The bluestockings A history of the first women's movement

Gibson, an Irish writer and historian who holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, traces the rise and fall of English salons by examining the prosopographical connections among such women authors and intellectuals as Elizabeth Montagu, Frances Burney, and Hester Thrale as they inspired, supported, and argued with one another. She includes detailed studies of women from many levels of society, such as Ann Yearsley, a milkwoman poet, and describes how society's expectations for women were often barriers to their intellectual growth. Gibson argues that the Bluestockings used their intelligence and wit to challenge societal norms and the patriarchy, thereby creating new possibilities for women. In the final chapter, she explores their legacy through the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf. This well-researched popular history is engagingly written; the Bluestockings come to life through their own words and through Gibson's adept storytelling. Her re-creation of the 18th-century world allows modern readers to understand the thoughts and actions of people who held views radically different from our own. The illustrations provide another window on these women's lives. Gibson's work will spark general readers' curiosity to explore the subject further. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers and undergraduates. --Janet M. Pope, Hiram College

A lively group portrait of 18th-century Englishwomen who claimed a place for themselves in the nation's intellectual life. Most of these "bluestockings" (not a pejorative term until much later) were aristocrats, privileged enough to have leisure time to devote to reading and writing. Working-class poet Ann Yearsley, wife of a yeoman who had fallen on hard times, and playwright/religious author Hannah More, middle-class daughter of a schoolteacher, were the exceptions--and More's patronizing treatment of Yearsley demonstrated that the bluestockings may have defied intellectual restrictions but did not question the class system. Gibson, the author of The Spirit of Inquiry, begins with Elizabeth Montagu, whose salon on Hill Street in London was a favored gathering place of intellectual women, equaled in brilliance only by Hester Thrale's salon, which orbited around literary lion Samuel Johnson. Thrale and Montagu were friends, and most women in their elite orbit socialized with both, among them classicist Elizabeth Carter and Hester Mulso Chapone, who gained early fame for cautiously feminist letters written to Samuel Richardson in defense of a woman's right to choose a husband. Gibson offers vivid sketches of all these women, and many others, in a loosely structured narrative that first introduces Montagu and other key players, then uses individual lives to explore common aspects of all female experience in chapters devoted to marriage, motherhood, friendship, and love, with a final chapter showing how some bluestockings maneuvered through social strictures to gain independence. The author does not scant the difficulties these women faced; the account of Thrale's constant pregnancies (15 in 16 years) and the frequent deaths of her children (only three remained alive in 1776) is particularly grim. The author's engaging account honors the determination and charm with which her subjects seized as much freedom as society would allow them. Vivid popular history illuminating some neglected feminist pioneers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.