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
Textual Production Katherine Philips
Another poem, dates five months after To my excellent Lucasia, marked Anne Owen's receiving the name of Lucasia, and adoption into our society.
Philips, Katherine. Collected Works. Editors Thomas, Patrick et al., Stump Cross Books, 1990–1993, 3 vols.
1: 101
Another, To Mrs. Mary Awbrey at parting was reprinted...
Intertextuality and Influence Katherine Philips
Elizabeth Carter used KP as a pattern for a poem about friendship. It has been much debated whether Philips's 'Tis true our life is but a long disease is a source for Pope 's famous...
Publishing Sarah Pearson
Subscribers included members of the Fitzwilliam family (that of Pearson's patron ),
Ashfield, Andrew. Emails to Isobel Grundy about Sarah/Susanna Pearson, Harriet Downing. 16 May 2016.
plus several from the wider literary world: Elizabeth Carter , her nephew Montagu Pennington , and the obscure novelist Mrs Carver , who...
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Wentworth Morton
The title-page quotes romantic, melancholy lines from Byron 's Childe Harold.
Bottorff, William K., and Sarah Wentworth Morton. “Introduction”. My Mind and its Thoughts, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975, pp. 5-16.
12
An Apology closing the volume speaks of SWM 's disappointments and distresses (which are often mentioned, though unspecified, in her work) especially...
Friends, Associates Hannah More
Here she began to gather the circle of friends which by the end of her long life had touched every cranny of English society. She had already met Edmund Burke in Bristol the previous September...
Leisure and Society Hannah More
Once an omnivorous reader, HM restricted her choice of books in later life, in line with her religious convictions. She delighted in William Cowper as a poet whom I can read on Sunday.
qtd. in
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
90
From...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Seymour Montague
The third epistle performs the conventional act of praising historical women: the monarchs Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great of Russia for their exercise of power, the French scholar Anne Dacier , and eleven British...
Travel Elizabeth Montagu
EM travelled to Paris with a group which included her nephew Matthew Montagu , Dorothea Gregory , and Elizabeth Carter 's nephew Montagu Pennington .
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
249
Rizzo, Betty. Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women. University of Georgia Press, 1994.
130
Blunt, Reginald, and Elizabeth Montagu. Mrs Montagu, "Queen of the Blues", Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800. Constable, 1923, 2 vols.
1: 311, 335
Textual Features Elizabeth Montagu
EM expressed to Elizabeth Carter the Bluestockings' determination to think for ourselves, & act for ourselves, rather than being so perfectly of ye [sic] Rib of Man as Woman ought to be.
qtd. in
Chisholm, Kate. “Bluestocking Feminism”. New Rambler, 2003, pp. 60-6.
62
Wealth and Poverty Elizabeth Montagu
By her marriage EM acquired wealth and improved her social standing. Edward Montagu was a grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich (admiral and patron of Samuel Pepys ). He owned mines in the rapidly-developing...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter (the most intellectually...
Travel Elizabeth Montagu
Her delight in her journey (on which Elizabeth Carter as well as Bath accompanied her) is reflected in the whimsicality of her letters to England about it. She claimed to have seen mermaids as she...
Textual Features Elizabeth Montagu
The letters of EM 's youth—to the Duchess of Portland and to her sister Sarah Scott —are sparkling, irreverent, and inventive. Some of these were conveyed via Elizabeth Elstob .
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Her early claim about the...
Literary responses Elizabeth Montagu
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge , in a review of this book and of Alice Gaussen 's monograph on Elizabeth Carter , used them to place the Bluestockings in relation to modern women's behaviour, but she was...

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