The Bluestockings were learned English women and men who gathered during the second half of the eighteenth century at the London salons hosted by Elizabeth Montagu and her friend Elizabeth Vesey. The ten essays in this volume, first published in 2003, explore the Bluestockings’ social, economic, and intellectual achievements, including the publication of fiction and criticism, their plans for a utopian community, their charitable enterprises, and the management of a large coal-mining concern. The Bluestockings enlarged the boundaries of what women could think, write, and do, less by overt political action than by their exemplary pursuit of intellectual improvement and their commitment to civic virtue in the context of polite sociability.

Introduction: A Bluestocking Historiography
The Elizabeth Robinson Montagu Collection at the Huntington Library
Biographical Sketches of Principal Bluestocking Women
A Bluestocking Bibliography
Bluestocking Feminism
Church of England Clergy and Women Writers
Clara Reeve, Provincial Bluestocking: From the Old Whigs to the Modern Liberal State
“Out rushed a female to protect the Bard”: The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare
Elizabeth Montagu, Bluestocking Businesswoman
The Politics of Sociability: Public Dimensions of the Bluestocking Millennium
Two Versions of Community: Montagu and Scott
Subjectivity Unbound: Elizabeth Vesey as the Sylph in Bluestocking Correspondence
“Rags of Mortality”: Negotiating the Body in the Bluestocking Letters
Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economics of Desire
Index

Nicole Pohl is a lecturer at University College Northampton. She is the coeditor of Female Communities, 1600-1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities. Betty A. Schellenberg is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University and the author of The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775.

From reviews of the original edition: “By packaging several perspectives together, Reconsidering the Bluestockings creates a more thorough context for future scholarship. The book is, in short, the most valuable kind of scholarship: it provokes questions rather than answers them.”—New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century