Building on Brewer’s claim that ‘the ways in which the arts worked in eighteenth-century England are often best understood…through…those we have now largely forgotten’ (1997: 13), my research explores novels published by the Minerva Press written by a range of neglected professional women writers. These works shed light on how women writers responded to an era of transformation in the literary marketplace and to a socially turbulent context. My thesis will expand current thinking and recast Minerva Press novels as dynamic vehicles of literary and social commentary whose authors made inroads into the literary marketplace. It illuminates how these women writers, often dependent financially on their pens, carefully and strategically represented their own and their characters’ literary interactions and activities. I demonstrate that Minerva Press women writers used their novels as vehicles to legitimise female presence in the literary marketplace and to redesign the reputation and reception of the popular novel and novelist.