This is an alphabetical list of women poets who were active in the United Kingdom before approximately 1800. (NB. Poetry is the focus of this list, though many of these writers worked in more than one genre).

Poets

Backscheider, Paula, and John Richetti, eds. Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730: An Anthology. Oxford: OUP, 1996.
Blain, Virginia, et al., eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990.
Buck, Claire, ed.The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. Prentice Hall, 1992.
Greer, Germaine, ed. Kissing the Rod: an anthology of seventeenth-century women's verse. Farrar Staus Giroux, 1988.
Lonsdale, Roger ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
Robertson, Fiona, ed. Women's Writing, 1778-1838. Oxford: OUP, 2001.
Todd, Janet, ed. British Women Writers: a critical reference guide. London: Routledge, 1989.