SOURCE: "Feminine Transactions: Money and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers," in Money: Lure, Lore, and Literature, edited by John Louis DiGaetani, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 227-43.

In the following essay, Dickerson discusses how nineteenth-century women writers depicted women and money. In the early part of the nineteenth-century, female authors confined the financial endeavors of women to the domestic sphere. However, in the later part of the century, female authors espoused the idea of allowing women to participate in the larger economic world

I had made but about 540 £ at the close of my last affair, and I had wasted some of that. However, I had about 460 £ left, a great many very rich cloaths, a gold watch, and some jewels, tho' of no extraordinary value, and about 30 £ or 40 £ in linnen not dispo'd of.

—Moll Flanders (1722)

Few female characters in British fiction have tallied their possessions or counted their pence and pounds with...