1. ‘Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-century Bluestockings’ National Portrait Gallery 2008

2. Blue Stocking lady: orig. one who frequented Mrs
Blue Stocking lady: orig. one who frequented Mrs. Montague's ‘Blue Stocking’ assemblies; thence transferred sneeringly to any woman showing a taste for learning, a literary lady. (Much used by reviewers of the first quarter of the 19th c.; but now, from the general change of opinion on the education of women, nearly abandoned.)
Oxford English Dictionary

3. Eighteenth-century women received little education and what education they did received focused on making them suitable marriage partners. Bluestocking women challenged this ideology.

4. ‘Although this was an unusually positive climate in which to be a bluestocking, intellectual and creative women still had to consider their moral reputation when venturing into the public eye.’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)
Bluestocking intellectual community formed in 1750s around Elizabeth Montagu (1718/ ), Elizabeth Vesey (c ), and Frances Boscawen ( ).

5. John Raphael Smith, Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800), 1775

6. Unknown artist, Elizabeth Vesey (1715?-91), c.1770

7. Allan Ramsay, Frances Boscawen (1719-1805), c.1747-8

8. Bluestockings corresponded, published and met at informal, late-afternoon gatherings of men and women from gentry, upper classes and some middle-class professionals ‘in the pursuit of intellectual improvement, polite socialibity, the refinement of the arts through patronage, and national stability through philanthropy...as the basis of civic virtue in a liberal society.’
Nicole Pohl and Betty A Schellenberg (eds), Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 2005)
‘The Bluestocking Circle became engaged in a wide range of social and philanthropic activities that promoted, in particular, women’s role as writers, thinkers, artists and commentators..’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)

9. Second generation of bluestockings formed in 1780s, included Hester Thrale, Mary Delany, Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney and Hannah More.
The name ‘bluestockings’ derived from hostess’s insistence that it was fine for a gentleman guest to wear everyday blue worsted stockings instead of decadent evening stockings to one of her gatherings.
Generally thought that the term first applied to practice of Benjamin Stillingfleet, scholar and botanist. But increasingly became pejorative term applied to intellectual women.

10. Johann Joseph Zoffany, Benjamin Stillingfleet (1702-71), c. 1761

11. Elizabeth Montagu identi fied by Samuel Johnson as ‘Queen of the Blues’ (Samuel Johnson). Daughter of country squire, educated by grandfather, a Cambridge University librarian. Published critical work on Shakespeare, excellent conversationalist and wit. Married aristocrat, Edward Montagu who let his wife manage his estates and coal mines. She used profits from coal mines to aid the poor, sponsor London literary and visual artistic production in London and encourage women’s participation in it. Hosted literary salons, negotiated with booksellers and publishers to aid aspiring authors, paid pensions to female authors.
Became one of richest women in England, and built opulent Mayfair mansion. Admirers applauded her patronage and taste, detractors portrayed her as ugly and a target for male golddiggers.

12. Enlightenment:
‘While few French Enlightenment philosophers accorded women rational or political equality, certain key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment [such as David Hume] assigned them a central role in the rise of civil society.’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)

13. Allan Ramsay, Elizabeth Montagu, 1762

14. Ramsay portrait of Montagu self-comissioned
Ramsay portrait of Montagu self-comissioned. Ramsay, painter of George III’s official coronation portrait.
Eger: ‘Allan Ramsay’s remarkable portrait of Montagu...depicts the perfect embodiment of ease, elegance and learning … Her exquisite gown, in rose-pink silk with a frothy complexity of lace embellishments, conveys her sophistication and social status. The painting is not ostentatious, however, but rather full of quiet grace … the third volume of Hume’s History of England, on which Montagu rests her elbow, was published only the year before …
The learned female was ...less of a threat if she could be admired almost like a work of art rather than seen as the overt practitioner or connoisseur of art.’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)

15. Elizabeth Carter good friend of Elizabeth Montagu
Elizabeth Carter good friend of Elizabeth Montagu. Religious and politically conservative, published poetry, essays, translations of Greek philosophy. Daughter of clergyman who taught her Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Studied French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, astronomy, ancient geography, history and music. Chose not to marry and travelled to Continent. First publication was poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine, age 17. Published anonymously/under pseudonym to preserve modesty and avoid biased criticism.

16. John Fayram, Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) as Minerva, c. 1735-1741

17. John Fayram’s Elizabeth Carter as Minerva c.1735-41.
Minerva: Roman goddess of wisdom, defender, artistic muse.
‘Carter was advanced as a role model for learned, creative and professional women.’ Influenced by seventeenth-century tradition of portrait historié in which sitter presented in ‘courtly and playful guises’. Fayram’s painting more serious ‘contrived to promote Carter’s status as an examplary British woman in whom personal virtue and learning were inseparable. Minerva ... represent[ed] wisdom “join’d with discreet Practice ... the Understanding of the noblest Arts, the best Accomplishments of the mind, together with all Virtues, but most especially that of Chastity”.’ Carter wears customary Minervan armour, but spear replaced by Plato’s book.
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)

18. Women excluded from university, but bluestockings sometimes referred to themselves collectively as a ‘college’ (conscious group identity) . Sought to legitimate their achievements by linking them with classical mythology – the nine muses of antiquity who inspired male artistic and literary creativity.
In Richard Samuel’s 1778 painting, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain), the bluestocking muses are not the inspiration for male achievement, but themselves the creators and embodiment of it. Lucy Peltz:’These new Muses were a means through which Britain could celebrate the special contribution that women made to the social and cultural progress and economic well-being of the nation.’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)

19. Richard Samuel, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo, 1778
From left: Elizabeth Carter (translator of classics, poet), Anna Letitia Barbauld (poet, writer), Angelica Kauffmann (artist), Elizabeth Sheridan (singer), Charlotte Lennox (novelist, poet), Hannah More (writer), Elizabeth Montagu (‘Queen of the Blues’), Elizabeth Griffith (novelist, playwright), Catherine Macaulay (historian).

20. Painting preceded by Wetenhall Wilkes, An Essay on the Pleasures and Advantages of Female Literature (1741) and John Duncombe, The Feminiad (1754), both praising women’s literary abilities. The women are dressed in vaguely classical robles in a classical setting and are idealized. No evidence they ever met together as group. Except for Montagu all the women in the painting earned a living from their work.
Print of the painting became very popular and commissioned by the publisher Joseph Johnson for his Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book for 1778, where it was placed next to a fashion plate which, says Peltz ‘brought the “Living Muses” down from their heavenly pinnacle and put them on a contemporary stage, thereby encouraging modern women to identify with them.’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)

21. Classical references also evoke republics
Classical references also evoke republics. Paralleled by contemporary republican activity:
References to classical republics – paralleled by republican activity:
American Declaration of Independence 1776
French Revolution 1789
Brilliant Women studied the period through portraits of 3 women:
Catherine Macaulay
Mary Wollstonecraft
Hannah More

22. Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay (1731-91), c
Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay ( ), c Full inscription: ‘government / a power delegated / for the happiness / of mankind / conducted / by / wisdom / justice/ and /mercy

23. ‘Painted at the outset of the American War of Independence, this political portrait conveys Macaulay's commitment to representative government. To indicate her republican sentiments and belief in democracy, she is dressed as a Roman matron, but also wears the distinctive purple sash of an elected Roman Senator. The letter in her hand refers to her friend and patron Revd Thomas Wilson, who probably commissioned this portrait.’
Macaulay, a political Radical, wrote 8-vol History of England ( ). Commentators frequently astonished that a woman could achieve so much, described her writing style as ‘masculine’ and warned other women that to imitate her would spoil their looks.
Macaulay a key radical and numerous images of her in circulation, particularly engraving of her as Libertas, based on Roman republican coins.

24. James Basire, after Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Catharine Macaulay, 1767

25. Macaulay lost credibility and became target of vicious satire for living with an admirer and then marrying poorly educated man half her age. Elizabeth Montagu criticised Macaulay for adopting masculine opinions and manners, but ‘pioneering feminist’ Mary Wollstonecraft admired Macaulay.
Wollstonecraft associated with group of leading revolutionaries including Thomas Paine. Key publication, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792, asserting, among many other things, the need for women’s education. Initially quite well received, but Wollstonecraft’s reputation ruined soon after her death in 1797 when her husband wrote a memoir detailing her unconventional life including birth of illegitimate child.
‘Her life was turned into an emblem of Jacobin – that is, revolutionary – immorality in action.’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)

26. John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), 1791-2

27. John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), 1791-2
‘The pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is shown
as though distracted momentarily from her studies.
The sombre colours of her costume and the cloistered,
darkened setting convey a sense of seriousness Iand dedication.
Painting a woman in such a role would have been more
controversial in an earlier age. It was generally thought that
only wealthy men could possess intellectual power. By stressing
universal human values, Sensibility inadvertently helped pave
the way for claims that women – at least middle-class women –
might have as much moral and mental strength as men.’

28. John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797

29. John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft 1797
‘She wears a high-waisted white cotton gown while her plainly-styled
hair is partially covered by a soft hat. She made her views on dress
clear in her published work, stating that it should neither distort nor
hide the human form but rather 'adorn the person and not rival it'.
This reflected the French Revolutionary emphasis on man's natural
rights and honesty; rejecting disguise and ostentation to reveal the
'real' person. Even for women without Wollstonecraft's high principles,
under the prevailing influence of Neo-classicism, the emphasis in
fashion of the mid-1790s was on restraint and elegance. When painted
by Opie, Wollstonecraft was pregnant with her daughter Mary … After
Wollstonecraft's death this portrait hung above Godwin’s fireplace.’

30. Mary Wollstonecraft dubbed ‘a hyena in petticoats’,
Hannah More, ‘a Bishop in petticoats’.
Wollstonecraft one of the 9 women named in Rev Richard Polwhele,
The Unsex’d Females (1798); idenified as radical, pro-equality,
immodest.
In contrast, Polwhele named ‘seraphic’ women writers, including
Elizabeth Montagu and Hannah More. More the evangelical daughter
of Tory, Anglican headmaster. Evangelicals believe in ongoing struggle
for redemption, to be achieved through personal piety and social
responsibility.

31. Henry William Pickersgill, Hannah More (1743-1833), 1821

32. Henry William Pickersgill, Hannah More (1743-1833), 1821.
Lucy Peltz: More had a ‘lifelong dedication to promulgating an agenda of conservative moral reform in almost every imaginable literary genre – from plays to paraphrases of Scripture.’ Called for ‘a revolution in manners … a radical change in the moral behaviour of the nation … By the time she sat for Pickersgill she was saddened by the “turbulent times”, the resurgence of radical politics and civil unrest accompanying the campaigns for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. … Pickersgill’s portrait does not flatter in the traditional sense. It makes no attempt to hide More’s frailty and, despite her ageing complexion, presents her as an inspiring figure of “Female Worth”’. Achieved through her direct gaze, throne-like chair and writing table with letter to William Wilberforce (evangelical, slave-trade abolition leader).
‘More was above reproach, having led a celibate and blameless life devoted to good works.’ Opposed to sexual equality believing women gentler, domestic. ‘Instead of advocating women’s rights ... More assigned women a central role as agents of the philanthropic action that would “raise the depressed tone of public morals ... awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principle, and ... reanimate the dormant powers of active piety.” In the early decades of the nineteenth century it was this model of middle-class female activism – and social formation – that enjoyed ascendancy in Britain.’
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008)