This book explores the ways in which a tradition of women moralists in Britain shaped public debates about the nation's moral health, and men's and women's responsibility to ensure it. It focusses on the role played by eight of the most significant of those women moralists whose writing on history, literature and visual art changed contemporaries' understanding of the lessons to be drawn from each field at the same time as they contested and redefined contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity.