“…The most notable examples are Mary Hays' Female Biography () written ‘for the benefit, of my own sex’ in order ‘to excite a worthier emulation’ (1: v–vi), and Matilda Betham's A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (), comprising biographies of women ‘distinguished by their actions or talents, in various nations, or at different periods of the world’ (v). The radical potential of arranging women's lives alphabetically has been noted, as ‘Mistresses, novelists, queens, Revolutionaries, Roman matrons, courtesans, intellectuals and Dissenters all take their place […] rubbing up against one another in a fertile cross‐period jumble’ (James 117). The notable absence of Wollstonecraft in Female Biography , once read as symptomatic of a decline in Hays' radicalism, has been rethought.…”