The following excerpt is taken from the book The Natural Superiority of Women, by Ashley Montagu.

“Women have many firsts as innovators in literature.  Thus Marie of France, who flourished during the latter half of the twelfth century, is said to have invented the genre known as the Breton lay.  Dame Juliana of Norwich wrote the earliest mystical prose autobiography (1342), and Dame Juliana Berners, the abbess of Sopwell priory, near St. Albans, wrote the earliest English treatise on fishing, The Boke of St. Albans (1486).  Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote here autobiography (1655), and a biography of her husband (1667), which was added as an appendix to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, in addition to the earliest English prose romance, The Blazing World (1666).  This remarkable woman was also the author of CCXI Sociable Letters, an epistolary novel, preceding Richardson’s Pamela (1740) in the same genre by years.  The Restoration playwright, Mrs. Aphra Behn, was also the author of the famous novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688), which was distinguished, among other things, for its sypathetic view of Blacks.  The Gothic or horror novel was the invention of Ann Radcliffe whose The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is perhaps her most famous work.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was the first science fiction story of a monster created by a scientist which subsequently ills its creator and the members of his family.  As Grace Shulman points out, women were leaders in the revolution that overthrew romantic flaccidity during the twentieth century.  Harriet Monroe founded Poetry in 1912, and Margaret Anderson founded The Little Review in 1915.  It was a woman, Sylvia Beach, who, in 1922, had the courage to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses.”