This paper presents two groups of text encodingproblems encountered by the Brown University WomenWriters Project (WWP). The WWP is creating a full-textdatabase of transcriptions of pre-1830 printed bookswritten by women in English. For encoding our texts weuse Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML),following the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange. SGML is a powerful text encoding systemfor describing complex textual features, but a fullexpression of these may require very complex encoding,and careful thought about the intended purpose of theencoded text. We present here several possibleapproaches to these encoding problems, and analyze theissues they raise.