Eighteenth-Century Libraries Online and the Digital Recovery of British and American Women's Reading and Writing

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This paper examines the presence of women writers and readers in the Eighteenth Century Libraries Online (ECLO) database. Winner of the BSECS Digital Award for 2026, this new digital resource brings together membership lists, catalogues and borrowing records produced by more than eighty subscription libraries across the British Isles and North America between 1731 and 1801. Not to be confused with commercial circulating libraries, subscription libraries (often called social libraries or library companies in North America) were self-governing private membership clubs whose subscribers pooled their resources to acquire a wider range of books than most could afford individually. While scholars have traditionally believed that these libraries were overwhelmingly - if not exclusively - masculine spaces, the paper argues that they played a very significant role in facilitating the circulation of women's writing and in extending women readers' access to print. The paper argues that women's relationship with eighteenth-century library culture has long been fundamentally misrepresented, while also considering opportunities for further development of the digital approach.

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