Jane West (1758-1852) was an important early woman writer in several fields: novelist, poet, dramatist, satirist, children's writer and moralist. She was published by national publishers such as Longman alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge as an equal but, whereas those writers stood the test of time, Jane West eventually fell from popularity as tastes changed. She was a farmer's wife in Little Bowden, Northants, the mother of a large family, and continued to write and publish into her old age. This new work makes use of contemporary reviews and archive material to present a profile of her life, and an assessment and history of her literary achievement in the context of her times. The book includes some substantial representative extracts from her works in an appendix (the originals, of course, are now rare and extremely expensive), nine photographic plates, a bibliographical check-list of the editions her twenty-one books went through, and an index. Jane West was extraordinarily multi-talented. Some of her works are historical novels, such as Alicia de Lacy (time of Edward II) and The Loyalists (Civil War period). Her plays include Edmund Ironside (11th-century). Didactic literature includes Letters to a Young Man and Letters to a Young Lady, A Friendly Address to the Labouring Part of the Community and A Few Words to the Friends of the Poor . Her poetry includes An Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke and the satirical The Humours of Brighthelmstone (Brighton). Her novel The Advantages of Education is an 'anti- sensibility' novel, preceding Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility by some eighteen years, and mocking the extent to which a mother goes in order to secure an advantageous education for her daughter. Jane West also made regular contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine . Most of her work was published under the name Jane West but some of her early titles were issued under the slightly-comic pseudonym 'Mrs Prudentia Homespun', yet her mind clearly reached to the great political and religious issues of her day and she wrote on national subjects as well as on 'homespun' philosophy. Jane West was educated, well-read, a devout Anglican and a devoted mother. In her day her achievement was quite remarkable.