In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft sat down to write a fan letter. “You are the only female writer who I coincide in opinion with respecting the rank our sex ought to attain in the world,” she wrote in excitement to Catharine Macaulay. Macaulay had recently published her treatise “Letters on Education,” arguing that boys and girls should be taught the same curriculum, since “true wisdom … is as useful to women as men” — a principle that formed the bedrock, two years later, of Wollstonecraft’s triumphant “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”
More than a century later, in “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf claimed several of Macaulay’s near contemporaries as role models, whose ability to earn a living from their writing, despite myriad obstacles, enabled future generations of women writers to conceive of their own intellectual freedom. “Toward the end of the 18th century,” Woolf concluded, “a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses.”
Both Woolf and Wollstonecraft argued far more stridently for women’s rights than did Macaulay or her peers, a loosely connected group of 18th-century British women writers and thinkers known — sometimes derogatorily, sometimes affectionately — as the Bluestockings. But as Susannah Gibson argues in her fast-paced and intimate study of the group, the Bluestockings’ feminist revolution lay in their determination to think and write and educate themselves, despite the “pitiless machinations” of British society, which kept single women dependent on their fathers, and married women subordinate to their husbands.
Gibson’s book opens in rapidly expanding London grappling with new fashions, ideas and building projects, and forging connections to Europe and the wider world. Here, in a Mayfair mansion, Elizabeth Montagu, a literary critic and writer married to a wealthy English landowner, invited like-minded women to candlelit salons where conversation was elevated to an art form, where wit and erudition were prized, and where men and women could discuss politics, literature, science and history on equal terms.
A 1739 pamphlet, titled “Man Superior to Woman,” denounced educated women under the stereotype of the “bookish slattern”: dangerous, unfeminine, ugly and certainly not a suitable wife. “A Woman,” a conduct manual from the 1770s claimed, “is the downy pillar on which a Man should repose from the severer and more exalted duties of life.” Montagu’s father, unusually, encouraged her early education, but she quickly saw that an advantageous marriage would be her best shot at independence. The salon that built her reputation — “brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgment, critical in talk,” as one friend put it — was made possible by her husband’s wealth and supportive attitude.
Maintaining respectability was key: Fanny Burney, whose novel “Evelina” was a popular sensation, held back from talking in public lest she “pass for being studious, or affected.” Elizabeth Carter ensured that her translations of Epictetus were preceded by an introduction reconciling his thought with Christian values. Even among themselves, the Bluestockings were not exempt from the double standards by which women were judged far more harshly than men for social transgressions: Members of the circle who found themselves embroiled in scandal risked becoming outcasts. Hester Thrale, a close friend of Samuel Johnson’s who operated another influential salon from her home in Streatham, was shunned by former friends when, newly widowed, she fell in love with her eldest daughter’s singing teacher (whom she subsequently married).
Thrale continued to write undeterred, charting the minutiae of her private life — Johnson’s witty repartee, the antics of her children, her grief after the death of her first husband and her developing feelings for her second — in a diary (published posthumously) that she titled the “Thraliana.”
Gibson, an Irish historian, is as attentive to the forces that worked against the Bluestockings as to those — wealth, supportive husbands, stimulating friendship — that enabled their success. The complex interplay of money, class and intellectual ambition is especially fascinating. While even aristocratic women faced financial precarity if they didn’t follow a conventional path, working-class writers were received on different terms altogether.
The story of Ann Yearsley, a Bristol milkwoman whose poetry was championed by the Bluestocking Hannah More, is one of the book’s most shocking: More took control of her image and financial affairs, preventing Yearsley, who went on to establish a circulating library and a network of charitable schools, from accessing her earnings, while thrusting her into the limelight in just the ways middle-class Bluestockings sought to avoid.
Gibson’s history is primarily social rather than intellectual. The Bluestockings’ personal lives are chronicled in vivid detail: Hester Thrale’s more than 15 pregnancies (including several ending in miscarriage) and the devastating deaths of several children in succession are an unforgettable horror; the saga of Thomas Wilson, a Bath churchman who spearheaded a character assassination campaign against Catharine Macaulay after she spurned his affections, makes for a gripping tale.
Still, I wanted more on the ideas that came out of these salons: how these women’s writings related to other literature and culture at the time; what approaches drove their prolific output (biographies of Shakespeare and Johnson, political satire, histories of Swedish and German royals, religious tracts); what politics they espoused, however subtly, in their lives and work. But Gibson conjures palpably the all too ephemeral achievement of the Bluestockings: their sparkling conversation, wafting out through high windows, to be borne down the centuries by the London breeze.
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