George Eliot, discussing with John Blackwood the best way to publish The Mill on the Floss, sounds shrewd and confident. Her comments show an awareness of the business issues involved in selecting the right formula for a relative newcomer on the literary scene, and one whose first appearance had set the public gossiping and speculating. Margaret Oliphant's observation that the nineteenth century, ‘which is the age of so many things – of enlightenment, of science, of progress – is quite as distinctly the age of female novelists’, has now become a truism. Yet the ways in which professional women writers handled their careers changed significantly from the early 1800s, when Jane Austen was being ignored by publishers and reviewers, to the 1890s, when Mrs Humphry Ward, riding high on the success of Robert Elsmere (1888), was insisting on the early release of a cheap edition of Marcella (1894). According to John Sutherland, ‘the reprint of Marcella was the torpedo that sunk the three-decker and by so doing stripped Mudie of his dictatorial powers’. Women novelists, who had begun the century in apologetic mode, ended it, to a considerable extent, calling the shots.