76 results for bluestocking

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.

Catherine Talbot

CT was a member of the eighteenth-century Bluestocking group. Most remarkable among her poetry and prose (essays and other non-fiction pieces, a fairy story and letters) are the poems of love and loss which have been only recently rediscovered.

Margaret Bingham, Countess Lucan

MBCL , eighteenth-century London miniature-painter, wit, and minor bluestocking, seems to have written verse all her life. Her writing would not be remembered if it were not for her strong political poem protesting against Britain's treatment of Ireland.

Hester Mulso Chapone

As a young woman Hester Mulso (later HMC ) was a forceful arguer against social injustice meted out to women, but her enduring reputation as a writer and Bluestocking is as a staid, conservative moralist and dispenser of advice. She wrote letters, essays, poems, and conduct literature.

Lady Louisa Stuart

Her mother, Lady Bute , has often been represented in writings about her mother as dull and conservative. But she had written immensely talented and satirical poems during her teenage years, then married the man of her choice against her parents' opposition. In maturity she was a highly intelligent and cultured, as well as discreet and politically astute, woman, on the fringes of the Bluestocking group.
Lady Bute's juvenile poems are discussed by Isobel Grundy in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Daughter: The Changing Use of Manuscripts, 2002.
Grundy, Isobel. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Daughter: The Changing Use of Manuscripts”. Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800, edited by George Justice and Nathan Tinker, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 182-00.
182-98

Susanna Watts

SW lived an independent social life which combined the old-fashioned with the modern. She was a snuff-taker.
Beale, Catherine Hutton, editor. Catherine Hutton and Her Friends. Cornish Brothers, 1895.
158-9
In 1800 she and the Coltman sisters, Elizabeth and Mary Ann , belonged to a self-consciously bluestocking female club which, in a spirit of friendly banter, refused to admit a friendly male who wanted to join, and who therefore said he would call them dragons. The single extant image of her is a portrait drawn by herself and surviving in her scrapbook: a slight figure in a bonnet, with an eager smile.
Aucott, Shirley. Susanna Watts (1768 to 1842): author of Leicester’s first guide, abolitionist and bluestocking. Shirley Aucott, 2004.
18, 5

Charlotte Smith

This novel follows a married, English hero (introduced in The Old Manor House) and heroine to the United States (where slavery is described and assessed), Portugal (where the plot lapses into romance), and back to London.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan, 1998.
212
The hero becomes a writer, which involves him in unhappy experiences with a self-styled patron, a bluestocking celebrity and other aspects of the literary marketplace.

Sarah Scott

The fame of SS 's elder sister, Elizabeth , later eclipsed her own. They enjoyed a very close relationship while they were growing up. Their nickname the two Peas suggests how they were regarded as a matched pair. In 1734 Elizabeth entered London society as companion to her friend Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland , leaving Sarah behind on the family estate. Sarah felt deeply the loss of her sister's companionship. After Elizabeth married George Montagu in August 1742, Sarah stayed with her sister at various times until she moved in with Lady Barbara Montagu. Elizabeth also supplemented Sarah's income on many occasions. The two sisters maintained a close relationship throughout their lives.
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, 1996, p. ix - xlv.
x-xiii
Rizzo suggests that Sarah's relationship with her sister was a compelling preoccupation
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, 1996, p. ix - xlv.
x
in her life, and that she never forgave Elizabeth for abandoning her. She also suggests that the smallpox which ruined Sarah's beauty set the two sisters on different courses: Elizabeth as a bluestocking in the social limelight, and Sarah as a social activist.
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, 1996, p. ix - xlv.
x
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
33, 137

Hester Lynch Piozzi

As Mrs Thrale, HLP wished to acquire a circle, even a salon, of leaders in London's intellectual and cultural life. Her husband's occupation was against her in a society was which highly stratified and dominated by the nobility. She established friendly relations with many of the bluestocking group; but the brilliant company she assembled at Streatham was largely male.

Anne Hunter

From about 1786 AH became known as a London literary hostess, although her husband was too much of a workaholic to be clubbable. She took up the baton of bluestocking entertainment as the earliest generation were beginning to feel their years. William Beloe counted her as a leading bluestocking, but Caroline Grigson notes that she is mentioned very little in writings either by or about those at the centre of the group.
Hunter, Anne. The Life and Poems of Anne Hunter, Haydn’s Tuneful Voice. Editor Grigson, Caroline, Liverpool University Press, 2009.
44, 46

Louisa Anne Meredith

Bluestocking Reputation

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, and laid the foundations for a friendship which remained unaffected by their political differences.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
19-20
In London she was a great hit with David Garrick and his wife, the former Eva Maria Veigel , at whose house she often stayed. Garrick called her Nine, in allusion to his opinion that she was equal to the nine Muses rolled into one. More pertinently, he was the patron of her career as a writer for the stage, and he and his wife introduced her to many of the leaders of London cultural life, including manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan . Samuel Johnson helped her, loved her (though he called her a flatterer), and introduced her to many other distinguished figures in the literary and cultural landscape. Elizabeth Montagu became her friend and correspondent, and made her free of her large social circle, crucially including the Bluestockings. More got to know Frances Boscawen , Elizabeth Carter , Mary Delany , the Duchess of Portland , Lady Bute , Anna Letitia Barbauld , and Sir Joshua Reynolds , and visited Montagu and Boscawen at their homes both in and outside London. She was also a good friend of the actress Sarah Siddons , the artist Frances Reynolds , the musician Charles Burney , and the historian Edward Gibbon . All these knew HM as a young woman: bubbly, energetic, naive, giving little hint of the formidable force she would become in national life. Her Bluestocking friendships were of two generations, taking in both Boscawen and her daughter the Duchess of Beaufort . With Hester Lynch Piozzi and Frances Burney , however, she failed at this stage of her life to develop a rapport.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
17, 21, 25, 27, 31, 42, 54, 59-61

Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

While working for the Featherstones, Sydney Owenson met Thomas Moore at a party given above his parents' grocery shop in Aungier Street, Dublin.
Campbell, Mary, 1917 - 2002. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora, 1988.
46
She gained access to Ireland's bluestocking circle through Alicia or Alice Lefanu , daughter of the novelist and playwright Frances Sheridan (who had been dead for more than a generation). Lefanu's literary status depended more on her famous theatrical brother, Richard Brinsley , than on her mother.
Campbell, Mary, 1917 - 2002. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora, 1988.
51-2
It was not she, but a niece of the same name , who became a writer and published memoirs of Frances Sheridan.

Diana Athill

One of DA 's aunts had studied at Oxford , become the family bluestocking, and worked as a hospital almoner in London, but had come home when her father died to look after her perfectly healthy mother, according to the expectations of that time. She was an important influence on Diana, introducing her to serious painting and to the idea of foreign travel.
Athill, Diana. Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill. Granta, 2009.
276-8

Anna Letitia Barbauld

ALB met Elizabeth Montagu for the first time (after some months' correspondence) when on her honeymoon trip she visited Montagu's house in Hill Street, Mayfair, London site of the famous bluestocking salon.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
147
McCarthy, William et al. “Introduction”. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, University of Georgia Press, 1994, p. xxi - xlvi.
xliv
Rodgers, Betsy. Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family. Methuen, 1958.
80

Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger

Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley , who had already discovered her in her solitude.
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 33 vols.
1 n.s., 1827.126
Sarah was a grand-daughter of Susanna Wesley , niece of Mehetabel Wright and John Wesley .
She now met Dr George Gregory and his wife, through them Elizabeth Hamilton , then Anna Letitia Barbauld and Lucy Aikin , with whom she developed a lifelong intimacy. She became a special friend of the painter Robert Smirke and his accomplished daughter, as well as of Joanna Baillie and other names whose celebrity would have attracted attention in the proudest saloons of the metropolis.
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 33 vols.
1 n.s., 1827.127
EOB 's friendship with Lady Caroline Lamb (a relationship across class lines) may have been what Aikin had in mind in this last phrase. Benger was also a friend of Jane and Anna Maria Porter (she was corresponding with Jane by late 1802), and Eliza Fenwick . Germaine de Staël judged her to be the most interesting woman she had met in England. Charles Lamb , on the other hand, whom she invited to tea, coffee, and macaroons along with his sister Mary (who was unwelcome to many hostesses because of her history of violent insanity), wrote of her in the satirical tone of a man dismissing a woman as a bluestocking.
Aikin, Lucy, and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger. “Memoir of Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger”. Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, 3rd ed., Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827.
Burton, Sarah. A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb. Viking, 2003.
161-2, 154
Women Writers of the (long) English Regency. Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts, 2009.
29

Henrietta Maria Bowdler

Frances Burney preferred HMB , as more kind and gentle, to her sister Frances Bowdler. Burney amusingly records a visit by herself, HMB and others, to Lady Miller of Batheaston on 8 June 1780, when Miller and members of her family overwhelmed Burney with effusive praise of Evelina, while HMB (presumably entering into Burney's feelings of embarrassment) modestly mumbled some praise.
Burney, Frances. Journals and Letters. Editors Sabor, Peter and Lars E. Troide, Penguin, 2001.
160
In 1828, when both were old ladies, HMB was urging Burney to resume [her] pen.
Burney, Frances. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay). Editors Hemlow, Joyce and Althea Douglas, Clarendon Press, 1972–1984, 12 vols.
12: 705
Bowdler (like Burney) was unkindly censorious about Hester Piozzi 's second marriage, though she later became Piozzi's friend. She was a close friend, too, of Elizabeth Smith (who was also her pupil) and of the bluestocking circle,
Feminist Companion Archive.
as well as of Anna Seward and the Ladies of Llangollen (Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby ).
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
183
Hester Thrale (now Piozzi) called HMB an intimate of the ladies, to whom Bowdler sent regular supplies of Bath gossip, verses, and political news, with on one occasion the gift of an Alderney cow. She asked in return, she said, only their affection.
Piozzi, Hester Lynch. The Piozzi Letters. Editors Bloom, Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses, 1989–2002, 6 vols.
3: 66
Mavor, Elizabeth. The Ladies of Llangollen. Penguin, 1973.
162-3

Mary Boyle

The Honourable Sir Courtenay Boyle , MB 's father, the second surviving son of Edmund, seventh Earl of Cork and Orrery , was a Vice-Admiral.
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray, 1902.
4
One of his postss was commissioner of the dockyards at Sheerness, and his daughter Mary later remembered as a child watching convicts at work there in chains.
His family had produced notable women as well as men, especially two of the sisters of Robert Boyle the seventeenth-century scientist: Katherine, Lady Ranelagh , a learned woman closely associated with her brother, and the diarist Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick . An aunt by marriage to MB was the bluestocking hostess Mary Boyle, Countess of Cork and Orrery who was a particular friend of the novelist Sydney Morgan .

Emma Frances Brooke

While at Newnham College , EFB began her acquaintance with Charlotte Mary Martin , later Charlotte Wilson , a forceful young bluestocking with a similar growing dissatisfaction about the political beliefs that she was exposed to at Cambridge . This initiated a close, life-long friendship.
Daniels, Kay. “Emma Brooke: Fabian, feminist and writer”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
12
, No. 2, 2003, pp. 153-68.
156

Frances Burney

Among those whom FB met through the Thrales' hospitable house at Streatham were members of the Bluestocking circle. Through Hester Chapone she met Mary Delany , and a real friendship developed despite the more than fifty years difference in their ages. She reverenced Mrs Delany as she reverenced Johnson. Another long-lasting friendship was with Frederica Augusta Locke , a Surrey neighbour of FB 's sister Susan.

Elizabeth Carter

She occupies volume two in Pickering and Chatto 's series Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1790, 1999, general editor Gary Kelly . This volume includes her Epictetus, her two Rambler essays, and selected poetry and letters.
Johnson's House in Gough Square, London opened an exhibition on EC (in what was once Anna Williams 's room) in July 2011.
“Elizabeth Carter Display”. Dr Johnson’s House.

Sarah Chapone

SC was a great networker. Having met George Ballard , a local man (perhaps because her sister was a patient of his mother, who was a midwife), she introduced him to Elizabeth Elstob and to Samuel Richardson . She helped find patronage and a source of income for Elstob, writing on her behalf a circular letter to potential patrons. The £100 subscription with which Queen Caroline responded reflected the queen's admiration for Chapone's letter as well as for Elstob. In introducing Elstob to the bluestocking circle, SC formed a personal and intellectual link from them back to Mary Astell .
Ballard, George. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. Editor Perry, Ruth, Wayne State University Press, 1985.
14, 21, 23, 40
Glover, Susan Paterson, and Sarah Chapone. “Introduction”. The Hardships of the English Laws, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1-16.
5-6

Frances Power Cobbe

An important early friend of FPC was Harriet St Leger , a bluestocking who dressed in masculine fashion and lived intimately with her friend Dorothy Wilson . FPC and novelist Felicia Skene were lifelong friends and correspondents from their introduction in 1845.
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
7, 50, 60, 61

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

The volume includes literary criticism on works by Richard Watson Dixon and William Butler Yeats . The memoir The Drawing-Room recalls Robert Browning 's visit to MEC 's childhood home. Recollections of Mrs. Fanny Kemble recounts a quarrel sparked between MEC and Kemble when Kemble (the elder by fifty years) asked to show some of Coleridge's work to a friend. During their exchange, Kemble declared: You deserve to be called a scribbling woman. You are that thing men call a blue.—an unusually extreme example of the bluestocking allusion which was generally more or less hostile at this date.
qtd. in
Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth. Non Sequitur. J. Nisbet, 1900.
186
In another essay, On Paper Matches, MEC argues against the practice of burning letters.
Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth. Non Sequitur. J. Nisbet, 1900.
195
Beum, Robert, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 98. Gale Research, 1990.
75

Sara Coleridge

SC 's biographer Bradford Keyes Mudge, however, sees Edith's contribution less positively. He writes: having no desire to expose any part of her mother's private life, Edith edited a two-dimensional portrait of a proper Victorian bluestocking, Coleridge's gifted daughter decorously acting out his legacy. But the relentlessly intellectual, often abstruse letters of Edith's edition illustrate . . . how important it was for Sara to find a forum for her ideas . . . a place in which she could discuss the most recent works of literature, history, or theology without violating the prohibitions against women writers.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, and Sara Coleridge. Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. Yale University Press, 1989.
59
Her judgements are sometimes unsparing. For example, in a letter to John Kenyon dated July 1838, SC writes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Were [her] writings from the hand of a man, they would be set down as unsuccessful productions exhibiting some portion of poetic power and merit and never have made the tenth part of the noise which as the poems of Miss Barrett they have created.
qtd. in
Mudge, Bradford Keyes. “Sara Coleridge: A Portrait from the Papers”. Library Chronicle of the University of Texas, Vol.
23
, 1983, pp. 15-35.
34