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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was small but handsome. Thomas Stothard did two of the illustrations. His design for sonnet 12 (Written on the Sea Shore.—October 1784—the month in which she crossed the Channel with her children to join her husband in Normandy) shows a female romantic poet, with manuscripts, sitting on rocky cliffs above a rough sea and a doomed sailor in a little boat. This picture (titled from the line On some rude fragment of the rocky shore) became CS 's personal emblem. The 815 subscribers to the new edition included a number of the nobility (many of them recruited by Henrietta O'Neill and her husband, who took a munificent ten copies each). The Bluestockings were represented by Elizabeth Montagu (for three copies), Frances Boscawen , Elizabeth Carter , and Mary Delany . Others included the diarist Lady Mary Coke , the literary hostess Anne, Lady Miller , Horace Walpole , Sarah Siddons , Frances Burney , Henrietta Maria Bowdler (and many of her relations), and William and Eliza Hayley .

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.

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.

MC knew Elizabeth Carter slightly before her marriage, and was a friend of Samuel Richardson . Carter wrote of her to Elizabeth Montagu and as an author she also met other Bluestockings, becoming particularly friendly with Catherine Talbot .

Though at least partly resident in Edinburgh, SF did not mingle with the literary set known as the Edinburgh Bluestockings. Apart from her large circle of siblings and in-laws, her closest friends were Charlotte Clavering (1790-1869) and the novelist Lady Charlotte Bury (1775-1861)—granddaughter and daughter, respectively, of her father's employer the Duke of Argyll—and Anne Walker of Dalry, author of what seem to have been two now very rare and obscure novels published by Blackwood : Rich and Poor, 1823, and Common Events, 1825 (billed as a continuation of Rich and Poor). The correspondence between Ferrier and Walker has unfortunately not survived.

Like others of CG 's novels, it harks back to a less heartless age in which women's capacities were better able to expand. A character deplores the taste of modern readers for Annuals, annuals,—annuals!—The splendid toys of modern blueism. The present age is damned by comparison with the age of the Bluestockings. This is also the first of CG 's fully-fledged silver-fork or fashionable novels. She had always set her fiction among the upper classes, but now life in the nobility and upper income brackets is conjured up in authentic material detail, with much naming of fashionable brand-names. It incorporates, too, its own defence of the genre as the amber which serves to preserve the ephemeral modes and caprices of the passing day. The heroine, Helen Mordaunt, to please her parents, marries an older peer (forty-one to her eighteen), who neglects her to pursue his career in politics. Swallowed by the world of fashion, she develops a social relationship with a rake, and very nearly loses her reputation. In fact, as Edward Copeland points out, this cycle runs twice. First Helen is unfairly touched with scandal, her husband is wounded in a duel for her honour, she nurses him back to health (in retirement in Ireland) and the couple are able to begin getting to know each other. Back in London, at a loose end with her husband now serving as Prime Minister, Helen makes the same kind of mistake over again. At the final climactic moment of reconciliation she blames her husband as well as herself: he has been in error in failing to guide and protect her weakness. This is as close to a happy ending as CG usually gets.

Boswell's is Johnson's most famous friendship, but his women friends were immensely important to him. Carter and Lennox were joined by Hester Thrale (though Johnson always reckoned her husband, Henry Thrale , if anything the more important friend of the two), Frances Reynolds , Frances Burney , and the more obscure Margaret Bingham, Lady Lucas . He was a valuable resource for the writers among his women friends, urging them to develop toughness and professionalism in the literary market-place. His relations with Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking circle seem to have been courtly rather than cordial, perhaps on account of his championing of two women (Lennox and Thrale) whom the Bluestockings had difficulty accepting. Among late recipients of his patronage were Hannah More and (more incidentally, on possibly a single meeting each) Henrietta Battier and Mary Wollstonecraft .

While working for the Featherstones, Sydney Owenson met Thomas Moore at a party given above his parents' grocery shop in Aungier Street, Dublin. 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.

LOM was always especially proud of the fact that the Bentincks were descended, though not actually from the seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish , Duchess of Newcastle (who had no children), at least from the family line of the writer's husband, in the person of Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (née Cavendish Holles) , who was also a friend of the eighteenth-century Bluestockings and a significant patron of women. Ottoline would have known of Margaret Cavendish, as did those of her contemporaries who knew of her at all, as a great lady, an eccentric who designed her own clothes in defiance of the fashion and who published a number of extraordinary works of which the most readable was the life of her royalist commander husband. At this date Cavendish did not evoke respect or admiration as a writer, but as an independent-minded woman she did.

Her target here is malicious social gossip and the harm that it does. Those particularly vulnerable to detraction, she says, include converts to serious religion, as well as women writers and bluestockings. She calls on all those women who are really bluestockings (that is, those who love knowledge, not showing off their knowledge) to dare to be themselves.

The fuller title was The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, Theological, Moral, Dramatic, and Poetical. Several of them now first printed. Many of the bluestocking circle subscribed. Two British Library copies have different versions of the subscribers' list and different grades of paper. This was clearly a venture undertaken in order to raise money for the author, at the behest of William Warburton , Thomas Sharp (Archdeacon of Northumberland), and a third influential friend. At first Warburton himself was to edit the collection; then, after Cockburn's death, Henry Etough suggested Birch. (The money was still just as badly needed, for Cockburn's daughter.) Birch omitted most of her plays: perhaps not because they were felt to be unacceptable, but because no copies were available, she having been unable to afford to buy her own work. He supplied a life of her for clearly articulated feminist motives: her own sex is intitled to the fullest information about one, who has done such honour to them, and raised our ideas of their intellectual powers, by an example of the greatest extent of understanding and correctness of judgment, united to all the vivacity of imagination.

SW lived an independent social life which combined the old-fashioned with the modern. She was a snuff-taker. 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.

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 Several Occasions says she would be sorry to see the wild vigour of her rustic muse polished into elegance, or laboured into correctness. The quarrel between AY and Hannah More broke out within about a month of publication. The Critical Review admiringly quoted a fine passage (which, it said, was typical of the volume's quality). It also enthused over the large list of subscribers, which does honour to the author's protectress.Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Boscawen , as bluestockings and friends of Hannah More , wrote of the poems with admiration inflected by a clear sense of AY 's class and gender position; by the following year, when More was convinced of Yearsley's wickedness, bluestocking praise became more muted and qualified. An anecdote records Anna Seward 's perceptive, even prescient, response to these poems. Reading them aloud, she paused at AY 's assertion that friendship cannot dare exist without equality, and broke off to exclaim, Ah Yearsley! thou hast a proud and jealous spirit, of the Johnson ian cast. It will be difficult to oblige thee without cancelling the obligation by the manner of conferring it. Furthermore, to Thomas Sedgwick Whalley (who was friendly with both herself and More), she voiced her perception of an air of superciliousness in More's prefatory letter. Johnson, she wrote, would have resented such a tone, and that resentment, which in her [Yearsley] is universally execrated, would, coming down to us now as a record of his emerging talents, have been generally excused, even admired.

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.

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.

The play is written in warm and eloquent verse and prose. A prologue directly addresses the Bluestockings as you who make the British circle shine. It compares the plight of its hero, Heartly (in prison with his two children, the victim of money-lenders), with that of slaves. His wife, Amelia, who visits him in prison, married him for love despite her larger fortune, but her rich father now refuses them his support. Despite the efforts of the improbable Humanicus (head keeper of the prison), Benevolus, and Trueman, the wicked Teasewell refuses to release Heartly except at the price of Amelia's virtue, and Heartly dies.