Chancing upon this obscure all-female literary club in academic works led the authors to investigate further. Founded in 1736 by the young, free-thinking Susanna Ashley-Cooper the 4th Countess of Shaftesbury, the members met to read and discuss Shakespeare’s plays. Appalled that The Bard’s “earthy” plays had been “cleaned-up”, the SLC campaigned to re-stage the original texts – and to install a long overdue statue to him in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey. These far-sighted, courageous women elevated Shakespeare from a writer whose plays were viewed as outdated, into an indisputable, literary deity. A chance discovery of long forgotten papers in a British archive led the authors to suspect these women were up to much more than play reading! The statue is still credited to a committee of men (and the actor David Garrick with ‘saving’ Shakespeare). This first book on the S.L.C. finally restores these women’s accomplishments to their rightful place in history.