Elizabeth Montagu

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Standard Name: Montagu, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Robinson
Nickname: Fidget
Nickname: The Two Peas (with Sarah Scott)
Nickname: The Queen of the Blues
Married Name: Elizabeth Montagu
EM , eighteenth-century Bluestocking leader, is known on the one hand as an informal letter-writer, and on the other hand for ambitious critical intervention in canonicity and cultural debates, with her critical study of Shakespeare and dialogues of the dead.
Mezzotint of Elizabeth Montagu, published by John Raphael Smith in 1776 after a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. She is seen in profile, sitting in a large upholstered chair against a backdrop of drapery, a pillar, and an outdoor landscape. Her dress and petticoat are voluminous and heavily decorated, with ruffled sleeves and a bow at the neck. Her hair is brushed back under a small bonnet perched on top of her head and tied with a dark ribbon. Below the image is a coat of arms and italic writing: "Mrs. Mon

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Publishing Mary Deverell
A dedication to the Princess Royal praises the immortal writings of many other women, or rather ladies. MD herself, she says, is a person of obscure and undistinguished rank, who yet hath not reliquished the...
Publishing Mary Deverell
Her full title was Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, mostly written in the Epistolary Style, chiefly upon Moral Subjects, And particularly calculated for the Improvement of Younger Minds. It was published in two volumes...
Textual Features Caroline Frances Cornwallis
The letters span nearly fifty years, from 1810 to 1856. They give a vivid picture of CFC 's dedication to her studies and her publications. (The first records returning a copy of Elizabeth Montagu 's...
Friends, Associates Mary Collyer
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...
Dedications Hester Mulso Chapone
HMC published her anonymous Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, addressed to a Young Lady—her eldest niece—and dedicated to Elizabeth Montagu .
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
43 (1773): 241
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
231
Occupation Hester Mulso Chapone
Suggestions were put to her about taking up a job as companion to an English duchess or governess in a German princely household, but the always-influential Elizabeth Montagu disliked the sound of the first position...
Intertextuality and Influence Hester Mulso Chapone
The book was a resounding success in the market. She had had the idea for these advice letters in 1765, when the niece who was to receive them was only eight. Montagu encouraged her to...
Literary responses Sarah Chapone
SC 's friend and printer Richardson saw her project in a different and far more simple light than she did: as the administering by a good woman of an antidote to the Poison shed by...
Friends, Associates Dorothea Celesia
In Genoa in February 1763 DC and her husband entertained William and Mary Robinson (brother and sister-in-law of the writers Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott ). Mary Robinson reported on 11 February
Jones, W. Powell, and William Robinson. “The William Robinsons in Italy”. Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol.
4
, No. 3, pp. 343-57.
352, 357
that...
Travel Elizabeth Carter
EC travelled in Europe with Elizabeth Montagu and Lord Bath .
Pennington, Montagu, and Elizabeth Carter. Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Elizabeth Carter. F. C. and J. Rivington.
I: 270-2
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
194
Textual Production Elizabeth Carter
EC 's nephew Montagu Pennington followed his first collection of her letters with another, of her correspondence with her almost lifelong friend Elizabeth Montagu (whose name he bore, as her godson).
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
17 (1817): 293
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Carter
EC associated on terms of warmth and equality with men of letters or culture such as Samuel Johnson , Samuel Richardson , Thomas Birch , Moses Browne , Richard Savage , William and John Duncombe
Wealth and Poverty Elizabeth Carter
EC was proud of her financial independence (though she also accepted support from her wealthy friend Elizabeth Montagu and from Archbishop Secker , patron of her friend Catherine Talbot). She leased from Secker a group...
Publishing Elizabeth Carter
The book had gone to press in June 1757.
Feminist Companion Archive.
The original press run of 1,018 copies had to be supplemented with a further 250. First of several more editions was the Dublin one of the...
Textual Features Elizabeth Carter
As a youngster of twenty-one (in May 1739), EC addressed the eminent businessman Edward Cavebreezily, mingling the domestic and the literary.
Chisholm, Kate. “Bluestocking Feminism”. New Rambler, pp. 60-6.
63
In her mature correspondence with Elizabeth Montagu both writers discuss their...

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