Bluestockings Displayed

Elizabeth Eger is Reader in Eighteenth-Century Literature at King's College London.

• 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.

'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