Bluestockings Displayed
Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830

The first academic and interdisciplinary volume exploring bluestocking portraiture, performance and patronage in eighteenth-century Britain, opening vistas for future scholarship.

Elizabeth Eger (Edited by)

9781316619728, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 September 2016

326 pages, 60 b/w illus. 3 tables
24.5 x 17 x 1.7 cm, 0.58 kg

'Eger's collection is a very welcome contribution that will stimulate further thought around the subject and encourage more research from this perspective to locate broader networks of Bluestockings and answer wider ranging questions about the development of women and society more generally.' Jackie Collier, Early Modern Women Journal

The conversation parties of the bluestockings, held to debate contemporary ideas in eighteenth-century Britain, were vital in encouraging female artistic achievement. The bluestockings promoted links between learning and virtue in the public imagination, inventing a new kind of informal sociability that combined the life of the senses with that of the mind. This collection of essays, by leading scholars in the fields of literature, history and art history, provides an interdisciplinary treatment of bluestocking culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It is the first academic volume to concentrate on the rich visual and material culture that surrounded and supported the bluestocking project, from formal portraits and sculptures to commercially reproduced prints. By the early twentieth century, the term 'bluestocking' came to signify a dull and dowdy intellectual woman, but the original bluestockings inhabited a world in which brilliance was valued at every level and women were encouraged to shine and even dazzle.

Introduction Elizabeth Eger
Part I. Portraits: 1. Romantic bluestockings: from muses to matrons Anne Mellor
2. 'To dazzle let the vain design': Alexander Pope's portrait gallery, or, the impossibility of brilliant women Emma Clery
3. Virtue, patriotism and female scholarship in bluestocking portraiture Clare Barlow
4. Anne Seymour Damer: a sculptor of 'republican perfection' Alison Yarrington
5. The blues gone grey: portraits of bluestocking women in old age Devoney Looser
Part II. Performance: 6. Sacred love: Eliza Linley's voice Joseph Roach
7. The learned female soprano Susan Staves
8. Roles and role models: Montagu, Siddons, Lady Macbeth Shearer West
9. Hester Thrale: 'what trace of the wit?' Felicity A. Nussbaum
Part III. Patronage and Networks: 10. Reading practices in Elizabeth Montagu's epistolary network of the 1750s Markman Ellis
11. The queen of the blues, the bluestocking queen, and bluestocking masculinity Clarissa Campbell Orr
12. Luck be a lady: patronage and professionalism for women writers in the 1790s Harriet Guest.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], History of art / art & design styles [AC]