248 Norma Clarke
The Bluestockings
Elizabeth Montagu launched her salons for serious talk, which marked the
beginnings of the bluestocking group, in 1760. The company was mixed,
refreshment usually nonalcoholic, and conversation would cover literary,
scholarly, artistic, political, and theological themes. Montagu was a wealthy,
elite woman with strong connections to the aristocracy, particularly the
intellectual Duke and Duchess of Portland whose home, Bulstrode, shel-
tered the great Anglo-Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob. Montagu believed
passionately in the importance of mental cultivation for women, read vora-
ciously, and sought out other highly intelligent women for companionship
and correspondence. Her own ambitions lay in literary criticism: in 1769
she published her book-length Essay on Shakespeare, which was, in part, a
challenge to Samuel Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare which
had appeared four years earlier. Hearing about the extraordinary gifts of
a learned vicar’s daughter in Deal, near Canterbury, Montagu introduced
herself, and the resulting lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Carter became
the bedrock of the bluestocking movement (Clarke 2000a; Pohl and Schel-
lenberg 2003).
Elizabeth Carter achieved fame as a distinguished scholar of ancient
Greek. Her translation of All the Works of Epictetus (1758) was acknowl-
edged as a major achievement. With Montagu as her patron she published a
volume of poems in 1762; her letters, edited by a loving nephew, appeared
after her death in 1808. A spinster, fervently dedicated to the single life (the
idea of matrimony horrifi ed her), Carter epitomized the bluestocking ideal
and helped establish the stereotype of the intellectual woman as a sexless
prude. This was, to some extent, the result of a deliberate bluestocking
agenda. The bluestockings acquired authority by insisting on their differ-
ence from notorious women writers like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley,
and Eliza Haywood, who had achieved celebrity in the previous era and
were associated with warm and worldly evocations of love and passion,
modeled on French examples. Such “wanton” foremothers were rejected.
In place of representations of the female self as a body, full of desire, the
bluestockings promoted mind and spirit (Myers 1990; Clarke 2004).
By the time Wollstonecraft began writing in the 1780s, this dual leg-
acy had nurtured a fl owering of female genius, and not only in London.
Many provincial cities boasted networks of enlightened sociability in
which women participated and were occasionally at the centre. At Lich-
fi eld, Anna Seward, poet, literary critic, and letter writer, reigned supreme;
she hailed the Rights of Woman as “that wonderful book” (Seward 1811,