Bluestocking Oxford

By Meagan Cea

‘Out rush’d a Female to protect the Bard,

Snatch’d up her Spear, and for the fight prepar’d:

Attack’d the Vet’ran, pierc’d his Sev’n-fold Shield,

And drove him wounded, fainting from the field.’

From ‘The Dream’, David Garrick

At a time when women were legally barred from attending university, there were few opportunities for them to openly engage with others on intellectual subjects. In the eighteenth century, however, women of means began creating informal educational opportunities for themselves by hosting salons. One of the most famous and influential of those women was Elizabeth Montagu.

Born into the English gentry in 1718, she received a higher standard of education than was expected for girls at the time, with exposure to Shakespeare and the Classics. In 1742, she met and married Edward Montagu, an extremely wealthy Northumberland landowner and mathematician, decades her senior. This companionable marriage gave Montagu the freedom to socialise as she pleased, and in 1750, she began hosting a salon at her London residence 22 Portman Square, inviting literary and scholarly guests, as well as large numbers of women who were encouraged to participate in discussions about literature and art.

Through these salons, Montagu cultivated a large and varied network of friends and acquaintances, including women such as Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney, Ann Yearsley, and Hannah More. One of her more notable friends, Benjamin Stillingfleet, was a frequent attendee of her salons but often failed to dress for the occasion, showing up wearing his work attire of worsted blue stockings, inspiring the term. Indeed, though ‘Bluestocking’ began as a nickname for Stillingfleet specifically, it evolved to refer to the circle of friends who attended Montagu’s salons, before eventually becoming the byword for an intellectual woman. Montagu herself, heralded as a wit by all who knew her, was dubbed ‘Queen of the Blues’ by her friend and rival, Samuel Johnson, author of the first modern dictionary.

In addition to encouraging and supporting the endeavours of her female friends, professional and otherwise, Montagu herself was an author. Her most famous work, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, compared with the Greek and French dramatic Poets; with some remarks upon misrepresentations of Mons. De Voltaire, was published anonymously in 1769. The essay was drafted as an explicit response to prior negative criticism of Shakespeare by Voltaire, who was scandalized by the elevation of the Bard above French tragedians, such as Corneille and Racine.

The debate of literary merit was, more than anything, a proxy war for cultural supremacy between the French and English, to which Montagu led the charge to defend her countrymen’s honor, taking issue with Voltaire’s portrayal of ‘every entire piece as a monstrous and ill-constructed farce’ as well as his complaints of a ‘want of politeness’ in Shakespeare’s work. She retorted that Voltaire’s ‘translations often, his criticisms oftener, prove he did not perfectly understand the words of the author; and therefore it is certain he could not enter into his meaning.’

Writing during the Enlightenment’s revival of Classicism, Montagu referred to ‘the period when Sophocles and Euripides wrote’ as being when ‘the fine arts, and polite literature, were in a degree of perfection which succeeding ages have emulated in vain.’ With the Ancient Greeks set as the standard, Montagu’s argument was structured around how Shakespeare and French tragedies compared. Noting that Voltaire himself admitted French tragedies were ‘rather conversations, than representations of an action,’ Montagu asserted that they therefore failed ‘at the most essential part of art.’ Although she acknowledged that both Shakespeare and Corneille’s plots were ‘wild,’ she argued the former’s were not guilty of being ‘unintelligible’, while, as Corneille himself confessed, his play ‘Clitandre might be to those who saw it but once.’ Moreover, she asserted that whatever ‘indecorums’ or ‘irregularities’ were present in his work, Shakespeare was redeemed by the ‘incomparable speeches’ present in even the ‘wildest and most incorrect’ of his plays.

Montagu’s criticism was well reviewed and received notable support from the esteemed Shakespearean actor, David Garrick. Though her sympathetic attitude may have been rooted in nationalism, her skilled defense contributed to the rise in Shakespeare’s cultural significance. By anointing the Bard as the ultimate representation of English genius, he became a figure above reproach. By the end of the century, criticism of his work consisted primarily of increasingly fawning praise.

A notable detractor of the Essay was Samuel Johnson, who published a new edition of Shakespeare around the same time and dismissed her work. Voltaire himself did not take Montagu’s critical rebuttal well, reportedly banning ‘all English people from his house’ in response. This did nothing to dampen the Essay’s popularity, which proceeded to be translated into French and Italian and ran through seven editions.

Literary criticism was considered a masculine pursuit when Montagu wrote the Essay, so speculation as to the identity of the author initially assumed it was written by a man. Due to the essays’ frequent allusions to Classical texts, the translator Elizabeth Carter was also suspected; however, Montagu was ultimately identified when the publishers determined her good friend Stillingfleet had corrected proofs of the manuscript. Though she initially denied it, most likely to avoid accusations of immodesty, Montagu’s authorship was an open secret for many years before she ultimately put her name to the fourth edition reprint in 1777.

The importance of Elizabeth Montagu’s accomplishment can only be truly appreciated in the context of the eighteenth century’s ambivalent attitude towards women who were active in the public sphere. Genteel femininity was still heavily associated with private life and domestic activity. As a result, any participation in public life put a woman at risk of being judged as immodest and unfeminine. Though poetry and fiction were increasingly being regarded as acceptable ladylike pursuits, endeavours which required extensive education and research, such as history, classical translation and literary criticism were still considered inappropriate for women to engage with. Thus Montagu not only established herself as a public intellectual at a time when her sex was not deemed qualified to engage in the public sphere, but successfully managed to maintain her social respectability until her death in 1800, a rare historical achievement.
 

References

Eger, Elizabeth and Lucy Peltz (2008). Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings (Yale University Press)

Eger, Elizabeth, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O. Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (2006). Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830 (Cambridge University Press)

Gibson, Susannah (2024). Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement (John Murray)

Montagu, Elizabeth (2018). An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, compared with the Greek and French dramatic Poets: with some remarks upon misrepresentations of Monsieur De Voltaire (Cambridge University Press)

Ritchie, Fiona and Peter Sabor, eds. (2012). Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press)

Thompson, Ann and Sasha Roberts (1997). Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900: An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester University Press)