Where are the women writers? Has their work been lost to history? Or did it ever exist at all? Were there really women writing in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries? (Or indeed, in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth?) And were any of them any good?

Many people have a hard time naming a woman writer before the nineteenth century. As recently as 2022, only 2.5% of writers on the core syllabus of the Oxford Master's degree in English from 1700 to 1830 were women.

Authoress answers with an alternative story. It shows how women have always written: with quills, needles and thread, at kitchen tables and in jail, in convents, parlours, attics and ships at sea.

Across ten centuries, Francesca Peacock takes us from cells where medieval anchoresses penned mystic visions to country houses where the exiled Mary, Queen of Scots wove tapestries of women's lives to adorn the walls; and from kitchens where Tudor mothers compiled recipe books to the grubby streets of eighteenth-century London, where Delarivier Manley fictionalised the scandals of the day - with accompanying 'keys' sold separately to discover who the gossip was really about.

Each of these women was an authoress, and yet their stories rarely feature in histories of literature, or are encompassed by traditional definitions of literacy. They are the names in the margins, sometimes working beyond the confines of the page - embroidering samplers, or moving the metal on printing presses.

Where are the women writers? Their stories are everywhere, but sometimes, we just have to look a little closer.

Praise for Francesca Peacock's Pure Wit:
'Scholarly, articulate, and never less than fascinating' Alice Loxton
'Margaret Cavendish was a woman out of her time. This blazing biography does her proud *****' Telegraph
'Gripping . . . I loved it' Kate Mosse
'Fascinating' William Boyd
'Francesca Peacock is as bold, bright and witty as her subject' Jessie Childs