Catherine Ingrassia looks at the contemporaneous development of speculative investment and the popular novel in the early eighteenth century. She shows that women were actively involved in finance as well as in fiction, and that both of these activities allowed women access to important new models for their social, sexual, and economic interaction. Ingrassia considers women's participation in the South Sea Bubble, and later focuses on the careers of Eliza Haywood and two of her male contemporaries, Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson.