In the preface to Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism, John Belchem draws attention to the way in which ‘Liverpool's past has been characterised as different’. While he argues that ‘Liverpool's apartness … is crucial to its identity’, he concedes that it has both been seen as ‘an external imposition, an unmerited stigma’ and ‘upheld (and inflated) in self-referential myth’. The thrust of Belchem's argument is that Liverpool's exceptionalism is neither a matter for pride nor stigma but is explicable, largely in terms of its identity as a maritime city. Belchem goes on to offer a brief historical survey which includes a consideration of the fluctuating economic fortunes of Liverpool. In this chapter I focus both on the representation of Liverpool and on the representation of Liverpool women at various stages of the city's twentieth-century history, from its Edwardian heyday, through the depression of the interwar years, the German bombing campaign of the Second World War, the economic downturn of the 1980s and 90s to the contemporary resurgence of the city, within novels written by women over the last thirty years. The texts which I will be considering focus particularly on the effects of these economic fortunes on the female inhabitants of the city, whether as wives and daughters of seafarers, dock workers or wealthy merchants, and in some cases as members of the Liverpool-Irish community, which as Belchem points out have tended in recent years to be written out of the history of the Irish diaspora by Irish revisionist historians.