During this period, representations, such as the "
bluestocking," which illustrated an image of the college women as nurturing, innocent, and pure in the nineteenth century, began to permeate the national culture (Peril 2006, 31).
In fact, the prologue to Sylvia Harcstark Myers' seminal work on the
bluestocking circle provides a vignette concerning Jemima, Marchioness Grey--illustrating the contested nature of female intellectual endeavour in this period.
This "
bluestocking novelist," one of a limited number of independent women in her era, embarked on a love affair with Scandinavia's most powerful literary critic, Georges Brandes.
What unites these essays and the international cadre of historical women they represent--from the famous (e.g., Louise Brooks, Amelia Earhart, Hannah Hoch) to the less studied (e.g., Japanese
Bluestockings, the New Negro Woman, the New Woman in Spain)--is their engagement with visual representation, notably photography and film.
This theme of identity formation through reading is picked up again, in a different way, in Linsey Howie's chapter, "Speaking Subjects: Developing Identities in Women's Reading Communities." 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).
(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.
It is the stuff of counterfactual comedy: sex-crazed French literary genius-in-the-making meets English
bluestocking and future heroine of the Crimea on a romantic cruise up the Nile.
Or, Poets, Publishers, and
Bluestockings) by the German poet Annette von Droste-Hulshoff (1797-1848) featured "a fatal
bluestocking from the good old days" called "Johanna von Austen." By the same token, it is less perplexing that the tastes and works of this bas bleu were depicted as being out of touch with pre-revolutionary German literary fashions.
Elizabeth Robinson would marry Edward Montagu, grandson to the first Earl of Sandwich, and become the "Queen of the
Bluestockings." Through her, Scott was connected to the
Bluestocking circle, but she never followed her sister into high society.
The drawing comes from the collection of Christina of Sweden, and is appropriate to that
bluestocking Queen who studied metaphysics with Rene Descartes, until her early honrs and the Stockholm winter proved too much for him.
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.