SOURCE: "Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820" in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 17, edited by John Yolton and Leslie Ellen Brown, Colleagues Press, 1987, pp. 191-207.

In the following excerpt, Fergus and Thaddeus examine the financial dealings of Amelia Alderson Opie with her publishers as an example of the social changes affecting women around the beginning of the nineteenth-century.

At the end of the eighteenth century, a woman who considered herself genteel had few options if she wanted or needed to make money. Working-class women could procure jobs as servants or shop assistants; the work was ill-paid and constricting, but it was available. Those in the middling classes who desired larger incomes were generally barred from the sort of employment where such incomes were feasible. Of the few professions open to women, acting was the most lucrative, but it was self-promoting and flamboyant—and hence morally suspect. Writing alone offered...