Ladies Bountiful

...Though only Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft are mentioned in this connection in Brilliant Women, many women of bluestocking tendencies were also active supporters of the American cause against their own government...

...Though she published a refutation of Voltaire’s attack on Shakespeare, her merit resides in her support of worthy individuals, including such writers as the poet Ann Yearsley...

...They included such liberalminded men as Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt...

...Combining philanthropy, culture, and commerce, Lady Elizabeth might be compared to the late Brooke Astor...

...Elizabeth Powers is a writer in New York...

...Macaulay, however, increasingly became a poster girl for the radical cause, and the images of her, in Roman garb, festooning pamphlets promoting liberty, were clearly propagandistic...

...The traditional qualifi cation for admission to the literary sphere—classical learning—was superseded as writers (many of them women) increasingly churned out novels...

...Not long thereafter, at the age of 47, she married a man of no birth at all, a ship’s mate of 21...

...But the products of such industry, traditionally supported by elite patronage or other subsidies, were increasingly supplanted in the 18th century by popular forms of intellectual consumption for which readers paid their own hard-earned money...

...Moreover, several women associated with the original Bluestocking circle were writers, and at least two were very learned: Elizabeth Carter, who translated the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, and Catharine Macaulay, who wrote a multivolume anti-royalist history of England...

...The wonderful portraits of some of the women represented here make this aspect impossible to ignore, and Brilliant Women rightly, if inadvertently, restores the prominence of this tradition in the lives of the original Bluestockings...

...The most vitriolic in their attacks were the leading Romantic writers who, according to Eger, wished “to protect the masculine strongholds of literary institutions...

...but there is a danger in imputing too much infl uence to the Blues as a group with a cohesive program...

...Macaulay, a prolifi c writer, is “After...

...Her History of England was seen in the 1760s already as a radical Whig response to David Hume’s Tory History of Great Britain...

...I suspect it was not the learned ladies, but the smart ones, who scared Coleridge...

...In 1777 she allowed the commissioning by an elderly admirer (a Protestant divine, no less) of a portraitstatue of herself as the Roman fi gure of History...

...Yet in truth, the original Bluestockings, like today’s scholarly women, had their intellectual precursors in the accumulated tradition of Western learning, i.e., the “patriarchy,” which feminists like Virginia Woolf have made it their business to delegitimize...

...Thus, the remaining chapters of Brilliant Women are about “defi ance,” “subversions,” and other tropes that suggest the diffi culty women have in their battle for intellectual parity with men...

...The really smart women were those quick to seize the opportunity offered by the market in popular fi ction...

...The transition is exemplifi ed by Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay...

...The dominant fi gure here is Elizabeth Montagu (also one of the “living muses”), who married into wealth and aristocracy and whose opulent mansion in London allowed literary and intellectual celebrity to shine to advantage...

...She also wrote a challenge in 1790, the year before her death, to Edmund Burke’s account of the French Revolution...

...Hannah More’s mock-heroic poem “The Bas Bleu...

...Frequently compared to France’s great 17th-century Greek scholar, Madame Dacier, she clearly represents “Before...

...Missing here is any exploration of the connection between female sexual permissiveness and radical politics, exemplifi ed by the relationship between Wollstonecraft and William Godwin...

...It was a time of intense social, religious, political, and cultural foment and ferment all around...

...By wearing the blue worsted stockings of the working man, instead of silk ones, the botanist and scholar Benjamin Stillingfl eet was said to signal his rejection of luxury and concern for social status...

...Without doubt, historical inequity has characterized the distribution of the affl uence that allows gifted individuals to pursue the life of the mind...

...That it was positioned in a Christian church evoked much negative comment...

...As in France, the sociability represented by the Bluestockings—in particular the art of civilized conversation— could not survive the French Revolution, an event that, for radicals, signaled a break with any accommodation with the past...

...The highpoint of the infl uence of such women was captured in a portrait celebrating female creativity, painted in 1778 by Richard Samuel, in which More, Carter, and Macaulay were featured among “the nine living muses” of Great Britain...

...She also helped fi nance an experimental (and shortlived) female community founded by her sister, the writer Sarah Scott...

...Reform” was in the air in 18th-century England, alongside competition among the classes for status and wealth...

...Coleridge, as quoted here, wrote a letter to Charlotte Brent in 1813 that praised her for her bad spelling—and then added, “The longer I live, the more do I loathe in stomach, and deprecate in Judgement, all, all Bluestockingism...

...There were many in England, among ordinary religious dissenters and literate laboring people alike, who were autodictats and moral improvers, reaching out to lift up fallen women and succor the poor or disabled...

...Like the French version, these gatherings were a counterculture to the court, a forum of intellectual exchange and socially and politically critical ideas...

...A more plausible explanation for the ridicule of learned women may simply be the belatedness with which women embraced learning...

...Carter was a deeply pious and learned woman who chose not to marry...

...Instead, booksellers and lending libraries sprouted up all over England...

...Few of these had Latin, much less Greek...

...BY ELIZABETH POWERS Though the term is now associated exclusively with women, “bluestocking” originally applied to both the men and the women who would gather, beginning in the 1750s, to drink tea and indulge in the art of conversation in the London drawing rooms of wealthy ladies...

...Women who chose learning were throwing in their lot with a product of diminishing cultural worth...

...By 1750, there are estimated to have been several thousand writers in London, but there can hardly have been that many patrons...

...This was too much even for a radical like John Wilkes...

...Brilliant Women contains portraits of both women that link them to classical tradition...

...This small, richly illustrated volume accompanied a recent exhibition in London that drew on the resources of the National Portrait Gallery and other British collections...

...The struggle of women against entrenched institutions for admittance to the well-endowed universities (and especially the perks thereof) received canonical expression in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own...

...For feminists, the increasing ridicule of learned women is a sign that men wished to keep uppity women in their place...

...You do not need 500 pounds a year to write novels, which Woolf had insisted was necessary for a woman wishing to write...

...It is essential, however, if your desire is to become fi rst-rate in, say, classics or physics, fi elds that take years of training and personal sacrifi ce to master...

...The editors of Brilliant Women stress a perennial feminist trope, “foremothers” of women’s creativity, and suggest a line of development from the Bluestocking circle to contemporary feminism by drafting as exhibits sundry female personalities, from Madame de Sta?l to Germaine Greer...

...Eger emphasizes the high moral tone that reigned among the original Bluestockings, which was accompanied by good works...

...It is hardly surprising, as Britain reeled from the Revolution and then the war in Europe, that “bluestockings,” now applied exclusively to learned women, became an uncomplimentary term...

...Though Macaulay was praised on this side of the Atlantic for her republicanism, the broadsides of the day portray the ridicule her personal behavior brought down on herself and learned women in general...

...or Conversation” (1787) celebrated the polite learning, elegant conversation, and high moral purpose of this English version of French salon culture, which brought together men of society (the Earl of Bath) with those in the professions and celebrities generally (Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds...

...Elizabeth Eger, lecturer in English at King’s College, London, lays out this original social constellation in her fi rst chapter...

...I wrote two while working full-time...