Resources

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Find out more about Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking Circle.

Published Letters

Blunt, Reginald, Mrs Montagu ‘Queen of the Blues’, Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800, 2 vols (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1924)

Climenson, Emily J., Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Bluestockings, Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1906)

Doran, John, A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs Elizabeth Montagu): Illustrated in her Unpublished Letters (London: Richard Bentley, 1873), 2nd ed.

Gaussen, Alice C. C., ed., A Later Pepys: The Correspondence of William Weller Pepys, 2 vols (London & New York, John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1804)

Kelly, Gary, ed., Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1785, 6 vols [1999] (London & New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2016)

Montagu, Matthew, ed., The Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, with some of the Letters of her Correspondents, 4 vols (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1809-1813)

Pennington, Montagu, ed., Letters from Mrs Elizabeth Carter to Mrs Montagu, between the years 1755 and 1800, chiefly upon Literary and Moral Subjects, 3 vols (London: F.C. & J. Rivington, 1817)

Pohl, Nicole, ed., The Letters of Sarah Scott, 2 vols (London & New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2016)

Secondary Sources

Brant, Clare, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Clarke, Norma, Dr Johnson’s Women (London: Pimlico, 2005)

Eger, Elizabeth, Bluestockings: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

---, ed. Bluestockings Displayed: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Eger, Elizabeth, and Peltz, Lucy, Brilliant Women:18th-Century Bluestockings (Yale: Yales University Press, 2008)

Franklin, Caroline, ed. Women’s Writing: The Material Culture of Eighteenth-century Women's Writing (vol. 21, Issue 3, 2014)

Guest, Harriet, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago University Press, 2000.

Harcstark Myers, Sylvia, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)

Heller, Deborah, ed., Bluestockings Now! The Evolution of a Social Role (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)

Hengstmengel, Joost, '‘I am greatly obliged to the Dutch’: James Beattie's Dutch Connection', Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 18:1 (2020)

Huchon, René Louis, Mrs Montagu and her Friends (London: John Murray, 1907)

Major, Emma , Madam Britannia: Women, Church and Nation, 1712-1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Pohl, Nicole, ed., Huntington Library Quarterly: The Commerce of Life: Elizabeth Montagu (vol. 81, No. 4, 2018)

Pohl, Nicole & Schellenberg, Betty, eds, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino, California: Henry E. Huntington Library, 2003)

Prendergast, Amy, Literary Salons Across Britain and Ireland in the Long Eighteenth Century (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2015)

Voloshkova, Natalia, Bluestockings and Travel Accounts: Reading, Writing and Collecting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Digital Projects

Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/collections/maryhamilton/1

Georgian Papers Project https://gpp.rct.uk

Electronic Enlightenment https://www.e-enlightenment.com

The Collected Letters of Hannah More http://hannahmoreletters.co.uk/Letters/

Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts https://janeausten.ac.uk/index.html

Caro: the Lady Caroline Lamb Website https://sites.google.com/sjsu.edu/caro

Other resources

‘The Bluestockings’, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b045c0h9

'The Bluestockings In Print', WPHP Monthly Mercury, https://www.buzzsprout.com/1157615/7915048-bluestockings-in-print

Please note that all dates and location information are provisional, initially taken from the library and archive catalogues. As our section editors continue to work through the material we will update our database and the changes will be reflected across the edition.

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