bluestocking

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bluestocking

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 More, Elizabeth Montagu, and Elizabeth Carter, 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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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).

The campus sweetheart: an idealized, gendered image on college campuses in the early to mid-twentieth century

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.

Women, letter-writing and the life of the mind in England, c.1650-1750

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.

Miss Julie's revenge, or men who hate women, please meet Lisbeth Salander

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.

The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s

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).

DeNel Rehberg Sedo, ed. Reading Communities: from Salons to Cyberspace

(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

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.

A Winter on 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.

Johanna von Austen, 'a fatal bluestocking from the good old days": Jane Austen, Madame de Stael, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, and the woman artist

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.

"A consolation under every affliction": marriage, duty, and sentiment in Sarah Scott's The Test of Filial Duty

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.

Master drawings from Ontario at Dulwich

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.