Between 1750 and the mid 1830s literacy among women increased and women became increasingly significant in the literary marketplace: indeed, it has been argued that by the end of the eighteenth century the majority of reading audiences were female. Moreover, women's reading became central to a range of discourses, not all of which are obviously concerned with gender or literacy. Everywhere one looks in the literature of the period, one sees women reading. The discourses of women's reading are voluminous and paradoxically both repetitive and deeply contradictory. This book explores these phenomena both as a way of clarifying our understanding of women's cultural position in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and as a way of better comprehending the authors, male as well as female, who wrote with this audience in mind. I take it for granted that writing on reading, both non-fictional and fictional, is ‘ideologically freighted’: studying these writings displays more fully than anything else I know the contradictions in contemporary gender ideologies and the complex relationships of contestation but also complicity between women generally thought to represent very different political positions. Writing cultural history requires juggling large numbers of balls at once, but I have consciously attempted to balance broad generalisations and specific close readings (of, among others, works by Charlotte Lennox, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, Hannah More, Jane Austen and Sarah Green). While, especially in chapter 2, I deal with women's reading of a wide range of material, the book focuses especially on the issue of fiction-reading, since this issue recurs so compulsively and anxiously in contemporary texts.