Elizabeth Montagu

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Standard Name: Montagu, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Robinson
Nickname: Fidget
Nickname: The Two Peas (with Sarah Scott)
Nickname: The Queen of the Blues
Married Name: Elizabeth Montagu
EM , eighteenth-century Bluestocking leader, is known on the one hand as an informal letter-writer, and on the other hand for ambitious critical intervention in canonicity and cultural debates, with her critical study of Shakespeare and dialogues of the dead.
Mezzotint of Elizabeth Montagu, published by John Raphael Smith in 1776 after a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. She is seen in profile, sitting in a large upholstered chair against a backdrop of drapery, a pillar, and an outdoor landscape. Her dress and petticoat are voluminous and heavily decorated, with ruffled sleeves and a bow at the neck. Her hair is brushed back under a small bonnet perched on top of her head and tied with a dark ribbon. Below the image is a coat of arms and italic writing: "Mrs. Mon

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Ann Radcliffe
While staying with her uncle Thomas Bentley at Chelsea, Ann Ward (later AR ) met a number of influential men, most of them with Dissenting connections: Joseph Banks , George Fordyce , Ralph Griffiths ,...
Friends, Associates Catharine Macaulay
Early in her life CM knew (or was known to) the somewhat older Robinson sisters (the future Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott ), whose mother's family estate was not far from her father's.
Schellenberg, Betty. “Remembering Beyond the Great Forgetting”. Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) Conference, Saskatoon, SK, 19 Oct. 2001.
Friends, Associates Catherine Talbot
Six months later CT was staying with the duchess on an extended visit. She was also a good friend of Elizabeth Montagu (of whose closeness to Carter she was sometimes jealous); of Montagu's friends George Lyttelton
Friends, Associates Mary Eleanor Bowes Countess of Strathmore
Still in her early teens, Mary Eleanor Bowes was taken up by the Bluestockings. Elizabeth Montagu , she later reported, was pleased to honour me with her friendship, approbation, and correspondence.
qtd. in
Parker, Derek. The Trampled Wife. Sutton, 2006.
14
Once she...
Friends, Associates Ann Fisher
As an eighteenth-century publisher AF was in a small way one of the new breed of literary patrons. She and her husband helped the minor pastoral poet John Cunningham (1729–1773) by publishing him both in...
Friends, Associates Bathsua Makin
BM 's brother-in-law John Pell called her a woman of great acquaintance.
Teague, Frances. Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning. Bucknell University Press, 1998.
82
She was a lifelong friend of diarist and antiquarian Sir Simonds D'Ewes , who had been at her father's school, and of...
Intertextuality and Influence Ann Thicknesse
AT makes it clear she is no proto-feminist: If women are thought to possess minds less capable of solid reflection than men, they owe this conjecture entirely to their own vanity, and erroneous method of...
Intertextuality and Influence Hester Mulso Chapone
The book was a resounding success in the market. She had had the idea for these advice letters in 1765, when the niece who was to receive them was only eight. Montagu encouraged her to...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Carter
EC had her portrait painted by the artist Catherine Read (at least the third painter to represent her). It was commissioned by Elizabeth Montagu .
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
246
Leisure and Society Joanna Baillie
In the earlier 1840s, however, she was still a keen reader. She tackled the first edition of Frances Burney 's Diary and Letters out of a desire to get some insight into the literary society...
Literary responses Phebe Gibbes
This novel aroused much interest. One letter was reprinted almost entire, without attribution, on 2 July 1789 in the Aberdeen Magazine as a Picture of the Mode of living at Calcutta. In a letter from...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
More and Elizabeth Montagu admired AY as a primitive, untrained writer whose excellence came from nature, not from carefully nurtured ability: as a phenomenon verging on a freak. More's Prefatory Letter to Yearsley's Poems, on...
Literary responses Frances Burney
Hester Thrale recorded a significant dissenting voice: nine months after publication, Mrs Montagu cannot bear Evelina.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
172
The stumbling-block was probably the low elements of the book.
Literary responses Samuel Johnson
Like all of Johnson's later works this was controversial. For Johnson the art of biography has nothing to do with eulogy, and (quite apart from personal objections, like Elizabeth Montagu 's indignation at his low...
Literary responses Hannah More
Elizabeth Montagu wrote to Elizabeth Carter on 19 September 1793 ostensibly speculating as to what exactly was meant by the title Bas Bleu. She seemed to think (probably feigning, since the term bluestocking was...

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