A critical assessment of the written tradition has been key to feminist criticism in the twentieth century from Virginia Woolf and Hélène Cixous to Judith Butler. Sainte Anne, Persuasion, and Frankenstein - these novels by, respectively, Isabelle de Charrière, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley - do actually address the impact of literary and cultural representation on the perpetuation of gender inequality. While Charrière, Austen and Shelley can the three of them we described as inheritors of the Enlightenment, they nevertheless produced an early feminist criticim of the sexist prejudice embedded in the progressive paradigm of their time.