Bluestocking in the North: Elizabeth Montagu, Education and the Archive

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Elizabeth Robinson Montagu rose to notability after her publication of An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769) in which she defended the value of Shakespeare's writings against the criticisms of Voltaire. Her highly popular publication can be used as a key to Montagu's philosophy on education. However, it is her manuscript legacy which truly speaks to her unfiltered and unedited opinion on education. Montagu was a prolific correspondent, with over 4,000 of her letters still surviving in various archives and personal collections around the world. Her correspondence has been noted as one of the most 'important surviving collections from the eighteenth century' (ODNB). She frequently wrote to leading intellectuals of the eighteenth century such as Edmund Burke and David Garrick, while also corresponding extensively with members of the Bluestockings, including Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney, Mary Hamilton, and many more. Elizabeth Carter was one of Montagu's closest friends, to whom she sent over 700 letters over the span of many years, and the two exchanged letters about their lives, covering everything from family trouble to overseas politics and Greek mythology. The correspondence has rightly been considered as a means of gauging Montagu's knowledge and networks, her reading, learning, and the strength of her proto-feminist approach to women's education. But the Bluestocking circle was a metropolitan phenomenon, and Montagu's skills of husbandry, mentorship and entrepreneurship were also required to manage her husband's estates, where she put into practice her ideologies of education.