250 Norma Clarke
and letters as individuals to be admired to the point of worship. Montagu,
Carter, Barbauld, Elizabeth Griffi th, Macaulay, More, and Lennox were
posed in a temple, along with the singer Elizabeth Linley and the painter
Angelica Kauffman.
The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain captured an idealized mo-
ment which, in retrospect, looks slightly ridiculous. As a powerful image
of what the bluestockings achieved it is important testimony, but it also
reveals a paradoxical problem: social approval of women’s literary and ar-
tistic achievements rested on elevated notions of goodness and purity. Real
women’s lives were not played out in temples. Mind could not simply and
easily be separated from body; and though there were no men in Samuel’s
portrait, men’s ideas about what women could and should do or abstain
from doing could not be disregarded. Elizabeth Linley was an established
professional commanding large fees, but when she married Richard Brin-
sley Sheridan he insisted she cease performing (O’Toole 1997, 85). Cath-
arine Macaulay became a laughingstock when she married a man much
younger than herself (Hill 1992).
Mary Wollstonecraft did not participate in the jeering at Catharine
Macaulay. For Wollstonecraft, Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790)
was an important confi rmation that others thought as she did, when she
argued that there was no innate intellectual difference between the sexes
and that the power of abstract reasoning was not inherently male. Woll-
stonecraft thought Macaulay “the woman of the greatest abilities, undoubt-
edly, that this country has ever produced” (Todd 2000, 179). Although they
had never met, she sent to Macaulay a copy of the second edition of her
own A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), telling her, “you are the
only female writer who I coincide in opinion with respecting the rank our
sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world. I respect Mrs. Macaulay
Graham because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek
for fl owers” (Todd 2000, 167). Sadly, Macaulay died before they were able
to meet.
The Rights of Men confi rmed Wollstonecraft’s growing reputation as
one of the radical thinkers of the London intelligentsia. Through Joseph
Johnson she became acquainted with others, meeting William Godwin,
Tom Paine, and Thomas Holcroft among them, and becoming friends with
Helen Maria Williams, whose Poems of 1786 had been immensely popu-
lar. (The volume was published by subscription and boasted a list of some
1,500 names — a vast number.) Dissenters dominated the literary avant-
garde. Williams, like Wollstonecraft, was strongly associated with liberal
“enlightened” dissenting circles. Unlike Wollstonecraft, she also mixed in