Triumphant Bodies centers on Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Brooke, with additional glances toward their contemporaries, including John Dryden, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Delarivier Manley, Henry Fielding, Anne Finch, Mary Leapor, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Horace Walpole. Smith positions women’s writing within dominant traditions but argues that women writers simultaneously understood themselves s part of a gendered trajectory. By drawing together a diverse and expansive range of texts by women, this study suggests the complexity of any attempt to define women’s authorial triumphs during this period of tremendous vigor and transformation in the literary marketplace.