She’s a poet, a chemist, a mathematician: The Bluestockings Circle and its Representation in The Liberal
Daniele Svezia (University of Florence)
The Bluestockings Circle was a social and intellectual network operating in England between the mid-eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. With Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1718-1800) as its central figure – celebrated as the “Queen of the Blues” (Bodek 1976: 187) – and comprising figures such as Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More, Frances Burney and Hester Chapone (Pohl and Schellenberg 2002: 4), the circle developed within the broader context of the Enlightenment’s growing interest in rethinking the intellectual role of women. Inspired by models of sociability associated with the French salons, the Bluestockings’ gatherings provided informal spaces for learned conversation and critical exchange. In this sense, the circle can be understood as a response to women’s marginalisation from institutionalised and authoritative cultural forums, offering alternative modes of access to learning that sought to expand participation in intellectual life (Bodek 1976: 185).
Although closely related to the model of aristocratic salonnières across the Channel, the Bluestockings differed from their French counterparts in embodying the values of the upper middle class and in rejecting the aristocratic taste for social frivolity and excess (Bodek 1976: 188). In their English reconfiguration of these circles, learning was conceived as a moral duty aimed at cultivating rationality and virtue rather than as a form of leisure. As Bodek observes, the Bluestockings were marked by a distinctly puritanical insistence on propriety, correct sentiment, and moral conduct; consequently, activities perceived as ephemeral, including card games, gossip, or the consumption of alcoholic beverages, were excluded from their gatherings (Bodek 1976: 187-88; Eger 2010: 137). Assemblies were carefully organised and presided over by the hostesses, most notably Lady Montagu, who determined the topic of discussion, selected suitable participants, and guided the conversation, often by actively drawing prominent male guests such as Samuel Johnson or Horace Walpole into the debate (Bodek 1976: 190, 193).
The result was an environment shaped by exchange, with a strong focus on literature and literary criticism, in which patronage and mutual support in publication encouraged the development of women’s capacities as a way of asserting that they “had intelligence and personal qualities that could elevate social life” (Bodek 1976: 196). At the same time, the Bluestockings’ stance remained cautious and largely conventional in relation to the political and social order of their time. This commitment to learning and virtue formed part of a broader conservative Anglican ideological framework (Pohl and Schellenberg 2002: 2), and the Bluestockings largely accepted existing social arrangements, without advocating an extension of education to all women or pressing for greater political rights (Bodek 1976: 195-196). By the end of the eighteenth century, the term “Bluestocking” had acquired a derogatory connotation, reflecting widespread prejudice against learned women (Pohl and Schellenberg 2002: 5). Its later usage associated the term with the figure of the cultured and pedantic woman, revealing a cultural climate in which erudition was perceived as a natural attribute of men and an “unpardonable sin” for women (Bodek 1976: 187), as well as anxieties surrounding the growing visibility of Bluestocking authors and the challenge this posed to male literary hegemony (Eger 2010: 206).
Women associated with these intellectual circles thus became increasingly exposed to satire and derision: it is within this context that Lord Byron’s poem The Blues; A Literary Eclogue takes shape. Written in August 1821 as “mere buffoonery” (Byron, quoted in Coleridge and Prothero 1901: 569) and not originally intended for publication, the poem appeared anonymously in the third issue of The Liberal in April 1823. As Gioia Angeletti observes, Byron offers a parodic glimpse into the intellectual and fashionable circles of the Regency era (Angeletti 2023: 151), notably through the reworking of two scenes associated with the Bluestockings. His satire operates on two related levels: it targets the identity of the “Blues” themselves, while simultaneously questioning their intellectual substance by ridiculing the male figures who participate in their gatherings and whom the Bluestockings treat as authoritative sources of knowledge and cultural legitimacy.
Apart from Inkel and Tracy, modelled on Byron himself and Thomas Moore, the characters of the poem consist of caricatural figures that allude to well-known intellectuals from the contemporary literary scene, whose names are parodically distorted. In the first eclogue, set outside the room where Scamp is delivering a lecture, Tracy and Inkel comment on the vogue for literary conferences and on the Bluestockings’ audience, which is portrayed as a noisy and worldly crowd, readily impressed by exposure to a “torrent of trash […] / Pumped up with such effort” (The Liberal, 3, 1823: 4). The Bluestockings thus appear as a group of women captivated by displays of erudition that the poem exposes as hollow, embodied by false literary idols such as the renegade Lake Poets, who feature under thinly veiled disguises: Scamp (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Mouthy (Robert Southey), Wordswords (William Wordsworth), and Botherby (William Sotheby) (Coleridge and Prothero 1901: 570).
Through the dialogue between Tracy and Inkel concerning Miss Lilac, whom Tracy intends to propose to, the poem presents the Bluestockings as fundamentally incompatible with romantic attachment and even more so with marriage. Inkel’s emblematic line, “she’s a poet, a chemist, a mathematician” (The Liberal, 3, 1823: 5), with its cumulative progression, frames multidisciplinary competence as a form of ridiculous excess, while simultaneously conveying the image of a woman “so learned in all things, and fond of concerning / Herself in all matters connected with learning” (5), to such an extent that she appears incapable of fully committing to love or of fulfilling the role of a wife. As suggested by the allusion to Miss Lilac’s fortune and to her mother, this episode also carries a pointed autobiographical resonance, referring to Byron’s failed marriage to the “mathematician and educationalist” Anne Isabella Milbanke (Franklin 2020: 211). The perceived incompatibility between a woman’s deep interest in knowledge and marital fulfilment becomes even more explicit in the second eclogue, where the setting shifts to the literary “collation” (The Liberal, 3, 1823: 9) organised by Lady Bluebottle – probably Lady Holland – at her residence, soon crowded with “Blues, dandies, and dowagers, and second-hand scribes” (10). At this point, the male voice of Sir Richard Bluebottle laments that his wife’s intellectual pursuits have turned their home into a public salon, eroding the private sphere; her relentless engagement with learning, staged as a social performance, is thus represented as a destabilising force that unsettles domestic balance and diminishes the traditional authority of the husband.
As the name chosen for the hostess, “Lady Bluebottle”, anticipates, Byron ridicules the strict moral code that governed the Bluestockings’ gatherings – and therefore the prohibition on consuming alcohol – by portraying the members of the circle, together with the other guests, cheerfully pouring each other generous glasses of Madeira wine. Furthermore, the dialogues in the same scene also address topics related to the literary field: firstly, the author reduces the Blues’ ability to converse skilfully on such matters to “smatter and chatter, gleaned out of reviews” (The Liberal, 3, 1823: 12), an observation that aims above all to demonstrate that the judgements expressed by these intellectual women are nothing more than second-hand opinions recycled from articles of criticism in mainstream periodical culture; then, launching scathing attacks on the Lake School poets through Inkel’s irreverent voice and attributing to the hostess and her companions the stubborn defence of these conservative poets, Byron attempts to highlight the fact that these “self-proclaimed” scholars, despite their incessant intellectual efforts, were the product of that conservative, elitist and repressive culture that The Liberal aimed to oppose in its four issues. It is also worth noting that, through the guests’ repeated references to future gatherings at the residences of other figures within this cultural milieu, Byron suggests that these events, rather than being assemblies devoted to the improvement of female intellect through literary discussion, more closely resembled social rituals imbued with the frothiness of the worldly culture from which this circle sought to distance itself.
Ultimately, Lord Byron’s The Blues; A Literary Eclogue delivers a scathing satire of the Bluestockings as self-styled intellectuals whose pretensions he saw as inauthentic – an affected coterie whose scholarly posturing masks a lack of originality and critical depth. The very form of the piece, a literary eclogue or mock-classical dialogue, underscores the artificiality Byron perceived in their gatherings, presenting their learned exchanges as performative spectacle. This harsh judgment reflects not only some anxiety over shifting gender roles in intellectual life (Franklin 2020: 213), but also Byron’s broader critique of moralising, conservative literary culture. Rather than at the idea of female intellectual ambition, his resentment was directed at the Bluestockings’ role as arbiters of cultural taste aligned with the establishment ethos of the Lake Poets. In this sense, The Blues targets a model of respectable femininity linked to authority and orthodoxy, while implicitly revealing the tensions that accompanied women’s increasing visibility in the literary field.
References
The Liberal Project. Università di Firenze. https://www.theliberal.unifi.it/
Angeletti, Gioia, “Domestica facta Recollected in Italy: Byron and The Liberal” in Imprinting: The Liberal in Anglo-Italian Literary Relations, edited by Serena Baiesi, Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Carlotta Farese, Lausanne, Peter Lang, 2023, 141-160.
Bodek, Evelyn Gordon, “Salonieres and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism”, Feminist Studies 3, (1976), 185-199.
Byron, George Gordon, The Works of Lord Byron. A New, Revised and Enlarged Edition, with Illustrations. Poetry. Vol. IV, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge and Rowland Edmund Prothero, London, John Murray; New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898-1905, vol. IV, 1901.
Eger, Elizabeth, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Franklin, Caroline, “‘Benign Ceruleans of the Second Sex!’ Byron and the Bluestockings” in Byron in Context, edited by Clara Tuite, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 206-213.
Pohl, Nicole and Schellenberg, Betty A., “Introduction: A Bluestocking Historiography”, Huntington Library Quarterly 65 (2002), 1-19.
Ultimo aggiornamento
22.01.2026