This course will take the form of an extended group project focused on an album of letters by “Eminent Women,” collected by a London librarian and self-professed sufferer of “autographic mania,” William Upcott. Compiled during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the album includes letters by 48 women, many of whom were writers with a public reputation, though the women represented in the album range widely in terms of the kind of writing they engaged in and their class, religious and sexual identities. The album therefore reflects a period of rising opportunities for women writers in Britain, as their contributions to literature began to be recognized and their handwritten manuscripts collected, preserved, and valued.