bluestocking


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bluestocking,

derisive term originally applied to certain 18th-century women with pronounced literary interests. During the 1750s, Elizabeth Vesey held evening parties, at which the entertainment consisted of conversation on literary subjects. Eminent men of the day were invited to contribute to these conversations. Hannah MoreMore, Hannah,
1745–1833, English author and social reformer. She was educated, and later taught, at her sisters' school for girls in Bristol. At the age of 22 she became engaged to William Turner, a wealthy squire 20 years older than she; he never married her, but settled
..... Click the link for more information. , Elizabeth MontaguMontagu, Elizabeth (Robinson),
1720–1800, English author, one of the bluestockings. She was noted for her wit and beauty, and her London literary salon was frequented by Johnson, Walpole, Burke, and other eminent men.
..... Click the link for more information. , and Elizabeth CarterCarter, Elizabeth,
1717–1806, English poet and translator. Under the pen name Eliza she contributed for years to the Gentleman's Magazine. One of the group of 18th-century women known as the bluestockings, she was a friend of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Horace
..... Click the link for more information. , among others, continued this tradition. Boswell, in his Life of Dr. Johnson, states that these "bluestocking clubs" were so named because of Benjamin Stillingfleet, who attended in unconventional blue worsted stockings rather than the customary black silk stockings. In time the name bluestocking was applied solely to women of pedantic literary tastes.
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5) Sylvia Harcstark Myers also used this term in the title of her seminal work on the bluestockings: The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990), however, she never actually defines the phrase and seems to have chosen it simply to denote intellectual interest and engagement.
Women, letter-writing and the life of the mind in England, c.1650-1750
Like Schellenberg's Bluestocking readers, the Australian women Howie studied in the mid-1990s developed awareness of both self and other through shared reading, allowing the author to assert that book groups develop "relational ways of being" among their members and support "subjects-in-process" whose shared reading leads to "shifting self-knowledges" (141).
DeNel Rehberg Sedo, ed. Reading Communities: from Salons to Cyberspace
Japanese Bluestockings, the New Negro Woman, the New Woman in Spain)--is their engagement with visual representation, notably photography and film.
The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s
4) Recent studies of Bluestocking writing and sociability include Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke, 2009), and Nicole Pohl and Betty A.
Private theatricals in the Harcourt family papers
Droste's critics, finally, derided her as the bluestocking she lampooned in Perdu
Johanna von Austen, 'a fatal bluestocking from the good old days": Jane Austen, Madame de Stael, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, and the woman artist
However, Scott's life was more typical for a woman in the Bluestocking circle.
"A consolation under every affliction": marriage, duty, and sentiment in Sarah Scott's The Test of Filial Duty
The exhibition participants at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2008 attempted to portray visually in miniature 35 years of academic scholarship on the Bluestocking Circle.
Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women, 18th Century Bluestockings
5) Here I want to argue that her rigorous definition of friendship as a rational virtue can be interpreted as the culmination of a long tradition of feminist thought that found its liveliest manifestation in the bluestocking circle, an Enlightenment intellectual network or 'republic of letters' that flourished in mid-eighteenth-century Britain.
Paper trails and eloquent objects: bluestocking friendship and material culture
Do cultivate a bluestocking look to prove you're intelligent and appropriately gendered, that is, neither head-turningly feminine nor inattentively androgynous.
Academic fashion: an oxymoron?
The letter is itself an example of camp by its outrageously bluestocking refusal.
A note on 'Notes on Camp'
The array of acute portraits--ice maiden Lakey, chubby, genial heiress Pokey, sexless bluestocking Helena, and biddable, earnestly leftist Priss--give the book its lasting appeal.
The groupie
Six of the eleven chapters in Repossessing the Romantic Past focus on women writers: Janowitz on Aikin; Mee on Barbauld's attraction to what Godwin termed "the collision of mind with mind" as opposed to the bluestocking politeness of the dominant Anglican culture; Nigel Leask on Elizabeth Hamilton; Janet Todd on "Jane Austen and the Professional Wife"; and Susan Manly's and James Chandler's contributions to a section of the book entitled "Reopening the Case of Edgeworth.
Repossessing the Romantic Past

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