Female Booksellers at the End of the Long Eighteenth Century

This essay presents case studies of three female booksellers—Ann Lemoine (fl. 1786–1820), Elizabeth Newbery (1745/6–1821), and Martha Gurney (1733–1816)—in an effort to disrupt prevailing narratives about women's waning involvement in the book trades over the long eighteenth century. Each of these women demonstrates astonishing productivity, longevity in the trade, and innovation and diversity in their publications. By uncovering women's durable presence in the book trades, the variety of roles they undertook, the range of books (both in terms of genre and format) they produced and disseminated, and the multiple strategies, both commercial and semicommercial, they devised to circulate publications, we encounter women as innovators in sourcing, compiling, marketing, and distributing their wares.