The actress’s acting life is a difficult one – any woman working several jobs to sustain herself, accepting abuse disguised as “helpful criticism,” and standing in line for auditions at 6 in the morning will tell you as much. But they’ve come a long way, baby: At least now they can wear pants.

An English actress in the 18th century performed for a London only recently accustomed to accepting women in women’s roles; she was a newcomer and a novelty. She also had to counter plagues, Jacobite invasions, and the possibility of being tossed in jail for her husband’s debts. A few women finally had their livelihoods in their own hands, and a great surge of female poets, actresses, and playwrights began to trade ideas with male contemporaries. But even they faced poverty and ruin at every turn.

Two women with two very different strategies for survival nearly beat the game, and two enjoyable new books pay them their due.

The scandalous Charlotte Cibber Charke, the subject of Kathryn Shevelow’s “Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress’s Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London’s Wild and Wicked Theatrical World” (Henry Holt, 448 pages, $27.50), provoked censure by rebelling against the time’s most dearly held ideas of “femininity” – for a time she dressed and lived as a man. Mary Robinson, whose spectacular life is painstakingly sketched in Paula Byrne’s “Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson,” (Random House, 464 pages, $27.50), took the opposite tack, dictating fashions, being kept by a prince, and finding herself admired by Marie Antoinette.

Both women died in their 40s, bodies giving out long before their tenacious minds. Both suffered for their choice in husbands, both bucked heavy systems at great cost to their livelihoods. And both, as their biographers hasten to point out, would not have been out of place in our own time, when scandal sells tickets, a savvy performer must write her own press, and talent never means quite as much as the right set of clothes.

Charlotte was the last daughter of actor-manager Colley Cibber, the famous fop, poet laureate, and public figure. Though she met with moderate successes on her father’s stage, the Drury Lane Theater couldn’t hold her for long. Under oppressive management, she, with her brother Theophilus, led a revolt. Then, finding herself in need of employment, Charke blackmailed her way into a better contract by savagely parodying her onetime managers – who rehired her just to shut her up. Once she had alienated them for good, Charke became the first female theater manager, running both a puppet theater and the short-lived Mad Company.

History, though, would soon hobble her. After the Restoration, and its flurry of continentally flavored cynicisms, the relieved and revived English stage enjoyed a few years of uncensored licentiousness. The good times came to crashing halt with the Licensing Act of 1737, when the angry hand of Robert Walpole crushed political satire and the innovations that attended it. Charke’s career depended on the fringe activities of theater-makers like Henry Fielding, the very people Walpole was trying to stop.

While not defeated, Charke never stood on her dignity. She was bailed out of a debt by an army of prostitutes, sold sausages door to door, and begged her father for money in the public press. Wearing men’s clothing, playing men’s roles, and passing as her female companion’s “husband” while tramping through the countryside, Charke branded herself an 18th-century curiosity. But by writing a spirited autobiography and breaking into theater management, she staked out a more enduring position.

Her colorful life gets a purple treatment from Ms. Shevelow, who peppers her narrative with blithe reconstructions of her heroine’s point of view. Surely Charke’s environs were flavorful enough without a biographer making up scenes in which she winks and flips the bootblack a penny. From the few quotations we hear from the autobiography, it seems clear Charlotte Charke had a self-puncturing humor toward her own puffed-up sense of melodrama. Ms. Shevelow does not. To steal a phrase from Ms. Byrne’s book, she rather over-eggs the pudding.

Charke had her heyday before the Licensing Act; Mary Robinson had hers after. The day of Charke had passed, and even the age of Garrick was ending by the time Mrs. Robinson made her debut. Tutored by the great Garrick himself and mentored by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Mary was a more celebrated star than Charlotte ever was. But having married at 15 and became a mother in short order, Robinson had her own financial woes. An insolvent, inconstant husband landed her in debtor’s prison, and creditors hounded her in and out of London for her entire life.

Options were limited when a lady was in need of financial rescue. The stage doubled in some cases as a high-class brothel, a veritable market for young morsels being offered up to the aristocracy. When Samuel Johnson wasn’t decrying them as dancing dogs, established society was denouncing actresses as trumped up trollops, the despised “demi-monde.” But the 18th century belonged to the masses, and the masses ate up tales of the “frail sisterhood,” copied their hats, and thronged to their performances.

While Charlotte had clung to her dreams of the stage, Robinson’s career was only the first of her three incarnations. Whether out of pragmatism or love, Robinson succumbed to the adoration of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) and their affair became the gossip of the century. Being half of the infamous “Florizel and Perdita,” as they were known in the press, was Robinson’s best chance at solvency.

Though portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds preserve her image as a willowy beauty, Robinson was no shrinking violet. She insisted on the annuities owed her and defied convention by taking a royal at his word. When an infection crippled her, leaving her unable to walk, Robinson changed attacks. Putting an impressive education to the test, Robinson became one of London’s most celebrated novelists and poets, sharing metric tips with Wordsworth and Coleridge and calling for a Women’s University with Robinson Wollstonecraft. As with Charke, a well-written, widely read autobiography proved indispensable to her place in history.

Ms. Byrne’s book is not as theatrical as Robinson’s first career, nor as sensuous as her second. But she does apply a careful, academic eye to a surprising life – appropriate for a woman who finally joined the bluestockings. That Robinson still died in debt gives no comfort to those who make their living from the pen.