examination of eighteenth-century women writers and their texts clearly shows wide variations in the degree to which these writers envisioned themselves as what H. T. Dickinson calls “political agents.” Once we have moved beyond an oversimplified notion of mid-century women as restricted to a domestic, or private, sphere of action distinct from the public spheres of politics and letters, we can begin to see some variations in agency represented in records of professional lives, in paratextual statements, or in actual publications. Some writers clearly saw their publications, pace Habermas, participating in a public sphere that was overtly political, and not merely literary. Whereas I will argue in my third chapter that Sarah Scott intervened in a self-conscious but deliberately disembodied and fragmented sense in a republic of letters, focusing in her historical biographies on the social responsibilities of the “private” gentleman of property, I have shown that Frances Sheridan more explicitly connects Sidney Bidulph's story with the public genre of tragedy in the politically resonant form of John Home's Douglas.