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?

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.

FW 's mother, Camilla Campbell Wright , belonged to the British aristocracy. The bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson Montagu was her godmother and great-aunt.

There she began to frequent Elizabeth Montagu 's bluestocking circle. She was introduced in cultural circles by Andrew Kippis , minister of the church her family attended, and soon knew William Hayley , Sarah Siddons , and George Romney . John Moore , like Kippis, became her mentor. Her freedom to move among very different intellectual groupings was greater than it would have been once the French Revolution had polarized opinion on that issue, and thus created a general divide between radicals and conservatives. Her friends included Frances Burney and her family (who had close links with Samuel Johnson ), and Anna Seward (who was already hostile to Johnson).

As an adolescent Ella Wheeler wrote every day something between two and eight bits of verse (I called them poems then), and earned three or five dollars for those accepted. When she was fourteen a neighbour told her she would soon be a regular bluestocking, round-shouldered, and wearing spectacles. Though horrified, she devised herself a home-made backboard to keep herself straight rather than reducing her writing time.

Marianne defends Louisa against the charge of being a bluestocking: Though her education had extended to particulars not usually attended to by females, there was nothing in her conversation to excite the apprehensions which gentlemen are apt to entertain of learned ladies. The novel, however, is thickly studded with Louisa's verses. She is fully occupied in charitable works for the village where she lives, and improves a small estate left her by her grandfather. Nevertheless, her father dies after facing financial ruin and the suicide of his business partner. JW 's elaborate, comic chapter-titles include The dawn of Connubial Felicity, with a word or two on the pleasure of tormenting (an allusion to Jane Collier ), Very palatable to the Lords of Creation, as it exhibits them in the possession of plenitude of Power, and The author's opinions of the politicks of Hymen, seem to be in favour of a limited monarchy.

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.

RT and her English teacher assumed that she would do A level exams at Crofton Grange and then try for a place at Oxford: she needed only to work harder at Latin. But her mother did not want her to turn into a bluestocking and decreed that Oxford was an inappropriate dream which would make her mother a laughing stock. In spite of the heartfelt regrets expressed by her teachers on her final school report, Rose left at not yet sixteen and was sent to a finishing school in Switzerland: Mon Fertile at Morges on Lac Léman. The school was multinational, and girls were compelled to speak French at all times. In autumn the girls helped harvest the grapes; in winter they were all re-settled at a nearby ski resort. Though RT never made any improvemente through ski-ing lessons, they provided a memorable motto for inculcating boldness: tits to the valley. The girls learned shorthand and typing, and studied French literature (the tragedies of Corneille and Racine , and Le Petit prince by Saint-Exupéry ).

E. M. Forster presented twenty letters by AS in 1939 to the Dr Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield, where they still remain.AS has some poems and letters included in volume four of Pickering and Chatto 's series Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1790, 1999, general editor Gary Kelly. The critical biography by Teresa Barnard , 2009 (which draws on unpublished letters and manuscripts) calls her one of the most significant and compelling figures in the history of writing women. A monograph by Claudia Thomas Kairoff appeared in 2012.

The fantastical plot of The Merchant of Pongee unfolds in the village of Pongee in India. The story follows Trumble Hicks and his nephew Tom Dingle as they attempt to become rich. When their plan fails Hicks asks Dingle to kill him for the insurance money. However, Hicks then meets Lady Sophie, a wealthy young woman with bluestocking tastes, and they plan to get married. Dingle is jealously angered by the idea of this marriage and hires an assassin to kill his uncle in earnest. While planning her wedding to Hicks, Lady Sophie falls in love with Dingle. Meanwhile, Hicks is being pursued by Miss Toboggan, a missionary acquaintance of Lady Sophie, and he also finds out that he is not after all impoverished. The show concludes with the couples uniting.

One of those who read this letter-book was the Bluestocking Catherine Talbot in 1753; another was Rowe herself, years after she had written the earlier letters in it.

CR provided presentation copies for the great Ladies who probably included members of the Bluestocking group; she evidently hoped to secure the ear of influential members of the public.

Her subscribers included many naval and some military personnel, a sprinkling of the nobility, Sir Joseph Banks and (separately) his wife , Frances Boscawen (bluestocking and admiral's widow), Hannah More , and printer-antiquary John Bowyer Nichols . Her book was reproduced in facsimile in Australia in 1991 with useful commentary, edited by Deirdre Coleman with interesting illustrations in 1999, and reprinted again in the final volume of Travels, Explorations, and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770-1835, 2001. It was reissued by Cambridge University Press in 2010, online and in print-on-demand format.

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 rulerQueen 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 .

CG told Sydney Morgan that her publisher, Bentley , had both thought of the subject and suggested the title. But with this self-exculpation she admitted that her protagonist was based on Mary, Countess of Cork and Orrery , once a junior bluestocking and later a grand hostess, who this year (as Morgan put it) died in harness, full of bitterness and good dinners. Gore said she had resisted Bentley to the extent of making her portrait not too much like the original, and thought the resemblance was more in mannerisms than essentials.

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.

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).

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 .

LCL 's friendships with women writers (besides Morgan) would surprise anyone not taking her seriously as a writer. When Germaine de Staël visited England, Lady Caroline was delighted to find her wearing a hat with a pen-box stuck in it. When John Murray asked for her help in correcting the proof of an English translation of Staël's De l'Allemagne and she thought certain passages of the translation inadequate, LCL at once enlisted her husband to supply a better version. Another friend was Elizabeth Benger : LCL was a regular at the bohemian bluestocking gatherings of Benger and Elizabeth Isabella Spence , as well as those of Lydia White . An anecdote has Lamb visiting Benger in the latter's one-room lodgings and embarrassing her hostess when her little dog retrieved some dirty stockings from under the bed. She initiated a correspondence with Amelia Opie , apparently attracted by Opie's poetry rather than her novels, but was soon asking for advice about stories of her own. Rosina Bulwer Lytton , whom LCL met while she was still the beautiful Rosina Wheeler and still years away from her career as a writer, was a protégée as well as a friend.

One of those prepared to welcome her was Elizabeth Benger , who invited the brother and sister to tea, and was keen to get them back again to meet Jane and Anna Maria Porter . But Charles, at least, felt they had been invited more as friends of Coleridge than for their own sakes, and afterwards ridiculed Benger's self-consciously intellectual conversational gambits, her belief that nothing good had been written in poetry since Samuel Johnson, and her desire to discuss Pope and Hannah More. He apparently despised Benger both as a pre-Romantic and as a bluestocking. The acquaintance seems not to have prospered.

A bluestocking-style brilliant Constellation of ladies, gathered at the Leesisters ' house in Bath, debated the authorship of Plays on the Passions, which were not yet known to be by Joanna Baillie .