Elizabeth Carter

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Standard Name: Carter, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Carter
Nickname: Mrs Carter
Used Form: A Lady
EC was renowned during a long span of the later eighteenth century as a scholar and translator from several languages and the most seriously learned among the Bluestockings. Her English version of Epictetus was still current into the twentieth century. She was also a poet and a delightful letter-writer.
Portrait of Elizabeth Carter as Minerva, the Greek goddess of wisdom, by John Fayram in probably the late 1730s. She wears gilded metal armour over a white loose shirt and under a blue sash, and a helmet with feathery plume. She is holding in one hand a round shield, in the other a book bound in red, with gilt decoration, which (as Edward Cave revealed in writing her praise) is a copy of Plato. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Publishing Anna Maria Mackenzie
This novel is now extremely rare, though a Dublin edition appeared the same year. The subscribers, where their place of residence is listed, come mainly from London and its environs (particularly eastward), with several from...
Publishing Fidelia
The Gentleman's Magazine printed a poem to Fidelia by Fido (that is, Thomas Beach), a poem to Melissa (Jane Brereton ) by Elizabeth Carter , and also Fidelia to Melissa.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
5 (1735): 255
Barker, Anthony. “Poetry from the Provinces: Amateur Poets in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s and 1740s”. Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker, Clarendon, 1996, pp. 241-56.
254
Reception Jane West
JW was well-known as a productive writer who nevertheless put out a great deal of domestic labour. Jane Austen , marvelling at her sister's time management skills, remarked: how good Mrs. West cd [sic] have...
Reception Fidelia
Over the next couple of months came further poems by Elizabeth Carter ,
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
5 (1735): 379
Melissa (who says Fidelia outgoes her in both spleen and brain), by Fido,
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
5 (1735) 382
the...
Reception Jane Brereton
This poem brought a whole clutch of replies: from Fido (Thomas Beach, whose verse persona runs to jocular misogyny about women's shrewishness), Elizabeth Carter (publishing under her initials), and Fidelia herself.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
5 (1735): 255-6, 259
Residence Anna Miller
In 1754 Anna Riggs (later ALM) and her mother were living in a fine newly built house, with a beautiful lawn, walks, garden, cascades, a piece of water and a stream running thro' the...
Textual Features Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Epictetus was both a slave and a cripple. His philosophy, which insisted on the mind's capacity to rise above adverse circumstances, held considerable appeal for women writers of this period. (The best-known translation was that...
Textual Features Hester Mulso Chapone
When Richardson offered her a list of examples of filial disobedience, she replied that no doubt an equally heinous list could be produced of parental oppression. With Carter she mulled over religious and literary questions...
Textual Features Elizabeth Cobbold
This collection features poetry by women such as Anna Maria Porter , Amelia Opie , Lucy Aikin , Elizabeth Carter , Anna Letitia Barbauld , Anne Hunter , Mary RobinsonCharlotte Smith , and EC herself.
Textual Features Jane Johnson
The poem is headed with a quotation from Psalm 19: The Heavens declare the Glory of God, & the Firmament showeth his handy work—the same psalm which Addison had famously rendered as The spacious...
Textual Features Ann Fisher
Her prefatory New Thoughts on Education observes the manifest absurdity of austere or learned pedant[s] in trying to instil Latin or Greek by whipping. Corporal punishment, she argues, produces disgust instead of a Love of...
Textual Features Jane Brereton
JB 's true attitude to her own poetic vocation is hard to fathom. In An Expostulatory Epistle to Sir Richard Steele upon the Death of Mr. Addison she calls herself the meanest of the tuneful...
Textual Features Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
Textual Features Tabitha Tenney
Choice of women writers is fairly generous, with excerpts from Hester Mulso Chapone , John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld (Evenings at Home), Susanna Haswell Rowson , Elizabeth Carter , Hester Thrale ,...
Textual Features Elizabeth Montagu
EM expressed to Elizabeth Carter the Bluestockings' determination to think for ourselves, & act for ourselves, rather than being so perfectly of ye [sic] Rib of Man as Woman ought to be.
qtd. in
Chisholm, Kate. “Bluestocking Feminism”. New Rambler, 2003, pp. 60-6.
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