By drawing on contemporary Persian sources, this paper aims to reconstruct the literary lives of prominent women in the first 40 years of the Qajar period (circa 1795-1834). The sources for this study are Qajar poetry anthologies (sing. tadhkira) such as Mahmud Mirza’s Nuql-i majlis (circa 1830) and Qajar histories whose focus is the reign of Fath-‘Ali Shah (d.1834), such as Khavari’s Tarikh-i dhu’l-qarnayn and Nuri’s Ashraf al-tavarikh. Those women poets who feature in the Nuql-i majlis are almost exclusively royal (mostly wives or daughters of Fath-‘Ali Shah), although there are some exceptions to this. An analysis of their poetry, combined with the additional biographical information found in contemporary histories will be used to sketch a broader picture of the cultural and –in some cases- political life of leading women from the royal family, other branches of the Qajar clan, and a number from the emerging urban elite. Early nineteenth-century court histories, tadhkiras, and poetry have to date been underused by those wishing to write the history of women in early Qajar Iran. This study aims to redress the balance in this regard.