Imaginings of Well-Employed and Wasted Time in ‘Bluestocking’ Letters and Writings

Abstract

Drawing on the letters and writings of Catherine Talbot, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Delany, and Elizabeth Montagu, this thesis explores bluestocking imaginings of well-employed and wasted time. Specifically, it examines ways in which these five women engaged with differing models of virtue, highlighting how each of these models outlined different versions of how one should employ one’s time in order to lead a happy, productive, and moral upstanding life. In this study, I argue that by unpacking how my case studies navigated conflicting models of well-employed time – along with how they used written accounts of themselves navigating these models to cement their relationships with other intelligent and genteel women – we can not only revise the idea of a bluestocking ‘circle’, but shed new light on the lives and legacies of individual bluestockings.
By highlighting how Talbot negotiated her domestic duties and scholarly ambitions in a manner that she grasped would be relatable to Carter, I challenge her reputation as a lamenting and bitter figure. Through exploring how Lady Mary wrote about time, learning, and custom in ways that she hoped would form emotional ties between herself and her female relatives, I expose that while not often written about as a bluestocking, her writings can be related convincingly to the bluestocking movement. In my examination of Carter’s letters, I consider how she used little-studied portrayals of herself walking and sewing to negotiate multiple, conflicting pulls on her intellectual and social lives in her letters to Talbot. Through my discussion of how Delany portrayed her shell crafts as both important and frivolous, improving and wasteful in letters written to her sister over the course of her lifetime, I dispute the popular idea of her reaching her creative peak in old age. Finally, through my analysis of Montagu’s adolescent letters, I shine light on how she used her alias ‘Fidget’ to progress along social and intellectual models of well-employed time, exposing a model of friendship that was crucial to the bluestocking movement.

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