Elizabeth Montagu, the queen of the bluestockings, Volumes 1 and 2

by Mrs. Montagu

Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Bluestockings presents the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu from 1720 to 1761, edited with a connecting narrative by her great-great-niece Emily J. Climenson and published in two volumes in 1906. Montagu, born Elizabeth Robinson, was the hostess whose London assemblies gave the bluestocking circle its name and the author of an essay on Shakespeare that answered Voltaire. The letters, chosen from the sixty-eight boxes of manuscripts that came to the editor, follow her from a clever girlhood in Kent and Cambridge through her marriage to the wealthy Edward Montagu, the death of her only child, her friendships with the Duchess of Portland and others, and her life among the wits of the mid-eighteenth century. The full text is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, and the first chapter is free.