31 Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), 10. Daniel Defoe, ‘An Academy for Women’, in An Essay Upon Projects (1697). See The Earlier Life and the Chief Earlier Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. Henry Morley (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1889), 23—164, at pp. 145—6. Defoe’s essay is discussed in Astell, A Serious Proposal, ed. Springborg, p. xiii.