Mary Steele, Mary Hays and the Convergence of Women's Literary Circles in the 1790s

A circle of Dissenting women writers that began in the 1770s, centred on Mary Steele of Broughton and Elizabeth Coltman of Leicester, merged in the 1790s in London with a group of Dissenting literary women and men revolving around William Godwin, Mary Hays and Crabb Robinson, a phenomenon revealed almost exclusively through informal life-writings and poems, most of which have remained in manuscript. This cross-pollination of women's literary coteries reveals much about how eighteenth-century women's literary networks were formed and perpetuated, how they overcame geographical boundaries and how they enriched the lives of their members and their male friends.