Douglass, Paul. Lady Caroline Lamb. Palgrave Macmillan.
154
196 results for bluestocking
Lady Caroline Lamb
's friendships with women writers (besides Morgan) would surprise anyone not taking her seriously as a writer. When
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,
at once enlisted her
to supply a better version. Another friend was
:
was a regular at the bohemian bluestocking gatherings of Benger and
, as well as those of
. 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
, apparently attracted by Opie's poetry rather than her novels, but was soon asking for advice about stories of her own.
, whom
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.
Mary Lamb, 1764 - 1847
One of those prepared to welcome her was
, who invited the brother and sister to tea, and was keen to get them back again to meet
and
. 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.
Sophia Lee
A bluestocking-style brilliant Constellation of ladies, gathered at the
' house in Bath, debated the authorship of Plays on the Passions, which were not yet known to be by
.
Charlotte Lennox
The legend that she had no female friends is further debunked by newly-discovered letters. She formed a close group with
,
, and her fellow-writer
. The friendship between Lennox and Clerke weathered various ups and downs; when Clerke's husband died in debt, Lennox, though badly off herself, suggested in terms fitting for a sentimental heroine that they should share her current home and pool their resources. Sylvia Thornton owned a portrait of Lennox which she bequeathed to her sister in a codicil to her will (proved in 1793). While she left objects of sentimental value to Clerke, she left Lennox five guineas and various items of clothing: a bequest of practical value for a friend in financial straits. It remains true, however, that the Bluestocking group appears to have found
socially undesirable.
Jane Loudon
was taught at home by a governess; she later pronounced this the safest, healthiest, the pleasantest and most effectual as well as the cheapest form of education—though she also believed that governesses needed to be better educated and better paid, and that modern education suffered from trying to pack in too much in too short a time. At the time she did not want to study too much: she had an awful idea of a learned lady or bluestocking, whom I always pictured as a cross old maid, who did not like little children, and who talked in a high-flown language that very few could understand. Her travels with her father were also undertaken with educational aims: while abroad she worked at German, French, and Italian. Back at home she felt, ironically, a positive dislike for the study of botany, but became skilled in country arts like dairying and raising poultry.
Mary Seymour Montague:
It is likely though not absolutely certain that the author was really female. Her pseudonym suggests
(who had died nine years earlier, and whom this poem praises as the only woman capable of standing up to
). It is tempting but risky to suppose that Seymour might be a giveaway signalling the writer and sculptor
, who until her marriage in 1767 was
. Other allusions might be read into this pseudonym and into other features of the text. Either or somebody else signed the Editor's Advertisement To the Gentlemen of Great-Britain (in prose) as Fra. Bacon Lee. A verse Address to the Ladies of the Coterie (which appears to be another name for the Bluestockings) is unsigned. The text is available through
.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
These are displays of learning, compliment, and sometimes satire, with a bluestocking tone.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
His attention to questions of power and representation helped spawn poststructuralist theory. His unregenerate misogyny—expressed in contempt for little bluestockings like
, for
as a prolific writing-cow, and in Thus Spake Zarathustra's proclamation: You're going to women? Don't forget your whip!—has rendered his work symptomatic and problematic for feminist readers.
performed her own translation of this latter work in the early twentieth century, and
was led to abandon feminism for anarchism in part by her reading of
. He influenced many other writers, especially
and
.
Julia O'Faolain
's mother used to tell her suspense-driven fairy-tales, most of which were later published. When Julia was very young they gave her nightmares. Her father agreed to give her The Child's Encyclopedia when she asked for it as a gift, but warned her against becoming a bluestocking: Literary ladies grow hair on their faces. She mentions among her early favourite authors
,
, and
.
Mary Ann Parker
Her subscribers included many naval and some military personnel, a sprinkling of the nobility,
and (separately) his
,
(bluestocking and admiral's widow),
, and printer-antiquary
. Her book was reproduced in facsimile in Australia in 1991 with useful commentary, edited by
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
in 2010, online and in print-on-demand format.
Eliza Parsons
She gave her name as Mrs. Parsons on the title-page and signed the dedication with both her names. A title-page epigraph reads: Brutus said Virtue was but a name—tis more. . . . (The reference is not Shakespeare's Brutus.)
dedicated her work, by permission, to the
(chief recent patron of her late husband, the wife of a former earl who had been created a marquess the year before this). In this dedication she mentions her very disadvantageous circumstances, her husband's sad condition, and the eight dear fatherless children whom her dedicatee has helped to preserve. Her preface pays homage to women's writing in the guise of a fear to follow a
, a
, a
, a
, and many other excellent female novelists. Her distinguished subscribers included three Royal Highnesses, various nobles,
and a number of Bluestockings and women writers:
,
,
,
(who, Parsons said later, was the first to persuade her to publish),
,
,
and her
,
,
, and
.
Jane Porter
Her Thaddeus owes much to Kościuszko, but he is only half Polish: his English father abandoned his royally-descended Polish mother. In the battle between the courageous underdog Poland and tyrannical Russia, Thaddeus forges a friendship with Pembroke Somerset, who delights in the romantic feudalism of Polish life (and who later turns out to be Thaddeus's half-brother). After the defeat of Poland (
himself dies in the arms of his namesake Sobieski), Thaddeus is instructed by his dying mother to go to England. Porter continues to draw not only on versimilitude (some Londoners exploit her hero in his poverty) but also on actuality (his London experiences include meeting
and the Bluestockings).
Clara Reeve
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.
Frances Reynolds
's surviving portraits are widely scattered. Her
is held by
, and is reproduced in
and
's Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings.
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
One of those who read this letter-book was the Bluestocking
in 1753; another was Rowe herself, years after she had written the earlier letters in it.
Anna Seward
presented twenty letters by
in 1939 to the
in Lichfield, where they still remain.
has some poems and letters included in volume four of
's series Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1790, 1999, general editor Gary Kelly. The critical biography by
, 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
appeared in 2012.
Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
Still in her early teens, Mary Eleanor Bowes was taken up by the Bluestockings.
, she later reported, was pleased to honour me with her friendship, approbation, and correspondence. Once she was married, however, Mary Eleanor's husband obliged her abruptly to break off this association.
Rose Tremain
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
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
and
, and Le Petit prince by
).
Sarah Tytler
The ideas expressed in this book of advice and warning were no doubt developed during
's many years instructing girls. Central among her topics are Intellect, Ambition, Friendship, and The Life of Sarcasm and Bitterness. She consistently asserts that the expectations and abilities of young women are different from those of boys. She considers female independence to be of only moderate importance and she rejects the idea of women's rights: Woman's rights! Foolish women have made the words a scandal in the ears of the community. True and tender women in their integrity and delicacy have revolted at the term, and avowed they had enough . . . they would have none of such bold, boisterous bragging advocacy. She also rejects bluestockings, and stresses that the intellect should not be overrated, as it is no more indispensable than beauty. She argues that women are just as capable of forming true friendships as men; it is just that men typically find their friends well beyond the family circle, whereas women's best friends are often blood relations.
Jane West
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.
's elaborate, comic chapter-titles include The dawn of Connubial Felicity, with a word or two on the pleasure of tormenting (an allusion to
), 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.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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.
Helen Maria Williams
There she began to frequent
's bluestocking circle. She was introduced in cultural circles by
, minister of the church her family attended, and soon knew
,
, and
.
, 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
and her family (who had close links with
), and
(who was already hostile to Johnson).
Frances Wright
's mother,
, belonged to the British aristocracy. The bluestocking
was her godmother and great-aunt.
Maria De Fleury
was a fervent Protestant, who had dealings with the sect of
, as well as attending an
or
congregation headed by
(who wrote one of the prefaces to her Divine Poems.
observes that in contrast with the comfortable Anglican Protestantism of, for instance, the Bluestockings, De Fleury offered less elite and more explosive visions of patriotic Protestant society, in which a vengeful Second Coming preceded the millennium's thousand years of peace.
31 May 1766
Coalmine-owner and bluestocking Elizabeth...
Coalmine-owner and bluestocking
, who had already commented acidly on the narrowness of Newcastle streets, wrote of its people as little better than Savages.