Masters of the Marketplace is the first book to address the importance of the 1750s in literary history and to consider the active role that women novelists played in the formation of the novel. It highlights how women novelists of the 1750s controlled their literary circumstances. These authors were particularly agile at responding to the changing literary marketplace, the emergent domestic ideal, varied reader responses, shifting notions of genre, and new developments in epistemology. Reading these essays side by side brings to light the fact that women novelists of the 1750s engaged in a critical renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it for a proto-feminist project, challenging, educating, and joining their readers.