Elizabeth Carter

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Standard Name: Carter, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Carter
Nickname: Mrs Carter
Used Form: A Lady
EC was renowned during a long span of the later eighteenth century as a scholar and translator from several languages and the most seriously learned among the Bluestockings. Her English version of Epictetus was still current into the twentieth century. She was also a poet and a delightful letter-writer.
Portrait of Elizabeth Carter as Minerva, the Greek goddess of wisdom, by John Fayram in probably the late 1730s. She wears gilded metal armour over a white loose shirt and under a blue sash, and a helmet with feathery plume. She is holding in one hand a round shield, in the other a book bound in red, with gilt decoration, which (as Edward Cave revealed in writing her praise) is a copy of Plato. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Notices in the British Review and other English journals were fairly appreciative, but quick to compliment British women writers at the expense of the French, as if the book had been a challenge to their...
Family and Intimate relationships Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Elizabeth Carter was Lady Spencer's mentor on religion and reassured her that her high social station made it necessary, even meritorious, to be to a large extent worldly. The Althorp MSS at the British Library
Travel Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Separated from her siblings as well as her parents, she felt abandoned, although she loved her grandmother. The experience seems to have marked her, leaving her insecure and over-anxious to please. After the birth and...
Friends, Associates Oliver Goldsmith
Goldsmith met and became a friend and associate of Edmund Burke , Samuel Johnson , Sir Joshua Reynolds , and others belonging to the Club, of which he was a founder member. He was a...
Textual Features Eva Gore-Booth
Several of these poems concern people and places that figured significantly in her recent experiences. EGB dedicated The Travellers to E.G.R.; it recalls her first meeting with Esther Roper , who was to be...
Friends, Associates Anne Grant
During this trip, AG met Elizabeth Carter , on 16 May 1805. She enjoyed Carter's sense of humour (just the kind, she said, that appealed to her), though she was later surprised (by this time...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Grant
This contains autobiographical fragments and insightful comments on other women writers. Objects of AG 's comment include Susan Ferrier , Charlotte Smith (whose poems AG felt to be easy, flowing, and correct, but low on...
Education Elizabeth Grant
EG refers to a number of texts that influenced her as a child. She learned to read by the age of three, taught by loving aunts, and remembered in particular Puss in Boots, Bluebeard...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
2
Friends, Associates Mary Harcourt
MH and her husband subscribed in 1803 to Poems by the widowed Mrs George Sewell (Mary Sewell) . Other subscribers included Elizabeth Carter , Elizabeth Cobbold , Catherine Fanshawe , Elizabeth Montagu , Arabella Rowden
Textual Features Jane Johnson
The poem is headed with a quotation from Psalm 19: The Heavens declare the Glory of God, & the Firmament showeth his handy work—the same psalm which Addison had famously rendered as The spacious...
Author summary Samuel Johnson
Arriving in eighteenth-century London as one more young literary hopeful from the provinces, SJ achieved such a name for himself as an arbiter of poetry, of morality (through his Rambler and other periodical essays and...
Friends, Associates Samuel Johnson
Johnson had a talent for friendship which he kept well exercised: the names mentioned here represent only a selection of his friendships. His early London friends, whom he met during a comparatively poorly documented period...
Publishing Mary Jones
This volume was dedicated to the Princess of Orange : Anne, daughter of George II and the late Queen Caroline . The princess's mother had been a patron of MJ 's friend Martha Lovelace, later...
Literary responses Mary Jones
Catherine Talbot found Holt Waters and A Letter to Doctor Pitt indelicate and was surprised that Carter liked MJ 's poetry.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press.
183
The collection was warmly praised by Ralph Griffiths in the Monthly Review:...

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