Enfilade

Susannah Gibson will give a lunchtime lecture related to her new book at London’s National Portrait Gallery on 7 March 2024. The volume is scheduled for publication in the United States this summer. From John Murray Press:

Susannah Gibson, Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement (London: John Murray Press, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1529369991, £25 / $30.

In Britain in the 1750s, women had no power and no rights—all money and property belonged to their fathers or husbands. A brave group risked everything to think and live as they wished, despite the sneers of contemporaries who argued that books frazzled female brains and damaged their wombs.

Meet the Bluestockings:
• Elizabeth Montagu hosted a series of glittering salons in her London drawing room, where a circle of women and men discussed theatre, philosophy and the classics, competing to outdo each other in wit and brilliance. Discover how she took on Voltaire and won.
• Whilst nursing twelve children and helping run her bullying husband’s brewery, Hester Thrale took key writers under her wing—Dr Johnson moved into her house for several years. Her vivid diaries offer a powerful chronicle of what happened when she finally decided to follow her heart.
• Find out how poetess and former milkmaid Ann Yearsley fought back when her snobbish patron refused to hand over her earnings because she was working class and thus irresponsible . . .
• Or how Catherine Macauley’s eight-volume history of England caused such a sensation that she became a leading light in the American Revolution—while her unorthodox love-life scandalised her contemporaries . . .

Susannah Gibson explores the lives and legacies of these and other figures who went on to inspire writers and thinkers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf and lead the way for feminism.

Susannah Gibson is an Irish writer and historian. She is the author of The Spirit of Inquiry and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge in eighteenth-century history and lives in Cambridge, England.