The fragmentary nature of Sarah Scott's literary reputation, both in her own time and now, despite her numerous, varied, and relatively well-received publications, invites the question of whether a literary career as we would recognize it was achievable for a woman writer at the height of the eighteenth century. But ahead of this gender-specific question stands the even more fundamental one of the relation of the “person of letters” to the literary professional, and the applicability of the term “career” to each. In his analysis of David Hume's career, Jerome Christensen insists that from its Renaissance origins, the term “man of letters,” though “generally honorific, … was never entirely free of the stigma of commerce, for the condition of possibility for the man of letters, and the basis for all his subsequent claims of independence, is the existence of the printing press and the publishing business.”