The Duchess of Portland
, friend of EM
and the Bluestockings, and patron of art and literature, died.
Blunt, Reginald, and Elizabeth Montagu. Mrs Montagu, "Queen of the Blues", Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800. Constable.
2: 191-2
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
28, 32-44, 102-3, 267
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
55 (1785): 575
Education
Elizabeth Montagu
Elizabeth was well-schooled along with her brothers and her sister. Commentators make much of the contribution supposedly provided by their step-grandfather, Cambridge scholar Conyers Middleton
; but in letters to her sister and to the...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Montagu
The letters of EM
's youth—to the Duchess of Portland
and to her sister Sarah Scott
—are sparkling, irreverent, and inventive. Some of these were conveyed via Elizabeth Elstob
.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Her early claim about the...
Friends, Associates
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Ottoline Morrell
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
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...