1,935 copies of the book were subscribed for. Names on the list include those of BluestockingsElizabeth Carter and Hester Mulso Chapone , William Cowper , and a number of those men who later wrote for the British Critic (which was founded a couple of years after this). It featured EB 's portrait. A second edition was planned from the outset. Its contents are reproduced in Pickering and Chatto 's Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1800, volume 3, 2003.

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. In 1828, when both were old ladies, HMB was urging Burney to resume [her] pen. 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, as well as of Anna Seward and the Ladies of Llangollen (Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby ). 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.

The Honourable Sir Courtenay Boyle , MB 's father, the second surviving son of Edmund, seventh Earl of Cork and Orrery , was a Vice-Admiral. 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 .

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.

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 .

LAC was helped with her literary labours by several scribes, notably one Edward Langley . Of the four copies which she dictated and kept at various of her residences, one survives, corrected by herself: in the Hothfield Papers at the Cumbria Record Office in Kendal. Two later copies survive: at the British Library (Harley MS 6177) and in the Portland Papers (made by the eighteenth-century Duchess of Portland , friend of the bluestockings). The text of the Great Books is included in Women's Political Writings 1610-1725, edited by Hilda L. Smith , Mihoko Suzuki , and Susan Wiseman , 2007.

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.

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. In another essay, On Paper Matches, MEC argues against the practice of burning letters.

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.

View reference

Mudge, Bradford Keyes, and Sara Coleridge. Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. Yale University Press.

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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.

An epilogue by Thomas Moore sounds flippantly critical of Bluestockings (not the historical group of this name, but in the more general sense of intellectual women). A speaker appears wondering much what little knavish sprite / Had put it first in women's heads to write. In response to this question a male fairy named Bas Bleu appears, as patron of kinds of women's writing which are rendered suspect by the context: those of Miss Indigoand that best of wives and Sapphos , Lady Mary (presumably Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , though the allusion is obscure). The fairy Bas Bleu adds that tonight's play is set before the age of the modern learned lady, and presents lovely Woman, all unschool'd and wild.

As an unusually talented woman moving in fashionable and high-culture circles, the future MD knew almost everybody of interest during her lifetime, including literary celebrities. She was a good friend of the Bluestocking group, and more particularly of Ann Donellan and of Margaret, Duchess of Portland , who was highly cultivated, sociable, and rich. She was instrumental in the duchess's offer of a job (as governess) and a home for life to the scholar Elizabeth Elstob in December 1738.

This novel was published by Hookham in three volumes, and dedicated to Georgiana's friend Lady Camden . Its subscription list, in this and the second edition (issued by Hookham in 1787, in two volumes each with a frontispiece), includes a phalanx of the nobility, plus bluestockings Frances Boscawen and Elizabeth Montagu , the actress Kitty Clive , and (probably) the novelist Maria Susanna Cooper . A Dublin edition of 1784 ascribes the work to the Author of the Sylph. Jonathan David Gross has produced a scholarly edition, 2004, whose introduction argues strongly for Georgiana's authorship, which, however, is equally hotly argued against by Siv Gøril Brandtzæg . Evidence, if one discounts the parallels with her life-experience (which mostly lay in the future when this novel appeared) consists in the claim in the Dublin edition, which may well have been a marketing ploy.

On 11 February 1848 GE discusses in a letter to John Sibree her views on Hannah More (once admired, now detested as exemplifying the bluestocking woman on display as a kind of freak), Benjamin Disraeli (for his ideas on race theory, not his novels), and George Sand (for her Lettres d'un voyageur).

AKE 's maternal grandmother, Mary (Jacob) Barrett , was a Kentish woman who had been a friend of the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter , while her husband belonged (possibly through her) to Carter's literary circle, and knew Samuel Johnson and Edward Cave .

Equiano was already a well-known figure in the abolitionist movement in Britain when his book appeared. He had issued Proposals for his subscription in November 1788 (the same month that George III fell ill, probably delaying the venture), and his list of 311 subscribers (including thirty-seven women in the first edition) included eminent names. Several members of the royal family subscribed, as well as allies through race like Ottobah Cugoano and the son of the late Ignatius Sancho ; prominent white abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson , Granville Sharp , and John Wesley ; John Graves Simcoe , who later, as Lieutenant-Governor of Canada, sought to prohibit slavery there; and bluestocking writers Elizabeth Montagu and Hannah More . Joanna Baillie , who subscribed along with the rest of her family, was not yet known to the public. A second edition of OE 's book appeared that year and a third the next. In 1791 they were joined by an edition published at Dublin, and an unauthorized edition in New York. A fifth official version was published in Edinburgh in 1792. The sixth and seventh editions (London, 1792 and 1793) were enlarged, as was the eighth (Norwich, 1794). The last edition published in its author's lifetime was the ninth (London, 1794), with almost three times as many subscribers as the first. Most of these editions included printed testimonials (which suggests, as in the case of Phillis Wheatley , a felt need to contradict scepticism that an African could write a book) and excerpts from reviews. An edition published at Leeds in 1814 was illustrated with Josiah Wedgwood 's famous medallion of a kneeling slave: Am I not a man and a brother?

The work was dedicated to Lady Pomfret . Its 440 subscribers included many prominent people, reflecting the bluestockings' range of influence as well as SF 's local and family connections: Ralph Allen , Lord Chesterfield , David Garrick , James Harris , Lord Lyttelton , Beau Nash , Samuel Richardson , Uvedale Price , John Wilkes , Lady Mary Coke , Elizabeth Cutts , Frances Greville , Susanna Highmore (later Duncombe) , Lady Barbara Montagu , Elizabeth Montagu , Sarah Scott , and Catherine Talbot . The husbands of Mary Delany and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu took ten copies each.

Structured along the lines of Brecht ian epic theatre, but filmic in many of its methods, PG 's drama presents a sequence of episodes from the life of the seventeenth-century Swedish ruler Queen Christina . The play foregrounds the question of gender identity: brought up as a boy, Christina lives as a man, despises women, and abdicates rather than comply with the expectation that she should marry and bear children. The second act finds her travelling through Europe after her abdication, stopping in at a Bluestocking salon in Paris, and debating reproductive rights with the Pope. In the end, Christina comes to realize the way she has been pushed into playing a man's part and suddenly reverses her thinking, regrets her childlessness, and demands the right to bear a child. Throughout, PG resists the romantic treatment of Queen Christina presented by her main source, the 1933 film starring Greta Garbo .

This ingenious plot plays with many ideas: the roots of prejudice and of emotion, the relation of intellect to feeling, the physical embodiment of personality, and inescapably along with these a condemnation of intellect in women (Eric is redeemed; his daughter is not), in line with the dedication's rejection of bluestockings.

Her work was unusually controversial even for a controversial movement, meeting with severe criticism for its sexual frankness and feminist politics, and high praise for bringing into the open such issues as sexually transmitted disease. This reputation rested on her novel about female sexuality and venereal disease, The Heavenly Twins, which established her as a ground-breaking, influential woman. She was perceived and portrayed by her critics as a man-hater, mannish, and anti-marriage, largely because this book squarely confronted issues of the oppression of women which shocked the public. She was nevertheless already doing everything she could to counter such criticism. Though ready to heap blame for women's troubles on her particular male characters and on the male sex in general, she also holds women responsible for their own failure to progress, regards them as failures if they have not succeeded at marriage and motherhood, and requires from them great efforts to become and remain pleasing to men. Sympathetic contemporary commentators stressed her social acceptability. Journalist Sarah A. Tooley noted in 1897 that [w]ith her kindly gracious manner, melodious voice, and slightly diffident bearing, she is an exact antithesis of what the author of The Heavenly Twins has so often been depicted to be.Athol Forbes , of the Lady's World, described her in 1901 as all that the new woman ought to be, and nothing that she is popularly supposed to be. Other critics lambasted and ridiculed her: Quentin Murray lampooned her in Battleton Rectory as Mrs Tumbledown, whose manner was singularly lacking in that gentleness which is a woman's great charm, representing her feminism as a joke and calling her a bluestocking with hostile intention. After all the controversy surrounding her during the years of the suffrage struggle, by the time of her death in 1943 she had largely been forgotten by both history and literary history. Critic Teresa Mangum suggests that early and continuing misrepresentation contributed to this oblivion.

The foundations of her wide reading were laid in her childhood, though she regretted not having learned Latin. She imbibed Scots nationalism, idealism, and self-dependence (something emphasised by her aunt). When visitors arrived while she was reading the philosophical-scientific writer Lord Kames , she hid the book, because her aunt was afraid she would be taken for a bluestocking. Later she was not afraid to differ publicly with Kames, and declined his biographer's offer to cut his account their disagreement.

The Female Spectator is acutely class-conscious, and addresses its advice on education to the gentry or aspiring gentry—while also delivering the message, as critic Iona Italia puts it, that [g]entlemen may be a subgroup of male readers, but all female readers are ladies. French salon society, a kind of foretaste of the Bluestockings in England, seems to be the ideal it proposes for cultivated, publicly articulate women. Readers are expected to spend several hours a day in serious study of ancient authors, moral philosophy, mathematics, geography, botany, zoology (in which it is open to them to add to the list of known species), history, astronomy, and medicine. The London pastimes discussed in the magazine include Ranelagh, the pantomime, and gambling. Its political issues include that of female rulers (topical in mid-eighteenth-century Europe). Though it has little to say about the Jacobite rebellion, it pays considerable attention to the War of Austrian Succession—sometimes while pretending not to, as when a fictional correspondent complains of the magazine's silence while cities have been depopulated:—towns laid waste:—ravage! burn! and destroy all before you!—spare neither sex nor age!—have been the words of command.Lord Carteret 's leadership is questioned, and an English and a Hanoverian lady debate their requirements for their joint monarch.

However evasive she may have been about her personal life, GH expressed strong views and was known to have warned: Don't you get thinking this is a fair world for women, because it isn't. Although a self-confessed bluestocking, she hated suffrage demonstrations and women with a magnified sense of their own importance (the kind of women she apparently associated with the suffrage struggle).

MJ here traces the shift from eighteenth-century tolerance and scepticism to Victorian religious earnestness. She makes good use of writing during these periods, including writing by women (novels, diaries, letters, memoirs), showing herself a highly knowledgeable and perceptive reader. She also shows by default how inadequate was the history of women's writing available to her: Anna Letitia Barbauld is unmentioned among the educators, and Mary Wollstonecraft ranks only a footnote as the solitary extremist rebel of the late eighteenth century . . . so untypical that she hardly affects a study of general social development. So the radicals, unlike the Bluestockings and later moderate reformers, remain erased, not by Jaeger but by her seondary sources.

The book bears in various details the influence of Jane Austen , though its overall project of pious didacticism is at odds with Austen's approach. The title-page quotes Rousseau on the topic of the sensitive soul. The story opens with the heroine, Eliza Rivers, [y]oung, beautiful, and highly accomplished (as well as rich and an orphan), living in a village. In the opening scene her grandmother dies, and she joins the household of her widowed guardian, whose daughter Louisa is six years older than herself and whom her grandmother had suspected of being worldly. While Eliza reads Byron , Scott , and Campbell , Louisa is reading Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor. Eliza also writes poetry, using the same paper she uses for memos about purchases for poor children and copies of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility for herself. Her circle includes Mrs Bartley, who with four daughters to marry off is putting them out into society one at a time. Eliza meets several apparently eligible men. Sir George Melmoth she scorns for preferring his hounds to the opera (she is a devotee of Mozart 's Cosi Fan Tutte; he dislikes bluestockings). His friend Waldegrave is attractive, but said to be a womaniser. The character of another, Mortimer Durand, is conveyed to the reader through discussions of women's writing. Eliza is enjoying and admiring Madame du Deffand , but Mortimer is a little hard-hearted in his view of Deffand. Indeed, he sees her as a miserable old woman, destitute of all that can make [old age] respectable or interesting; he clearly dislikes her for being French, but more for being a religious sceptic, which is worse in a woman, worst of all in an old woman. In a striking phrase he pronounces: I feel the want of dying, as one feels the want of sleep. On the other hand he admires writers whom Eliza calls methodistical, Henrietta Maria Bowdler and Hannah More . He judges that More, if considered as a christian, a woman, or a writer, is one of the highest ornaments of human nature. He fails to exert any influence on Eliza, who soon moves on to reading de Staël 's Corinne. Though Cowper is quoted elsewhere in this novel, it is women writers who are used to map its intellectual and religious issues.