Catherine Talbot

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Standard Name: Talbot, Catherine
Birth Name: Catherine Talbot
Pseudonym: T.
Pseudonym: Sunday
Pseudonym: M.
CT was a member of the eighteenth-century Bluestocking group. Most remarkable among her poetry and prose (essays and other non-fiction pieces, a fairy story and letters) are the poems of love and loss which have been only recently rediscovered.
Colour photograph of an oval miniature of Catherine Talbot by Christian Friedrich Zincke. She is seen from the shoulders up, against a pale blue background. She is wearing a white bodice with a lace-trimmed square neckline, blue lacing, and two blue bows. Her curly dark hair is pulled loosely back and decorated with a blue bow or flower. On the back is inscribed "Catherine Talbot. / celebrated / for her genius and piety. / died unmarried. / 1770./ Zincke."

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Carter
EC wrote a playfully hyperbolic account to the astronomer Thomas Wright of her longing to meet Catherine Talbot ; the two women met some days later.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
68
Carter, Elizabeth, and Catherine Talbot. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the year 1741 to 1770. Pennington, MontaguEditor , F. C. and J. Rivington, 1809.
1: 2, 12
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Carter
EC celebrated, in a letter to Catherine Talbot , the anniversary of their first meeting.
Carter, Elizabeth, and Catherine Talbot. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the year 1741 to 1770. Pennington, MontaguEditor , F. C. and J. Rivington, 1809.
1: 12-13
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter (the most intellectually...
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...
Friends, Associates Anna Williams
Williams enjoyed cordial relations with other members of Johnson's circle, like Elizabeth Carter (who helped with subscriptions for Williams's book when Johnson was dragging his feet) and Hester Thrale (who contributed). Carter counted her a...
Friends, Associates Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Lady Hertford wrote that a certain distrust of her own judgement made her slow in the choice of a friend; but when that choice is made, my attachments are too strong to be easily broken...
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
Intertextuality and Influence Susanna Watts
At the outset the sisters are faced with the big question about slavery: What can I do for the cause?
Watts, Susanna. The Humming Bird. I. Cockshaw.
4
They reply firmly that everybody can do something: boycott sugar and educate others. They...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan
A few statements are footnoted to their originators, whom EPW has either paraphrased or versified: Sherlock and Lavater are her favourites, but she also draws on lighter writers like Horace , Swift , and Coleridge
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Ann Kelty
After a preface on the subject of religion in fiction, an introductory chapter announces (though it anticipates the reader may lose interest here) that the narrator of the novel is to be a spinster of...
Literary responses Jane Squire
Elizabeth Carter wrestled with this book, driving herself half mad to find out the meaning of it and telling Catherine Talbot she was enraged at her own stupidity. Pope Benedict XIV , to whom a...
Literary responses Catharine Trotter
She was, however, more than any other woman writer, an important influence on the Bluestockings and their thinking about morality, religion, and gender.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
56
Catherine Talbot , for one, strongly agreed with Birch in an...
Literary responses Sarah Fielding
Samuel Richardson respected The Cry as a new Species of Writing, sent copies to two friends (Sophia Wescomb and Dorothy, Lady Bradshaigh ), and wanted it to go into a second edition—
Londry, Michael. “Our dear Miss Jenny Collier”. Times Literary Supplement, pp. 13 -14.
13
Literary responses Sarah Fielding
The novel was well reviewed. Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot read it and speculated about Fielding as author. Mary Ann Radcliffe cited it in The Female Advocate in 1799.
Radcliffe, Mary Ann. The Female Advocate. Verner and Hood, 1799.
91n
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Notices in the British Review and other English journals were fairly appreciative, but quick to compliment British women writers at the expense of the French, as if the book had been a challenge to their...

Timeline

1741, 1743
A private edition of ten copies (only) was published of Athenian Letters or, the epistolary correspondence of an agent of the King of Persia, residing at Athens during the Peloponnesian war, written by Philip Yorke (later Lord Hardwicke)
7 November 1752-9 March 1754
The self-educated John Hawkesworth edited and published an essay-periodical called the Adventurer, on the model of Johnson 's Rambler.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
22 September 1761
King George III and Queen Charlotte were crowned; Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray each left a vivid account of the occasion, while Catherine Talbot wrote a prose poem about non-attendance, about spending a festal day...