While the aesthetics of the Romantic period are commonly associated with the work of a limited number of male poets, the gendered nature of such thought in the era ensured that women writers commented extensively and in unprecedented numbers on matters of taste. In her polemical works, the radical Mary Wollstonecraft argued that the philosopher Edmund Burke had created an aesthetic that was not only gendered but fundamentally inegalitarian. In response, she proposed a retreat from the social to the natural and a rejection of convention in favor of originality. But other women writers, while also rejecting Burke’s gendering of the sublime and the beautiful, were suspicious of Wollstonecraft’s account of originality. As they reassessed how accurate aesthetic judgments could be made within the social space, they reshaped Romantic aesthetics and created the conditions for realism.