This dissertation arises from current debates around survivor agency that have often resulted in a critical impasse: how might agency be afforded to survivors when the aftermath of rape centrally involves the silencing of its record? This project finds historical footing in answering present-day questions of gendered violence in the Transatlantic eighteenth century, a period and geography that saw the explosive rise of print and female literacy. It investigates the intimate connection between female literacy and writing and gendered violence in three major texts of the period: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). Central to the project is the idea of “fictions of materiality,” which form around the heightened engagement of writers, fictional and historical, with the physicality of writing in the epistolary genre. These texts’ longing for the lost imprints of the human in letter-writing attests to the tectonic shifts in dominant media forms—from manuscript to print—with which we can view our own transition to a digital ecosystem. The fact that these traces and imprints arise in the aftermath of gendered violence, such as rape and abduction, genders this critical account and points toward female literacy and authorship as a means to respond to and challenge patriarchal discursive and physical control—both of women and of the writing that they produce.