Reconsidering the Bluestockings

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.