CHAPTER VIII

Women and the new Scholarship

The revolution of 1688 which removed James II from the throne placed on it his daughter, Mary, with her husband William, Prince of Orange. Until her death from smallpox on 28 December 1694 Queen Mary and her husband ruled England together. Her face, although almost masked by his, appears on the English coinage in those years. To many of her contemporaries the lightness of heart induced by a bloodless revolution was increased by the fact that a woman again sat on the English throne. The queen was a religious and kindly woman, interested in architecture and gardening. Many years after her death the Duchess of Marlborough wrote ‘that she wanted bowels’, because she showed no feelings natural in a daughter when she and her husband took her father’s place’¹. But to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, she was ‘our late Blessed Queen’, who ‘was incessantly employed, in possessing her Mind with the best Schemes, that were either laid before her by others, or suggested by her own Royal Heart, for Correcting every Thing that was amiss, and Improving everything that wanted finishing among us.… She had arrived at such a superior degree of Knowledge, and had such a Sweetness of Temper, that if our Sins had not provoked God to blast all those Hopes, by her early admission to a better Crown, we might have seen a glorious face put on our Church’². These words were written in 1713, when Queen Mary had been dead for nineteen years. The bishop had written a full account of the queen’s tastes and virtues in an essay which appeared in the year following her death³.

Inevitably, the queen’s subjects looked back to the glorious days of Queen Elizabeth. All women had gained by the skill and courage with which she led her people through a dangerous age. There were in Queen Mary’s lifetime signs that women were again to profit by the mere fact that one of their sex was the ruler. Two anonymous publications, one issued in 1691 and the other in 1692, are symptomatic of the feeling of the age. Since each was anonymous neither author can have expected personal advantage from flattery of the queen. A Dialogue concerning Women, being a defence of the Sex. Written to Eugenia, was the work of William Walsh¹, a man of fashion, a critic and a poet, who himself declared that he had ‘an amorous heart’². He wrote in prose and verse of love and lovers³. It has been supposed without evidence that the Eugenia to whom his Dialogue was addressed was his mistress. It is more satisfactory to identify her with the Eugenia who in 1700 trounced John Sprint for his contemptuous address directed against married women⁴. The style of Walsh’s Preface is that of a man about town addressing a lady of position. She is ‘your Ladyship’ or ‘Madam’. ‘I little thought’, he writes, ‘when I talk’d with Your Ladyship of the Vertues of your Sex, that you would have commanded me to have given my Sentiments upon that Subject in Writing’⁵. To help him to express his belief in the ability of women he used the conceit of two men discussing the sex, Mysogynes, the disbeliever in female capacity and virtue, and Phylogynes, the lover and upholder of women. All the arguments of Mysogynes were answered and his criticisms disposed of by Phylogynes. Like others who wished women well Phylogynes compared the long time spent on a man’s education with the little thought given to that of women. ‘Consider what time and charge is spent to make Men fit for somewhat; Eight or Nine Years at School; Six or Seven at the University; Four or Five Years in Travel; and after this are they not almost all Fops, Clowns, Dunces or Pedants? I know not what you think of the Women; but if they are Fools, they are Fools I am sure with less pains and less expense than we are’⁶. Many learned women of ancient times and modern were cited by Phylogynes, who declared that ‘granting the equal capacities of both sexes, ‘tis a greater Wonder to find one Learned Woman, than a hundred Learned Men, considering the difference of their Educations’⁷.

The conclusion and final proof of the argument for women was their capacity to rule. ‘But it is generally agreed that all Vertues are requisite for those who Govern well; and since there are some Countries where Women are Excluded from the Throne, and no Countrey where they are not postponed, it would be convenient methinks to see what they do when by accident they are placed upon it’. Ignoring all women of the ancient world the author confines himself ‘within the bounds of our own Countrey’¹. There he finds that ‘at a time when the Britains groaned under the Servitude of the Romans… Boadicia arose’. He is obliged to admit that the end of her enterprise ‘was not answerable to the Successes of the Beginning’. Nevertheless ‘as one of the greatest attempts the Britains made for their Liberty was whilst they were led by a Woman; so we must own the Greatest Glory our Nation could ever boast was under the Government of one of the same Sex. It was in the time of Queen Elizabeth that this island arrived at a pitch of greatness, to which it had been ascending for several Ages, and from which it has been declining ‘till very lately ever since’². His final example of the reigning queen was Queen Mary. ‘Yes, Sir, without going to foreign Countries, without searching the Histories of our own; we have even in our own Time and our own Countrey, a Princess who has governed to their general satisfaction, a People the most curious, to pry into the faults of their Governours, of any People under the Sun. A Princess, who though she never shew’d any fondness of Vainglory, or Authority, yet when the necessity of the Kingdom called her to the Helm, Managed Affairs with that dexterity which is rarely found in those who are the most ambitious of Command’³. The virtues of the queen seemed all the greater since she very readily yielded up ‘that Authority which she owed to the absence of a Husband whom she loved so much better than that. Does it not put you in mind of the old Roman Generals, who quitted their plow to command an Army, and when the Victory was gained returned to their Plow again?’⁴ William Walsh tried to ensure the success of his book by persuading John Dryden to write a Preface for him. In it the poet declared that he would rather see some women ‘praised extraordinarily, than any of them suffer by detraction: and that in this Age, and at this time particularly, wherein I find more Heroines than Heroes’⁵.

To Nahum Tate, whom Dryden befriended, is attributed A Present for the Ladies, being an Historical Vindication of the Female Sex¹. After a rapid survey of the famous women of the ancient and modern world the author states that ‘All nations have had experience of the excellent Rule and Administration of their Princesses … the Britons their Boadicia of ancient times, and of late their illustrious Elizabeth. What was wanting to accomplish this Princess? She was endu’d with great spirit: to discharge the Duties of Government, she levied Armies, she presided in the Councils, she managed her Subjects with Clemency, her Enemies with Terrour: She did everything in an extraordinary manner…. But after all, if Queen Elizabeth had never bless’d the World, if yet no Age or Country had seen a Princess sitting at the Helm of Government and skilfully steering through all Extremities of State, … if the times past, I say, had never shown such a Phoenix, yet to the eternal Glory of the Sex, it must be confess’d, that the present season is happy in an Example: All Europe have lately turn’d their eyes upon Great Britain, and there beheld upon the Throne, a Female Regent administering in the absence of her Royal Heroe, and every day affording just occasions for admiration and astonishment’. The writer concludes that ‘the inference to be naturally drawn from the Illustrious Instances we have produced, is, that we should at last render this noble sex their just respect and honour. That we should no longer look upon them as the Entertainments of idle Hours, but place them in the venerable Estimation which is due to their Merit. Let us bear in mind the Obligations wherein we stand indebted to them from our Birth and Infancy even through the whole Course of our Lives’². Neither of these two anonymous works gives the impression of mere book-making. William Walsh, at least, was a man of position with an estate in Worcestershire, who could afford to write what he chose. His poems suggest that he both admired and liked women and enjoyed their company, though he never married. The sincerity of both writers is evident.

Nevertheless some ladies, at least, did not think well of Walsh’s attempt to do them justice. The anonymous female author of An Essay in the Defence of the Female Sex, published in 1696³, wrote despiteously of ‘Mr. W.’s laboured Common Place Book’. The romantic days, she thought, were over when a man of wit might arise ‘to be the champion of our sex against the injuries and oppressions of his own’. She called Walsh’s book ‘a feint of something of this nature’ in which ‘he has taken more care to give an edge to his satyr, than force to his Apology: he has played a sham Prize, and receives more Thrusts than he makes’. She seemed to resent his method of argument: ‘He levels scandal at the whole Sex, and thinks us sufficiently fortify’d, if out of the story of Two Thousand Years he has been able to pick up a few Examples of Women illustrious for their Wit, Learning, or Vertue, and Men infamous for the contrary’¹. It is refreshing and new to find a defender of the female sex who declares that she will ‘leave Pedants and School-Boys to rake and tumble the Rubbish of Antiquity, and muster all the Heroes and Heroins they can find to furnish Matter for some wretched Harangue, or stuff a miserable Declamation with instead of Sense or Argument’². Her purpose was, indeed, a contemporary one, for she aimed at showing that men could improve and divert their minds in the company and conversation of women: that women are ‘qualified for the Conversation of ingenious Men, or to go yet farther, their Friendship’³.

Whoever wrote this book was certainly a lively and intelligent woman, who looked on the world about her and saw with a clear eye the follies and stupidities of men. She had no mercy on any of them. Scholars are pedants, ‘superstitious, bigotted Idolators of times past’ and ‘children in their Understanding all their lives’⁴. The country squire gets off no better. ‘He wearies you in the Morning with his sport, in the Afternoon with the noisie Repetition and Drink, and the whole day with Fatigue and Confusion. His Entertainment is stale Beer, and the History of his Dogs and Horses, in which he gives you the Pedigree of every one with all the exactness of a Herald; and if you be very much in his good Graces, ‘tis odds, but he makes you the Compliment of a Puppy of one of his favourite Bitches, which you must take with abundance of Acknowledgments of his Civility, or else he takes you for a stupid, as well as an ill bred Fellow’⁵. She pokes gentle fun at the scientists and members of the Royal Society, whom she stiles ‘Virtuosos’⁶ and pours scorn on the ‘beaus’ and ‘bullies’ of the town, the ‘fop-poets’, the ‘coffee-house politicians’, and the ‘scowrers’, that is, ‘men of nice honour that love fighting for the sake of blows’⁷. Her satire is good reading and her book was popular. It was already in its third edition in 1697⁸.

She is refreshing after the earnest propaganda of Hannah Woolley and Bathshua Makin, for unlike them she made no apology for the contemporary state of women’s education. Women, unlike men, do not have to waste years learning the classical languages, a labour she regarded as completely unnecessary for them, since all the best writers of antiquity can be read in translation. For the only purpose of learning foreign languages ‘is to arrive at the Sense, Wit, or Arts, that have been communicated to the world in ‘em’¹. She cites a large number of translations of classical authors and points out that ‘Assisted by these Helps ‘tis impossible for any woman to be ignorant that is but desirous to be otherwise, though she know no Part of Speech out of her Mother-Tongue’². Moreover, she argued, there are so many excellent works written in English—verse, prose, plays, history and philosophy—that ‘Women want not the means of being wise and prudent without more Tongues than one; nay, learned too if they have any Ambition to be so’³. Idleness keeps women from acquiring knowledge, but so it does many men. This, she thinks, must be the reason why women ‘who are commonly charged with talking too much, are guilty of writing so little. I wish they would shake off this lazy Despondence, and let the noble Examples of the deservedly celebrated Mrs. Philips, and the incomparable Mrs. Behn, rouze their Courages, and shew Mankind the great Injustice of their Contempt’⁴. They would not, she thinks, need foreign tongues to follow these examples. In fact ignorance of Latin and Greek is a great advantage to women, for they spend their time reading romances, novels, plays and poems, which give them command of words. They go visiting with their mothers which gives them ‘the Opportunity of imitating, conversing with, and knowing the Manner, and Address of elder Persons’⁵.

Ballard was not able to come by a copy of this tract or he would never have attributed it to Mary Astell. It is far too light-hearted for that serious and religious lady. The author was a woman of the world, at home both in the town and the country. Her tract was seen through the press by James Drake, a doctor, who wrote many pamphlets in the Tory interest and was a young man of twenty-nine when this essay appeared. He wrote a long poem in praise of the author, a much better poem than was often written to commend books to their readers in the seventeenth century. It has been suggested that the essay was written by his sister, but without evidence¹. The dedication of this book to the Princess Anne is a good illustration of the assurance women drew from the realization that William III would be succeeded by a queen. ‘I have only endeavoured to reduce the Sexes to a level’, wrote the author in her Preface, ‘and by arguments to raise ours to an Equality at most with the men: but your Highness by illustrious example daily convinces the world of our Superiority’². There is in this essay none of the humourless sense of mission that in the writings of her predecessors and many of her successors breeds weariness with their cause.

There is other evidence of a genuinely popular nature which implies that opinion was moving in favour of women in the last decade of the century. Between March 1690 and February 1696 an eccentric publisher, John Dunton, was issuing a weekly or bi-weekly paper called The Athenian Gazette³, a title soon changed to The Athenian Mercury. Each issue was a single sheet of questions and answers. The first number was presumably composed, both as to questions and answers, by Dunton himself, but in it he announced that ‘All Persons whatever may be resolved gratis in any Question that their own satisfaction or Curiosity shall prompt ‘em to if they send their questions by a penny post letter to Mr. Smith at his Coffee house at Stocks Market in the Poultry’⁴. This early type of Answers, or ‘Twenty Questions’, was popular at once and in the fourth number publication twice a week was announced. From time to time the papers were made up into a volume with a list of the questions answered therein. Dunton was insistent that questions from persons of either sex were welcomed. In the part issued on 5 May 1691 he inserted an advertisement: ‘We have received this week a very ingenuous letter from a lady in the country, who desires to know whether her Sex might not send us questions as well as men, to which we answer, Yes, they may, our design being to answer all manner of Questions sent us by either Sex, that may be either useful to the publick or to particular persons’. But the publishers were already overwhelmed with questions and asked their readers to send no more until they had dealt with arrears.

Dunton came of a family which for several generations had provided clergymen for the Church of England. He married a daughter of Samuel Annesley, one of the band of eminent Nonconformist ministers who were ejected from their livings in 1662. Another of Annesley’s daughters married Samuel Wesley, who became rector of South Ormsby, Lincolnshire, in 1690 and moved to the rectory of Epworth in 1695, where his illustrious son, John Wesley, was born and bred. When the answering of questions became more than one man could manage Dunton enlisted the help of Samuel Wesley and Richard Sault, a mathematician. Occasional help from other scholars was sought and queries came both from Oxford and Cambridge. In his Lincolnshire rectory Samuel Wesley wrote a poem on the Life of Christ which he dedicated to Queen Mary¹, and dealt with the many questions on religious subjects propounded to the Athenian Mercury. He brought sound learning and good sense to the answering of such questions as ‘What is the meaning of the present union between the Presbyterians and the Independents?’, ‘Whether a universal accommodation amongst Protestants may ever be expected?’ and ‘What is the soul of man, and whether Eternal?’ The questions posed by the public covered the whole range of human interests and many people obtained free medical and legal advice. The pages of The Athenian Mercury are well worth turning over today for the light the questions and answers throw on England at the end of the seventeenth century. In the first number the question ‘Whether ‘tis lawful for a man to beat his wife?’ was posed². The answer admits that the legality of beating is unquestionable, but ‘the time and measure are generally too critical for a Calculation’. The writer suggests that a ‘sympathetick Remedy, as the Rebuke of a Kiss’ is more likely to be efficacious than beating.

This answer provoked the question whether a woman having a sot to her husband might not beat him, but the editor clearly regarded this as frivolous and replied that the power was vested in man without any distinction or limitation, a view that might be expected from an authority so well versed in the Scriptures as Samuel Wesley¹. In the fourth number a question about the right of divorced persons to marry was disposed of by reference to ‘the 5th St. Matth. 32’². In general the answers show sympathy with women. The question ‘Why is it supposed by some that women have no souls?’ received short shrift: ‘They are a parcel of Jews for their pains; if any be so foolish and barbarous to make such a supposition: And the Reason why they think Women have no souls is because they have none themselves’. To the enquiry how a man may restrain a headstrong or unruly wife the editor replied ‘Give her rope enough, Our meaning is, e’en let her alone, for she’s not to be made civil by anything but the worms’. He concluded his answer, however, by saying that ‘the surest way’ of improving her ‘is being a good Husband yourself, for ‘tis bad Husbands are very often the cause that the Wives are no better than they should be’. On 23 May 1691 the question whether it be proper for women to be learned was faced and the decision reached that ‘on the whole since they have as noble Souls as we, a finer Genius, and generally quicker Apprehensions, we see no reason why women should not be learned now, as well as Madam Philips, Van Schurman and others have formerly been’.

Questions relating to love and marriage were put in considerable numbers by both sexes. The answers are revealing, for they reflect the professional and middle-class attitude to marriage which was very different from that set out in the lucid prose of Lord Halifax. The Athenian Mercury issued on 5 May 1691 was devoted to answering a number of questions relating to love and marriage ‘proposed by a Gentleman at different times’³. The first question was ‘Whether it is lawful to make addresses to young ladies without a prior acquainting their parents and relatives therewith?’ The advice given was that it was first necessary to find out if the young lady were deserving of love before any approach was made to her parents. When assured on that point it was perhaps best to make application to both the lady and her parents at as nearly as possible the same time, so ‘that neither might conceive umbrage of the other’. The second question was ‘Whether it is lawful to marry a person one cannot Love, only in compliance to Relations and to get an estate?’ ‘Such a practice’, said the answer, ‘would be the most cruel and imprudent thing in the world—society is the main end of marriage, Love is the bond of society, without which there can be neither found in that State Pleasure, or Profit, or Honour’. The thirteenth question was ‘Whether ‘tis convenient for a lady to marry one she has an aversion for, in Obedience to her Parents?’ The answer is ‘Undoubtedly ‘tis not convenient, but the Querist intends [to say is it] necessary? We answer that it is by no means so. Parents are not to dispose of their children like cattel, not to make ‘em miserable because they happened to give ‘em Being; they are indeed generally granted a negative voice, nor am I sure that will always hold if they are signally unreasonable, if they have given permission or connivance before, and after engagements too deep to be broken would endeavour to retract it: But that they have an irresistable despotical, positive Vote, none but a Spaniard will pretend, but I’m sure our English ladies will very unwillingly grant’.

The men who answered the questions often encouraged their readers by giving a semi-humorous turn to their answers, but they gave good practical advice when it was needed. One question posed by an apprentice throws a little light on women who appear as the heads of businesses in the seventeenth century. It was ‘Whether an apprentice, being bound to the Husband, (the Husband dying) may be forced to serve out his time with the Widow, she keeping up her Husband’s trade?’¹ The answer was that ‘the Widow is bound to teach him his trade, either by taking someone of the same Profession into her house, or by turning him over to another master’. This answer agrees very well with the large amount of information which has been collected by Miss Clark about the part played by women in trade and business in the seventeenth century². The wives of members of the city companies were, like the wives of medieval guildsmen, members of the company to which their husbands belonged. Widows often carried on their husband’s business, taking in someone to manage it for them. In some trades a widow lost the freedom of the company when she married again, unless she married a man already a member of it. But the widows of printers were in a much stronger position for they kept their freedom of the Stationers’ Company even after remarriage. The eccentric York printer, Thomas Gent, wrote his autobiography in 1746 and in it has preserved a characteristic picture of a London printer’s wife, Mrs. Midwinter. Gent was apprenticed to her husband and in 1717 became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company. He wanted to leave his master, who when he heard this insultingly asked if Gent had any of the firm’s copies in his trunk. ‘At which Madame Midwinter said “My dear, don’t be too hard, neither, upon the young man, since he will go; … don’t spoil what you have done for him, nor hinder him getting a living in the best manner he is able”.’¹ Gent experienced so much kindness from Mrs. Midwinter that in an autobiographical poem he likened her to the Empress Maud². She did her best to persuade him to return, but he was afraid of the ‘awful reverence’ he would be ‘obliged to submit to’³. Nevertheless, he walked ten miles to attend her funeral⁴. For a time he was employed by a Quaker widow, Mrs. Bradford, who carried on a printer’s business in Fetter Lane⁵. When he entered the employment of the York printer Mr. White it was Mrs. White who wrote to engage him⁶.

The questions posed to The Athenian Mercury by apprentices generally turned on the conditions of their employment and were easily answered. Questions on abstruse philosophical points were more difficult. Here the publishers received considerable help from John Norris, the scholarly incumbent of Bemerton, Wilts, who would take no pay for the hints he was able to give, despite the fact that his large family meant that he was always in need of money. He was their link with the learned ladies of the age, for he addressed a treatise on love to Damaris, Lady Masham, in 1688⁷, and corresponded with Mary Astell on the nature of the love of God. Damaris Masham (1658–1708) was the daughter of the Cambridge scholar, Ralf Cudworth, and is best remembered for her friendship with John Locke. From 1691 to his death in 1704 Locke lived at Oates, in Essex, as a paying guest of Sir Francis and Lady Masham. John Norris wrote Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life with reference to the Study of Learning and Knowledge, in a letter to an excellent Lady, the Lady Masham, in 1690. The second edition appeared in 1691 still addressed to her. Norris wrote on the assumption that she had lost her sight and consoled her for the loss of opportunities of study by assuring her of the worthlessness of human knowledge. But Lady Masham had not lost her sight. In 1694 she wrote Occasional thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life and in 1696 a Discourse concerning the Love of God, but did not put her name on the title-pages. Both were popular and ran into more than one edition. Women, felt Lady Masham, were generally so ill brought up that they could not reason for themselves. Their religion was acquired ‘when their Nurses, or Maids Taught them their Catechisms; that is to say, Certain Answers to a Train of Questions adapted to some approved System of Divinity’¹. Locke published his Thoughts concerning Education while he was living at Oates. He was Lady Masham’s guide in the education of her son. She agreed with him that women should be so educated that they could teach their own young children: ‘young ladies cannot better employ so much of their time as is requisite thereto than in acquiring enough knowledge to teach their children what is fit for them to learn in the first eight or ten years of their lives. As to Read English perfectly; to understand ordinary Latin and Arithmetick; with some general knowledge of Geography, Chronology, and History’². She knew that ‘Parents sometimes do purposely omit’ to have their daughters instructed ‘from an apprehension that should Daughters be perceived to understand any learned Language, or be conversant in Books, they might be in danger of not finding Husbands; so few men, as do, relishing these accomplishments in a Lady’³.

Damaris Masham had been fortunate in her home life at Cambridge and doubly so in her friendship with such a man as John Locke. Mary Astell was less fortunate, for she was without the secure background of the happily married woman. Nor, so far as can be known, had she any close friendship with able men. Surprisingly little is known of her family position or her way of life in Chelsea, particularly in her early years there. She was born in Newcastle in 1666 and removed to Chelsea after her mother’s death in 1684. She lived there until her death in 1731. Her writings, although published anonymously, were soon known to have come from her pen and she became famous before she died. She enjoyed the friendship of women of position younger than herself, who perhaps owed something of their own outlook to the writings of the older woman. Ballard, writing in the decade after her death, found it difficult to acquire authentic information about her and even to see all her books. It was on hearsay alone that he excused the ‘warmth of temper’ discovered in her Reflections upon Marriage on the grounds of ‘her disappointment in a marriage contract with an eminent clergyman’¹. There is no shadow of evidence for this suggestion. She herself said that her pamphlet was occasioned by reading the Duke and Duchess of Mazarins Case². It seemed to her that ‘Had Madame Mazarine’s Education made a right Improvement of her Wit and Sense, we should not have found her seeking relief by such imprudent, not to say scandalous Methods, as running away in disguise with a spruce Cavalier, and rambling into so many Courts and Places, nor diverting herself with such Childish, Ridiculous, or Ill-natured Amusements, as the greatest part of the Adventures in her Memoirs are made up of’³. Mary Astell, like Damaris Masham, saw around her many unhappy marriages, particularly unhappy from the woman’s point of view. The only remedy seemed to them both that women should be properly educated. They would then, said Mary Astell, ‘marry more discreetly and demean themselves better in the Married state than some people say they do. The foundation indeed ought to be laid deep and strong. She should be made a good Christian and understand why she is so, and then she will be everything else that is good’⁴.

This tract was written with passion. There was no indication of the sex of the author in the first edition, published in 1700, but to the third edition which appeared in 1706, Mary Astell added a long Preface, in which she spoke as a woman, mocking at ‘the ingenious gentleman’ who ‘had the good nature to own these Reflections, so far as to affirm that he had the original MS. in his closet’⁵. She denied that her tract had tried to stir up sedition or undermine the ‘Masculine Empire’ and argued at length against the supposition that the subjection of women to men was divinely ordered. It was difficult for so true a daughter of the Church of England to dispose of Scriptural texts which place women in clear subordination to men. The task had been attempted a generation earlier by a French author whose tract The Woman as Good as Man or the Equality of Both Sexes was published in English translation in 1677 by someone who hid behind the initials A. L.⁶ He had argued that the objections drawn from Scripture ‘are but Sophisms of Prejudice; whereby sometimes Men understand (of all women) Passages which only agree to some few in Particular: sometime they refer to Nature, that which only flows from Education or Custom, and that which sacred authors have spoken with relation to their own time’¹. There is no evidence that Mary Astell had read this tract. Her argument was that the relationship between the male and female sex was a matter which concerned human nature in general and was not particular to those to whom the Word of God had been revealed. Therefore it was a question which should be decided by natural reason only. The design of the Scriptures was to make men good Christians and not great philosophers. They were written ‘for the Vulgar as well as the Learned and therefore are accommodated to the common way of speech and the usage of the world’. She set out a long list of eminent women who appear in the Scriptures to show that men ought not to justify from that source their habit of ‘despising Women and keeping them in ignorance and slavery’. ‘The Bible is for, not against us and cannot without great violence done to it, be urg’d to our Prejudice’². A fourth edition of the tract, revised, appeared in 1730.

Mary Astell’s most famous book is A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the advancement of their true and greatest interest³, of which the first part, containing a proposal for a women’s college, was published in 1694 and the second in 1697. Both were anonymous, but Mary Astell wrote as a woman and made no attempt to conceal her authorship. Her identity seems to have been an open secret from the first. She advocated the establishment of what she described as ‘a Monastery, or, if you will (to avoid giving offence to the scrupulous and injudicious, by names which tho’ innocent in themselves, have been abused by superstitious practices), a Religious Retirement’⁴ which should be so conducted ‘as not to exclude the good Works of an Active, from the pleasure and serenity of a Contemplative life’⁵. She saw it as a ‘Seminary to stock the Kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies, whose good Example it is to be hoped, will so influence the rest of their Sex, that Women may no longer pass for those useless impertinent Animals, which the ill conduct of so many has caused ‘em to be mistaken for’⁶.

As a strong High Church woman⁷, Mary Astell would have had the members of her college ‘observe all the Fasts of the Church, viz. Lent, Ember and Rogation-days, Fridays and Vigils’¹. Her own nature was deeply religious. In 1695 John Norris published, with her consent, the correspondence which had passed between them on the nature of the love of God. The unfortunate influence of the tract which John Norris had addressed to Lady Masham is apparent when Mary Astell discusses what subjects shall be studied in her retreat. ‘It is not intended’, she writes, ‘that our Religious should waste their time, and trouble their heads about such unconcerning matters, as the vogue of the world has turn’d up for Learning, the impertinency of which has been excellently expos’d by an ingenious Pen’ (Mr. Norris Conduct of Human Life, is inset in the text here) ‘but busy themselves in a serious enquiry after necessary and perfective truths’. She argues that such study ‘will not be out of the reach of a Female Virtuoso, for it is not intended that she shou’d spend her hours in learning words but things’². The most concrete suggestion for the ladies’ study was that, since most ladies understand the French tongue, they shall study the French philosophers rather than romances³. It was necessary for them ‘to redeem their Time’. ‘For a stated portion of it being daily paid to god in Prayers and Praises, the rest shall be imploy’d in innocent, charitable, and useful Business, either in study in learning themselves and instructing others, … or else in spiritual and corporal Works of Mercy, relieving the Poor, healing the Sick, mingling Charity to the Soul with that they express to the Body, instructing the Ignorant, counselling the Doubtful, comforting the Afflicted, and correcting those that err and do amiss’⁴.

That there were temporal as well as spiritual advantages in this retreat Mary Astell was careful to point out. ‘Heiresses and Persons of Fortune may be kept secure from the rude attempts of designing Men; and She who has more Money than Discretion need not curse her Stars for being expos’d a prey to bold importunate and rapacious Vultures. She will not here be inveigled nor impos’d on, will neither be bought nor sold, nor be forc’d to marry for her own quiet, when she has no inclination to it’⁵. Men, she argues, will be much better off if they marry educated women. ‘Piety is often offensive when it is accompanied with indiscretion; but she who is as Wise as Good possesses such Charms as can hardly fail of prevailing. Doubtless her Husband is a much happier Man and more likely to abandon his ill Courses than he who has none to come home to but an ignorant, froward, and fantastick Creature’¹. Mary Astell was not appealing on behalf of all women. Those whom she addressed were ‘Persons of Quality who are overstock’d with children’². Five or six hundred pounds, she thought, ‘may be easily spar’d with a daughter, when so many thousands would go deep; yet as the world goes be a very inconsiderable Fortune for Ladies of their birth, neither maintain them in that Port which Custom makes almost necessary, or procure them an equal Match’³. But this sum would establish her in this retreat and might well save her from making some dishonourable match in order to avoid ‘the dreadful name of Old Maid’⁴.

The 1697 edition of the work was dedicated to the Princess Anne. She was thought to have been the noble lady who promised £10,000 towards establishing the college. The offer was withdrawn, on the advice, as was supposed, of Gilbert Burnet⁵. The daughters of James II had been carefully educated in the doctrines of the Church of England. Although in her second part Mary Astell stressed the fact that ‘our Institution is rather Academical than Monastic’⁶ the thoughts of many of her readers undoubtedly turned to the Roman Catholic nunneries. Burnet himself was certainly not opposed to women’s education, nor even to the idea of a women’s college, as his own words show: ‘The ill methods of schools and colleges give the chief rise to the irregularities of the gentry; as the breeding of young women to vanity, dressing, and a false appearance of wit and behaviour, without proper work or a due measure of knowledge and a serious sense of religion, is the source of the corruption of that sex. Something like monasteries without vows would be a glorious design, and might be so set on foot, as to be the honour of a Queen on the throne’⁷. Mary Astell’s proposal was widely read and discussed, but there could be no easy way of securing a good education for all women until an adequate supply of well-trained teachers was secured and that was far in the future. The proposal and its author were held up to ridicule in several numbers of the Tatler, but the interest which her book aroused had carried it into a fourth edition by 1701.

Mary Astell’s project was in tune with her times. The new societies for the Reformation of Manners, the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and the Propagation of the Gospel all derived from the spirit which moved Mary Astell, and encouraged the establishment of charity schools and the provision of parochial libraries. Robert Nelson, a supporter of all these efforts, pointed out in his survey of Ways and Methods of Doing Good that ‘We have not Houses for the Reception of Ladies and Gentlewomen, beyond Boarding-Schools, in order to their Improvement both in Knowledge and Piety; though there was some Years ago a Proposal to Ladies for this End, made by a very Ingenious Gentlewoman; which was then well approved of by several Ladies and others’¹. Mary Astell’s book reminded John Evelyn of Mrs. Ferrar’s household at Little Gidding. Like others before and after him, ‘he wished that at the first Reformation in this Kingdom, some of those demolished Religious Foundations had been spared both for Men and Women: where single Persons devoutly inclined might have retired and lived without Reproach or insnaring Vows’².

The diffusion of knowledge controlled by religion for which Mary Astell had laboured gave an overriding purpose to the energies of her younger contemporary, Lady Elizabeth Hastings. Early in the eighteenth century she figures as a paragon of beauty and learned innocence in the polite journalism of the time. The phrase ‘To love her is a liberal education’ survives among these faded compliments³. But the satisfactions of her life were found in austerer circles and in a distant part of England. Lady Elizabeth was the daughter of the seventh Earl of Huntingdon by his first wife, daughter and heiress of Sir John Lewis, of Ledstone Hall, Yorkshire. In 1705 Lady Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s estates and soon afterwards took her four half-sisters to live with her at Ledstone Hall. This household of five women formed what Mary Astell would have recognized as a genuine religious society⁴. Lady Elizabeth was firm in her adherence to the Church of England, but she was sympathetic to the movement within the Church from which Methodism arose, and her first biographer thought it necessary to defend her from the charge of being herself a Methodist⁵. She might well have subsided into the leadership of a small community of dedicated women had it not been for the influence of Robert Nelson and like-minded friends of her earlier years. Under their advice she used her great fortune in a way which placed her in the front rank of benefactors to the cause of English education. As a foundress of schools she insisted that the institutions which she endowed should be governed by regulations which she herself had planned. She felt a personal responsibility for the educational condition of the North of England, and the scholarships which she founded at Queen’s College, Oxford, still preserve her memory.

The idea of an academy for women was one of many suggestions put forward by the Nonconformist Defoe in a volume of 336 pages entitled An Essay upon Projects, published in 1697¹. He had read Mary Astell’s book, but feared that her scheme ‘would be found impractable. For saving my Respect to the Sex, the Levity, which perhaps is a little peculiar to them, at least in their Youth, will not bear the Restraint; and I am satisfied that nothing but the heighth of Bigotry can keep up a Nunnery’. Although his plan differed ‘from what is proposed by that Ingenious Lady’ he confessed to a great esteem for her proposal and a great opinion of her wit. He would have an academy for ladies ‘differ but little from Public Schools, wherein such Ladies as were willing to study, should have all the advantages of Learning suitable to their Genius’². Their academy was to be a plainly built house with a moat all round and but one entrance. No men were to be admitted. ‘No Guards, no Eyes, no Spies’ should be set over the ladies who were ‘to be try’d by the Principles of Honour and strict virtue’³. The ladies were to be ‘taught all sorts of Breeding suitable to both their Genius and their Quality; in particular Music and Dancing’. They were to be taught languages, ‘particularly French and Italian; and I would venture the injury of giving a Woman more Tongues than one’. They were to be taught ‘all the Graces of Speech and all the Necessary Air⁴ of Conversation which our common Education is so defective in’⁵. They were to be brought to read books, and especially history. ‘To such whose genius would lead them to it’ Defoe would ‘deny no sort of learning, but the chief thing is to cultivate the Understandings of the Sex’.

The plan outlined by Defoe was eminently sensible and the demand for such academies as that which he described might well have been as large as he expected. He thought that there should be at least one in every county and about ten in the city of London, but he made no estimate of the initial cost of such establishments. His practical suggestion about finance was that the ladies should pay the expenses of the house and that each lady should pay for the whole year although she might withdraw before the year was ended. That such a sound plan should be put forward by a man of Nonconformist origin is in keeping with the evidence for a continuous succession of well-educated women in the families of Nonconformist clergymen from Puritan days. It is possible that Defoe was speaking from experience when he said that ‘a Woman well bred and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of Knowledge and Behaviour, is a Creature beyond comparison’¹. He strongly believed that ‘all the world are mistaken in their practice about Women; for I cannot think that God Almighty ever made them so delicate, so glorious Creatures, and furnished them with such charms, so Agreeable and so delightful to Mankind, with Souls capable of the same Accomplishments with Men, and all to be only Stewards of our houses, Cooks and Slaves.² Defoe was thinking of the women of the middle classes from which he had sprung rather than of the ladies of position for whom Mary Astell was writing.

There is a real danger that the modern student, reading the works of Mary Astell or Defoe and skimming through the pages of the Tatler and Spectator, may come to the conclusion that, with the exception of Mary Astell and Lady Elizabeth Hastings, all women of the end of the seventeenth century were idle, empty-headed, ignorant creatures seeking only pleasure to fill their days. But the fact that the High Church Mary Astell and the Nonconformist Defoe agreed in urging upon their contemporaries the value of education for women is only one sign of a genuine intellectual ferment distinguishing that age. English society was moving towards a time when the cultivated woman who could hold her own in conversation with the best brains of the age was to be an object of admiration. But it was moving reluctantly, with outcries against illiterate, pleasure-loving idlers and jibes at ‘the female Virtuoso’. Even in the later part of the eighteenth century, the age of the female wits and the blue-stockings, there were plenty of coarse jeers at learned women from the foolish of both sexes. They have been heard even in our own time. There have always been those who urge educated women to hide their learning if they want to find husbands. Nevertheless, when George Ballard undertook the necessary research he was able to find out something about a surprising number of learned women who flourished at the end of the seventeenth century.

George Ballard is a remarkable example of the learned amateurs who are characteristic of English historical scholarship. He was born in 1706 and earned his living as a habit-maker or ladies’ tailor at Chipping Camden, where he lived with his mother, a midwife. He was described by a younger contemporary as ‘a mantua-maker, a person studious in English antiquities, laborious in his pursuits, a Saxonist, and after quitting external adornments of the sex a contemplator of their internal qualifications’. He continued his trade by day and his studies by night until 1750 when he was enabled to go to Oxford through the generosity of Lord Chedworth and other gentlemen who usually spent a month in the neighbourhood of Camden every year for the hunting. Ballard had visited Oxford on several occasions before he went there at the age of forty-four to be one of the eight clerks at Magdalen, where he received free rooms and commons. The only book he published was Memoirs of British Ladies who have been celebrated for their Writings or skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, or Sciences, which appeared in 1752. He died in 1755 ‘owing, it was thought, to too intense application to his studies’¹. Women, in particular women scholars, should remember George Ballard with gratitude for his selfless work to preserve the memory of their predecessors².

The limitation which Ballard placed upon his work means that nothing can be found in his pages about some able women of the last decades of the seventeenth century whose names are better known today than those of his learned ladies. The letters of Rachel, Lady Russell, were unknown to Ballard, for they were first published in 1773. They were popular at once and had reached their fourth edition in 1792³. They reveal a woman of high principles, deep religious feeling and strong affections struggling against overwhelming grief. Rachel Wriothesley was a daughter of the Earl of Southampton and his Huguenot wife and married as her second husband Mr. William Russell, who on his elder brother’s death became by courtesy Lord Russell and heir to the earldom of Bedford. From opposition to the Government, natural enough in a man of his rank, he passed to activities sufficient to support a charge of high treason. He was convicted on this charge and executed in 1683. During his trial his wife ‘appeared in open court, attending at her Lord’s side, she took notes, and made observations on all that past, in his behalf’¹. After sentence, she vainly endeavoured to obtain a pardon from the king, reminding him of her dead father’s services. The account of Lord Russell’s preparation for death and his execution, written by his friend Gilbert Burnet, shows Lady Russell bravely encouraging her husband and helping him to prepare his apologia: ‘she had command of herself so much that at parting she gave him no disturbance’².

Lady Russell lived a widow until September 1723, when she was in her eighty-seventh year. The letters published in 1773 provide ample evidence of the regard in which she was held by men in high position. It was through her influence that the future Lord Chancellor Cowper became a king’s counsel at the age of twenty-four³. Dean Tillotson, who had been a close friend of Lord Russell and was with him on the scaffold, consulted her about his own future and was encouraged by her to accept King William’s offer of the See of Canterbury. Her letter, he said, ‘helped very much to settle and determine my wavering mind’⁴. Many of Lady Russell’s letters were written to Dr. Fitzwilliam, who had been her father’s chaplain and had taught Lady Russell and her sisters. He was Rector of Cottenham and Canon of Windsor. His ‘good letter and excellent prayer’ stirred Lady Russell in her grief to write to him on 30 September 1683, not quite two months after her husband’s execution: ‘I know I have deserved my punishment, and will be silent under it, but yet secretly my heart mourns, too sadly, I fear, and cannot be comforted, because I have not the dear companion and sharer of all my joys and sorrows. I want him to talk with, to walk with, to eat and sleep with; all these things are irksome to me now; the day unwelcome and the night so too; all company and meals I would avoid, if it might be; yet all this is, that I enjoy not the world in my own way, and this sure hinders my comfort’⁵. In 1689, like George Hickes, Dr. Fitzwilliam became a nonjuror. In a long letter to Lady Russell he set out his scruples and asked her three things: first, that she would keep her good opinion of his integrity and his zeal to serve her; second, that she would allow him to make over his property to her; and third, that he might have some room in her house for his books¹. Lady Russell tried to persuade him to take the oath of allegiance, but in vain.

The wisdom and integrity of Lady Russell were remembered through the eighteenth century before her letters were published to rouse interest again in her story. When the Duchess of Marlborough in 1742 published her account of her life at court she recorded that before advising her mistress, the Princess Anne, to acquiesce in the revolution of 1688 she ‘consulted with several persons of undisputed wisdom and integrity, and particularly with the Lady Russell at Southampton House, and Dr. Tillotson, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury’². At York in 1754 the ten-year-old Catharine Harrison, later Mrs. Cappe, was entertained by her grandmother’s tales of ‘the fortitude of lady Rachel Russell, of the disinterested patriotism of her virtuous lord, and of the piety of Archbishop Tillotson’³. The publication in 1819 by Miss Mary Berry of a series of letters from Lady Russell to her husband written between 1672 and 1682 offered a glimpse of the happy wife instead of the sorrowing widow of the later letters⁴. There is in them, here and there, a hint that Lord Russell might with advantage have taken his wife’s advice. ‘My sister being here tells me she overheard you tell her Lord last night, that you would take notice of the business (you know what I mean) in the House: this alarms me, and I do earnestly beg of you to tell me truly if you have or mean to do it. If you do, I am most assured you will repent it. I beg once more to know the truth. It is more pain to be in doubt, and to your sister too; and if I have any interest, I use it to beg your silence in this case, at least today’⁵. This note was brought to Lord Russell ‘while the House was sitting’ in March 1678. Again in November 1681 Lady Russell concluded a letter from the country to her husband in London: ‘One remembrance more, my best life: be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove. So farewell, for this time’⁶. Lord Russell has been held in great posthumous honour as a political martyr, but it is his wife who deserves the regard of posterity.

Another woman of strong personality of whom Ballard can have known nothing is Celia Fiennes, daughter of Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, second son of the first Viscount Saye and Sele. Between 1687 and 1702 she undertook a series of journeys through England and into Scotland and Wales, of which she made a careful record. She arranged her material in the form of a published work, but she never sent it to press and made no reference to it in the detailed will she signed in 1738 and revised three times before her death in 1741. In her preface addressed ‘to the reader’ she disclaimed any intention of publishing her work, but at the same time she took care to explain how she came to take her journeys and declares that ‘if all persons, both Ladies, and much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would be a sovereign remedy’… for ‘the vapours, should I say Laziness? It would also form such an idea of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds and cure the evil itch of overvalueing foreign parts’. She concludes by promising to add corrections where she is proved wrong and recommending ‘to all, but especially my own Sex, the studdy of those things which tends to improve the mind and makes our Lives pleasant and comfortable as well as profitable in all Stages and Stations of our Lives, and render Suffering and Age supportable and Death less formidable and a future State more happy’. This lengthy apology for her travels is really beside the point, for her narrative makes it plain that she rode about the country in a spirit of pure curiosity, delighting in what she could learn of the lie of the land, and mercilessly investigating the habits of the people and the houses of the great folk of her own class. In this way she produced a book which is both interesting to read and highly important as a first-hand description of England at the end of the seventeenth century’¹.

The omission from Ballard’s book of any account of Catharine Cockburn is less easily explained. She was well known as a playwright, a poet and a philosophical writer in the early years of the century, and in 1751 Thomas Birch published in two volumes an account of her life, an edition of her writings, and a number of letters to and from her². Her portrait in the first volume shows a woman with a long oval face, a long thin nose, and a large forehead on which the hair grew far back. The eyes are set far apart and the lips faintly smile. She was ‘short in stature’, but with ‘a remarkable liveliness in her eye and delicacy of complexion which continued to her death’¹. She was born in London in 1679. Her father, David Trotter, was a Scottish naval commander who died when she was an infant. Charles II gave his widow a pension, which ended at his death. It was renewed in Queen Anne’s reign, when £20 a year was paid by the Duchess of Marlborough to Bishop Burnet for the use of Mrs. Trotter. Catharine was brought up in the Church of England, but owing to early friendship with Roman Catholic families of position she entered that Church and remained in it until 1707. She began her career as a playwright when she was only sixteen with a tragedy based on the story of Agnes de Castro which Aphra Behn had translated from the French. The play was printed anonymously in 1696, but Catharine made no attempt to conceal her authorship from her friends. In 1697 she addressed a poem to Congreve on his Mourning Bride, and in the next year produced another tragedy, Fatal Friendship, which she dedicated to the Princess Anne. Catharine was one of nine ladies who wrote poems on Dryden’s death in 1700 and she produced both a tragedy, The Unhappy Penitent, and a comedy, Love at a Loss, in 1701.

Despite this early effervescence Catharine Trotter was essentially a scholar. She read Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding with delight and ventured to write a defence of it from anonymous attacks. To her friend Gilbert Burnet, of Kemnay, near Aberdeen, she wrote on 9 December saying that she had finished the work and was determined to publish it, ‘though I am conscious that so noble a cause deserves a better advocate’. ‘I am more afraid of appearing before him I defend than of public censure; and chiefly for the honour I bear to him, resolve to conceal myself. A woman’s name would give a prejudice against a work of this nature’². Her correspondent evidently felt some doubt about the wisdom of publishing anything ‘upon such a nice and important subject, especially from one of your sex and years, and in defence of such an aged philosopher, and whose notions have not been thought by many to have done the best service to religion’³. But Catharine Trotter was not to be put off and her Defence appeared in May 1702. The name of the author was revealed by Mrs. Burnet, wife of the Bishop of Salisbury, when she realized that the book was approved by her own husband, by ‘several others of great judgment in such matters’, and by Mr. Locke himself. After this Locke was moved to write to his defender and send her a present of books¹.

Catharine Trotter was a good letter-writer and could offer a spirited challenge to those who would belittle the natural abilities of women. In 1705 she protested strongly against a friend’s suggestion that Damaris Masham, Locke’s friend, was incapable of a piece of writing attributed to her: ‘It is not to be doubted that women are as capable of penetrating into the grounds of things, and reasoning justly, as men are, who certainly have no advantage of us, but in their opportunities of knowledge. And as Lady Masham is allowed by everybody to have great natural endowments, she has taken pains to improve them; and no doubt profited much by a long intimate society with so extraordinary a man as Mr. Locke. So that I see no reason to suspect a woman of her character would pretend to write anything, that was not entirely her own. I pray be more equitable to her sex than the generality of yours are; who, when anything is written by a woman, that they cannot deny their approbation to, are sure to rob us of the glory of it, by concluding ‘tis not her own; or, at least, that she has some assistance, which has been said in many instances to my knowledge unjustly’². The perennial complaint of able women here appears in an eighteenth-century idiom.

The letters written by Catharine Trotter during 1705 show that she was moving away from the Church of Rome, and in 1707 she published A Discourse concerning a Guide to Controversies: Written to one of the Church of Rome, by a person lately converted from that communion, with a Preface by Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. Much of her correspondence survives from that year, which was the turning-point of her life. In 1708 she married a learned young clergyman of Scottish birth and education, Patrick Cockburn, whose preferment was long delayed by an unwillingness to abjure the Stuart dynasty. In the end he was presented to the vicarage of Long Horsley, in Northumberland, where Catharine Cockburn died in 1749. Marriage put an end to her writing for many years, but in 1726 she again came forward in defence of Locke and her letters show that she had never allowed her brain to rust.

Catharine Cockburn has been long forgotten, but in her own day she was widely held in respect. The long list of subscribers to Birch’s two volumes shows that although she had in her later years fallen out of the public view, interest in her life and work could quickly be revived. Many of the nobility, many ecclesiastical dignitaries, many fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges subscribed. Addresses in Scotland and the North of England suggest a personal concern for a neighbour and a friend. Many people subscribed for large paper copies, some for more than one copy and two men gave considerable sums to help print the work. The most noteworthy feature of the list is the large number of women’s names which it contains. The presence of a woman’s name may not mean that she could read and understand Locke, but it certainly points to a willingness to support a member of her own sex.

But even without Lady Russell, Celia Fiennes, and Catharine Cockburn, Ballard’s work showed that, despite the hard words written about women’s education in this age, an able woman of whom her contemporaries could be justly proud could appear in any part of England. Two only of the women he described were born in or near London and only two belonged to a noble family. They were all gentlewomen whom Mary Astell would have regarded as worthy of entering her women’s college. Two of them, Frances, Lady Norton, and her daughter Grace, Lady Gethin, hardly deserve their places in his book. Lady Norton, who was still living in 1720, owed her reputation to two volumes of religious meditation which she was moved to write after the death of her daughter Grace. She cannot have been a woman of wide reading for she was a party to the curious publication on which her daughter’s fame rests. Lady Gethin died at the age of twenty and was buried in Westminster Abbey. After her death her relatives were impressed to find among her papers a number of essays, which, since they were in her handwriting, they assumed that she had herself composed. They published them in 1699 with a title-page headed Misery’s Virtues Whet-stone and ended Let her own works praise her in the Gates, Prov. xxxi, 31. The full title of the work, Reliquiæ Gethinianiæ or some remains of the most Ingenious and Excellent Lady Grace Gethin, Lately Deceased, being a collection of Choice Discourses, Pleasant Apothegmes, and Witty Sentences, written by her for the most part by way of an essay and at spare hours¹, conceals the fact that Lady Gethin had simply copied out a number of Bacon’s essays which none of her admiring relatives was able to recognize. The work ran into more than one edition, without anyone recognizing the unconscious plagiarism. Ballard was deceived and, after him, Edmund Gosse¹.

Three more distinguished ladies of this period received the signal honour of mention by the great Dr. George Hickes in his Preface to the Thesaurus published in 1705. Having set out in his stately Latin his obligations to his male friends and fellow scholars, Hickes continued in the same tongue and style ‘Here also come three distinguished and most elegant ladies; our books, indeed, have no one to whom they owe more than to them. The very noble matron, Dorothy Grahme, dearest wife of James Grahme of Levins in the county of Westmorland Esq., having already acquired immortality among those above, outstanding in her virtues, is worthy of eternal memory. The noble matron, worthy of veneration, Susanna Hopton of Kington in the county of Hereford, an outstanding example of Christian piety and a great glory to the Church of England, who having acquired no common knowledge of the sacred Scriptures, has put forth not a few anonymous books which are worn to pieces in the hands of pious men and women. That she had put them forth she refused to make plain because of her unshakable modesty, as one who prefers to be instructed and to be good, rather than to seek recognition. The most eminent and most honourable matron, Catherine Bovey of Flaxley in Gloucestershire, the Christian Hypatia of our England, of whom there is no praise so moderate that it does not greatly offend her extreme modesty; nor is it possible to speak of her in such an exalted or magnificent fashion that her virtues will not equal, or even exceed it’². Such words are praise indeed.

A writer, less august but now more famous than George Hickes, has recorded an incident from Dorothy Grahme’s virtuous youth as a maid of honour to Charles II’s queen. John Evelyn on 8 July 1675 rode from Oxford to Northampton with Mrs. Howard, Dorothy’s mother, and her two daughters to be present at the assizes. Under the date 11 July he records that ‘in this journey, went part of the way Mr. James Grahame [since Privy Purse to the Duke], a young Gent: exceedingly in love with Mrs. Dorothy Howard, one of the Mayds of honor in our Company. I could not but pitty them both; the Mother not much favouring it. This Lady was not only a greate beauty, but a most virtuous & excellent Creature, and worthy to have been the Wife of the best of men: My advice was required, & I spake to the advantage of the young gent: more out of pitty than that she deserv’d no better; for, though he was agent: of good family, yet there was great inequality, etc.’¹ Evelyn’s success in this negotiation appears from a letter written in the same year by Lady Russell, who told her husband that ‘Mr Grimes [sic] that was at Wickham, was married yesterday to Dol. Howard, the maid-of-honour’².

When Hickes published his Thesaurus in 1705 Susanna Hopton was drawing near to the end of a long life. She died in 1709 at the age of eighty-two. During the civil war she had been converted by the Catholic apologist, Henry Turberville, but returned to the Church of England after making herself ‘as perfect in the controversie as English writers could make her’³. She wrote to Father Turberville setting out her reasons for returning to the Church of England, and Hickes after her death printed her letter in the second volume of his Controversial Letters. Her first book of devotions was published as early as 1673 as the work of ‘an Humble Penitent’. Hickes himself revised and published her second book in 1701, with an Introduction by himself in which he said that the author ‘hath already given the world one book of devotion, which hath been very well received in four or five editions, and will leave it another for which posterity will bless the author’s name; one, whose house is a temple, and whose family is a church, or Religious Society, and whose hands are daily lifted up unto Heaven with alms as well as prayers’⁴. Hickes is said to have written the inscription on her tomb at Bishop’s Frome.

Catharine Bovey, the third lady to whom Hickes expressed his gratitude, earned great praise from her contemporaries not only for her charity but for her learning and beauty. She died in 1726 at the age of fifty-seven having been a widow for thirty-five years. Even Mrs. Manley, the scurrilous author of The New Atalantis, could find only praise for Mrs. Bovey, whom she called Portia. ‘She is one of those lofty, black, and lasting Beauties, that strikes with Reverence and yet Delight; there is no Feature in her Face nor any Thing in her Person, her Air and Manner, that could be exchanged for any others, and she not prove a Loser’¹. Sir Richard Steele dedicated to her the second volume of The Ladies Library. ‘With the Charms of the fairest of your own Sex’, he wrote, ‘and Knowledge not inferior to the more Learned of Ours, a Closet, a Bower, or some Beauteous Scene of rural Nature, has constantly robbed the World of a Lady’s Appearance, who never was beheld but with Gladness to her Visitants, nor ever admired but with Pain to Herself’². That a beautiful young woman of twenty-two should prefer to remain unmarried and devote her life to study and good works surprised her contemporaries. But her short married life had been unhappy. She was the heiress of both her father’s and her husband’s wealth.

The zeal of George Hickes for the cause of education made him willing to write a Preface or dedication to any serious work which had the improvement of the mind and manners as its end³. He was equally concerned with the education of men and women. He revised a translation of the treatise on the education of daughters written by François S. de la Motte Fénélon, Archbishop of Cambrai. Hickes wrote a dedication of the book to the Duchess of Ormonde, mother of five daughters⁴. Fénélon understood and sympathized with women. He wrote mainly for women of position, to encourage them to educate their daughters at home, rather than in religious houses. In France the work was immediately popular and in England the translation was widely read. Steele pillaged it for The Ladies Library, though without acknowledgment. A second edition was issued in 1708. The publishers of the 1750 edition felt it necessary to say that they were ‘sensible that this translation is far from that elegance, that might have been expected in one revised by a person of Dr. Hickes’ learning’. Nevertheless a comparison of the French and English versions shows that Hickes took trouble to see that the words suited an English audience.

George Hickes was the leading figure among those interested in the new scholarship. It is remarkable how far his influence penetrated. It was felt in remote country houses up and down England as well as in the universities and the city of London. In his writings on the religious controversies of his time he showed respect for women’s capacities and appreciation of their achievements without a trace of condescension¹. In the studies for which he is now chiefly remembered he gave valuable encouragement to Elizabeth Elstob, the first woman to study the Anglo-Saxon tongue. She was born at Newcastle in 1683, so that she was still a child when Mary Astell left Newcastle for Chelsea. Elizabeth’s father died when she was five and her mother three years later, but before she died Mrs. Elstob did all she could to encourage her daughter to become a scholar, for she was herself an admirer of learning, ‘especially in her own sex’². At eight years old Elizabeth had gone some way towards mastering her Latin grammar. After her parents’ death she lived with her aunt and uncle at Canterbury, but her uncle, the Reverend Charles Elstob, had no belief in the education of women. She could not pursue her classical studies, although her aunt enabled her to learn French. Her real education was acquired from her brother William, who had been a fellow of University College, Oxford. In 1702 he became the incumbent of two City churches and Elizabeth came to look after his house. She lived with him, ‘the delightful and tireless companion of my studies’³, until his death in 1715. In dedicating his sermons to the Dean and Chapter of Durham in 1713 Hickes recorded his pleasure in seeing some of the work which he had been forced to abandon ‘for want of Help and Supply’ being ‘attempted with so much Success, by two private and very modest persons, I mean the Reverend Mr. William Elstob, Rector of St. Swithin’s, London, and his sister Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob; … the latter with incredible Industry hath finished a Saxon homilarium, or a collection of the English Saxon Homilies of Alfric archbishop of Canterbury, which she hath translated and adorned with learned and useful Notes, and for the printing of which she hath published proposals; and I cannot but wish, that for her own sake as well as for the advancement of Septentrional Learning, for the Honour of our English Saxon Ancestors, and the service of the Church of England, and the Credit of the Country, and the honour of her Sex, that Learned and most Studious Gentlewoman may find such encouragement as she and her great Undertaking deserve’¹.

Elizabeth Elstob’s edition of Alfric’s Homilies was never published, for after her brother died she had to earn her living. She entrusted her papers to a woman friend who went to the West Indies and the papers were lost². But before Hickes wrote the dedication to his sermons in 1713 she had already published enough to establish her reputation as a precise scholar. She dedicated her edition of the Homily on the birthday of St. Gregory, which appeared in 1709, to Queen Anne, reminding her that a woman had secured the acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Empire, that the conversion of the English owed much to the first Christian English queen, Bertha, and that the Christian faith in England had been restored from corruption by Queen Elizabeth. In her long Preface Elizabeth Elstob set out to answer the question ‘What has a woman to do with Learning?’ and further to explain how she came to study Anglo-Saxon. ‘For my part’, she says, ‘I could never think any part of Learning either useless, or contemptible, because I knew not the Advantages of it; I have rather thought my self obliged to reverence those who are skilful in any Art or Profession, and can gladly subscribe to the Praise of any liberal Accomplishment, be it in any Person, of any Sex’. There speaks the truly magnanimous scholar. It is not surprising after reading those words to find that both William and Elizabeth Elstob subscribed to The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer by Thomas Madox in 1711, despite their narrow means and despite the fact that they lived together. The young Elizabeth Elstob is not only the first woman to study Anglo-Saxon but the first woman scholar who would be at home in the learned world today.

In a book dedicated to Queen Anne it was to be expected that the name of the nonjuring Hickes would not appear. Elizabeth Elstob, however, speaks of him under the description of ‘the great Instaurator of Northern Literature’ and ‘this great Patron of Septentrional Studies’. He had, she said, urged her to publish something in Saxon so that she might ‘invite the Ladies to be acquainted with the language of their Predecessors and the original of their Mother Tongue’. She called attention to Hickes’s translation of Fénélon as proof of his belief in the importance of educating women properly. Elizabeth Elstob also wrote an Anglo-Saxon Grammar, which she dedicated to the brilliant Princess of Wales, Caroline of Anspach’¹. Her Preface took the form of a letter addressed to Hickes. In it she explained her purpose in writing an Anglo-Saxon Grammar in English. It was in order that women, who were not able to read Latin, could study Anglo-Saxon. She told Hickes that after she had published the Homily of St. Gregory she took a holiday in Canterbury on the invitation of her friends. She was there ‘more particularly gratified, with the new Friendship and Conversation, of a young Lady, whose Ingenuity and Love of Learning, is well known and esteemed, not only in that Place, but by yourself: and which so far indear’d itself to me, by her promise that she would learn the Saxon tongue, and do me the Honour to be my scholar, as to make me think of composing an English Grammar in that language for her use’. Unfortunately ‘that Ladies Fortune’ had separated them so far that they could no longer ‘treat on this Matter by Discourse or by Correspondence’².

Although Elizabeth Elstob’s uncle might feel and say that one tongue was enough for a woman, she received ample encouragement during the years she lived with her brother not only from George Hickes but also from most eminent scholars and antiquaries of the day. To Ralf Thoresby of Leeds she was ‘the Saxon nymph’ and ‘the ingenious sister’ of Parson Elstob, whom he visited when he was in London³. Chief Justice Parker, later Lord Macclesfield, paid for the Saxon type used for Elizabeth Elstob’s Grammar⁴. Robert Nelson, a ‘learned and pious layman’⁵, son of a wealthy London citizen, wrote in 1714 to thank Lord Oxford for procuring ‘the Royal Bounty for Mrs. Elstob: she wants only that to set the press to work’⁶. A learned woman might well have felt that she lived in a fortunate age in the early eighteenth century. Queen Anne was sympathetic to learned women. The Electress Sophia of Hanover, whose death prevented her succession to the English throne, was the most highly educated woman of rank in Europe. In the dedication of her Grammar to the Princess of Wales, later Queen Caroline, the author stated that she had hoped ‘to have had the Honour of dedicating it to her Royal Highness the Princess Sophia, a lady endowed with all Princely Accomplishments, and particularly a most Bounteous Patroness of Letters’. The list of subscribers to Elizabeth Elstob’s first book shows that a woman’s work could receive support from a large number of women as well as from men. The list is particularly interesting, for it contains not only the names of many noble ladies, such as the Duchesses of Beaufort, Bolton, and Somerset, several countesses and many other ladies of title, but also the names of obscure women, some of whom it would be difficult to identify today. In all, one hundred and twenty-one women subscribed to a book in which few of them could have felt much interest. Well might the authoress speak of ‘the many Compliments and kind Expressions, which their favourable Acceptance of my first Attempt in Saxon, had obtained for me from the Ladies’¹.

It was hard enough for a man to make a living by his pen if he had not taken orders. To make a living entirely by works of scholarship would have been as impossible for a man as it was for Elizabeth Elstob. In 1718 she gave up the struggle to publish her work on the homilies and retired to Worcestershire. How she lived during the next few years cannot be known with certainty. When her name next appears in contemporary correspondence she was keeping a little school at Evesham. The Cots-wold country had a tradition of cultivated society. Clement Barksdale had spent his life there a generation earlier. In 1715 Colonel Granville, a younger brother of Lord Lansdowne, had come with his family to live at Buckland, near Camden. His daughter Mary, born in 1700, became the close friend of a lively and intelligent girl, Sarah Kirkman, daughter of the incumbent of Stanton. The girls met in the fields between their fathers’ houses since Colonel Granville regarded Sarah as ‘too free and masculine’ for a woman². Mary Granville called her Sappho and the friendship thus formed lasted through their joint lives. Mary Granville, better known by her second married name, Mrs. Delany, belonged to a great family and was drawn into the fashionable world. Sarah married a poor parson, named Capon or Chapone, who kept a school at Stanton. How she came into contact with Elizabeth Elstob is unknown, but once she had met her she did not rest until she had tried to improve her situation.

During 1730 she wrote a letter about Elizabeth Elstob which Mary Granville, now Mrs. Pendarves, could put into the hands of people about the queen. In October 1730 Mrs. Pendarves wrote to her sister describing how the matter had gone. Queen Caroline ‘was so touched with the letter’ that she ‘ordered immediately an hundred pounds for Mrs. Elstob, and said she need never fear a necessitous old age whilst she lived’¹. The queen promised to give Elizabeth Elstob a hundred pounds every five years. It was probably through the kind offices of Mrs. Chapone that Elizabeth Elstob met George Ballard. It gave Elizabeth Elstob great pleasure to enjoy again the friendship of an antiquary. He was engaged in collecting material for his book on learned British ladies and was evidently delighted to meet one. He carefully preserved her letters, written in her beautiful script-like hand, and they have passed with his papers into the Bodleian Library. Their friendship began in August 1735, when she explained that she was unwilling to give up her school at Evesham for a better post because of the friendship she had received from the good ladies there. Ballard obtained first-hand information from her about Mary Astell, whom she had known in London. He persuaded her to write an account of her own life for him. This, too, is preserved among her letters². She does not figure in his book for she was still alive when he brought it out in 1752.

Elizabeth Elstob’s letters to George Ballard show how much pleasure she derived from the friendship of this sensitive and intelligent man. He visited her at Evesham and on one occasion she rode the five miles to Camden to spend a day with him and his mother. He made her such gifts as he could and interested his antiquarian friends in her. One of them brought her three guineas collected for her use, a gift she found embarrassing. Apart from failing health these years at Evesham were not unhappy. She had no desire to become the mistress of Lady Elizabeth Hastings’s charity school, where she would have to teach spinning and knitting. The death of Queen Caroline in 1737 renewed her fears for the future. But Mrs. Chapone was still her friend. Through the good offices of Mrs. Pendarves, Elizabeth Elstob was at last established in the household of the Duchess of Portland in 1739. ‘When I see the Duchess of Portland’, wrote Mrs. Pendarves to her sister, ‘I shall have Sally’s historical epistle’¹, that is, the letter which had so much impressed the queen. The duchess was the daughter of Lord Oxford, the founder of the Harleian Library, who had procured the queen’s bounty towards publishing Elizabeth Elstob’s Homilies many years before. Until her death in 1756 Elizabeth Elstob remained in the household of the duchess.

The position of a dependant in a great household cannot always be easy, but it is foolish to pity Elizabeth Elstob for her fate. She was honoured for her learning to the end of her life. Her letters show that she loved her pupils and that they profited by her teaching. As her hands contracted with rheumatism one of them wrote her letters for her. She would have liked, but failed to get, permission for Ballard to dedicate his book to the duchess, but at least five copies of it were subscribed for by members of the household at Bulstrode. The duchess took a copy, as did her son, the Marquis of Titchfield², and her three daughters. For Elizabeth Elstob there was no lonely old age with no one to look after her. She had her own apartment where her friends could visit her. Mary Granville, now Mrs. Delany, wrote to her sister on 24 May 1756 that ‘Mrs. Elstob is gradually drawing towards that happy repose which we may suppose so good a woman may obtain. I have made her many visits during my constant attendance at Whitehall, and urged her, as the Duchess desired me, to have some physician: she said she had a better opinion of Mr. Groat than any of them, and would have none. She did not at first know me the last visit I made her, and Mr. Groat tells me today her memory is rather worse’. The duchess was alarmed at the constant visits of one of Elizabeth Elstob’s cousins, who was a Roman Catholic. ‘She brings her presents of chocolate, and seems to pay great court to her’³. Early in June Elizabeth Elstob died, and seventy guineas were found among her belongings.

Her story has often been used to illustrate the unhappy position of women, and particularly women scholars, in the eighteenth century. But if her career is looked at as a whole and in perspective it appears in a very different light. She was extraordinarily fortunate in youth beyond other women who may have felt the impulse towards scholarship but had no learned brothers to make them the companions of their studies. Above all she was fortunate in the friendship of Hickes, whose magnanimous spirit rejoiced to find a woman interested in learning. Throughout her life she had memories of days when she talked familiarly with the leading scholars of their generation. Even in her darkest moments after her brother’s death and the death of Hickes one eminent man, George Smalridge, Bishop of Bristol, endeavoured to supply her necessities. His was the poorest see in the country and Elizabeth Elstob would not allow him to impoverish himself on her behalf¹. He, too, died in 1719, but she had then been for a year in Worcestershire. She was not a great scholar, though perhaps she might have become one had things fallen out differently. She was not much more than thirty when her brother died. Her two slender books were given their full measure of admiration by her contemporaries, even in the fashionable world. She herself might, in moments of depression, feel ‘that the prospect of the next age is a melancholy one to me who wish Learning might flourish to the end of the World, both in Men and Women’. In such a mood she wrote to Ballard that ‘the choice you have made for the Honour of the Females was the wrongest subject you could pitch upon. For you can come into no company of Ladies and Gentlemen, where you shall not hear an open and vehement exclamation against Learned Women’².

Yet it was respect for her learning alone which made Mrs. Chapone stir up her friends on her behalf. Mrs. Delany and her sister were anxious to provide for the scholar in distress, not the decayed gentlewoman, when they persuaded the Duchess of Portland to employ her. In her honoured old age at Bulstrode or the ducal establishment in London Elizabeth Elstob was a person on whom her own relatives were glad to wait. The story of her life illustrates how society was beginning to appreciate the capacities of women. It is surely remarkable that an obscure City parson’s sister should be able to dedicate two learned works, one to the queen and the other to the Princess of Wales, that a chief justice should pay for the type-cutting for her Grammar and that the queen’s bounty should be obtained for her work through the good offices of the chief minister of state. In choosing to write about learned women George Ballard, though he did not realize it, was moving with the times. The long list of subscribers to his book, which, like the list of subscribers to Catherine Cockburn’s works and to Elizabeth Elstob’s Homily, contains a high proportion of women’s names, shows that people of rank and culture were ready to be interested in women’s achievements in the past. Such an interest could only arise in a society which is preparing to show respect to women’s achievements in the future.

1 An account of the conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough from her first coming to court to the year 1710, in a letter to my Lord—, London, 1742, p. 25.

2 The New Preface to the Third edition of the Pastoral Care, London, 1713, p.18.

3 An Essay on the memory of the late Queen, London, 1695.

1 London, 1691.

2 The Works of the English Poets with Prefaces, ed. S. Johnson, London, 1779, vol. xii, p. 309.

3 See for example his Preface, Ibid., pp. 301–8.

4 See above, p. 205.

5 Dialogue, pp. 1–2.

6 Ibid., p. 101.

7 Ibid., p. 100.

1 Dialogue, pp. 126–7.

2 Ibid., pp. 127–8.

3 Ibid., pp. 129–30.

4 Ibid., pp. 132–3.

5 Ibid., last page of Preface, unpaged.

1 London, 1692.

2 A Present, etc., pp. 98–101.

3 London. My copy is the 4th ed., 1701.

1 Defence, pp. 4–5.

2 Ibid., p. 5.

3 Ibid., p. 8.

4 Ibid., p. 26.

5 Ibid., pp. 28–9.

6 Ibid., pp. 86–91.

7 Ibid., pp. 55 ff.

8 One sign of its success was the appearance of A farther Essay relating to the Female Sex in the same year, 1696, in which this work appeared. The dedication to Elizabeth, Countess of Kildare, is signed ‘Ez. Symson’. The whole tenor of this book suggests a masculine author. In the Preface addressed to ‘the fair sex’ the author states that the object of the book is to draw characters which would help women to correct their faults; this suggests an answer to the author of the Defence.

1 Defence, p. 37.

2 Ibid., p. 39.

3 Ibid., p. 47.

4 Ibid., p. 50.

5 Ibid., p. 51,

1 Despite the author’s jibes at Walsh’s book and ‘his Eugenia’ it is tempting to wonder whether Eugenia was not herself the author. If so this book might be that referred to by Lady Chudleigh in her poem ‘To Eugenia’:

‘Yet of this wretched Place so well you’ve Writ,

That I admire your Goodness and your Wit,

And must confess your excellent Design

To make it with its native lustre shine:

To hide its faults and to expose to view,

Nought but its Beauties, is becoming you.’—Poems, p. 31.

2 Unpaged.

3 The Athenian Gazette: or Casuistical Mercury, Resolving all the most Nice and Curious Questions proposed by the Ingenious, vol. i, for John Dunton, at the Raven in the Poultry, 1691.

4 Ibid., at the end of the first number.

1 W. O. Massingberd, History of Ormsby, p. 344.

2 Question 6.

1 The writer of the law-book for women discussed in an earlier chapter thought otherwise. See above, p. 62.

2 Question 2.

3 No. 13, vol. i.

1 Question 11, no. 5, vol. ii.

2 Alice Clark, The Working life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, London, 1919.

1 The life of Air. Thomas Gent, printer, of York, written by himself, London, 1832, p. 72.

2 Ibid., pp. 30–2.

3 Ibid., p. 90.

4 Ibid., p. 93.

5 Ibid., pp. 14, 17.

6 Ibid., p. 18.

7 The Theory and Regulation of Love, London, 1688; 2nd ed., 1694.

1 Occasional Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, London, 1705, p. 18. This rare book was kindly lent me by Mr. Arnold Muirhead, of St. Albans.

2 Ibid., pp. 195–6.

3 Ibid., p. 197.

1 Ballard, pp. 449–50.

2 Reflections upon Marriage, 3rd ed., London, 1706, p. 1. An excellent note (9) on the duchess was written by Mary Berry in her edition of some of Lady Russell’s letters, Some Account of the Life of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell, p. 10.

3 Reflections, p. 4.

4 Ibid., p. 80.

5 Ibid., Preface, unpaged, f. id.

6 London.

1 Advertisement at the end of the book, unpaged.

2 Reflections, f. 11.

3 In two parts. By a Lover of her sex, London, 1697.

4 A Serious Proposal, p. 36.

5 Ibid., p. 43.

6 Ibid., pp. 43–4.

7 In addition to the work in which she set out her faith, The Christian Religion as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, London, 1704, Mary Astell intervened in the current pamphlet war about dissent. She wrote, e.g., A Fair way with Dissenters and their Patrons, London, 1704, as an answer to Defoe’s satire The shortest way with Dissenters.

1 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, p. 55.

2 Ibid., pp. 45–6.

3 Ibid., p. 51.

4 Ibid., pp. 53–4.

5 Ibid., p. 90.

1 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, pp. 97–8.

2 Ibid., p. 100.

3 Loc. cit.

4 Ibid., p. 102.

5 Ballard MSS. XLIII, 29.

6 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 2nd part, p. 286.

7 Gilbert Burnet’s History of his Own Time, vol. iv, p. 437.

1 Robert Nelson, An Address to Persons of Quality and Estate, London, 1715, p.213.

2 Numismata, p. 265.

3 Tatler, no. 49.

4 The Diary of Ralf Thoresby, F.R.S., ed. Joseph Hunter, London, 1830, vol. ii, pp. 302, 313, 314.

5 Thomas Barnard, M.A., Master of the Free-School in Leedes, An Historical Character relating to the holy and exemplary Life of the Right Honourable the Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Leeds, 1742, pp. xxiii-xxvi.

1 London, pp. 282–304.

2 An Essay upon Profects, pp. 285–7.

3 Ibid., p. 288.

4 sic,? for ‘Art’.

5 Ibid., p. 292.

1 An Essay upon Profects, p. 294.

2 Ibid., p. 302.

1 J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1812, vol. ii, pp. 466–70.

2 Mrs. Delany, see below, pp. 251 if., was annoyed that Ballard wished to dedicate part of his book to her and would have refused had not Dr. Delany said that ‘it would be using the man ill’. Her reason was that she feared too fulsome compliments. Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, London, 1861, vol. ii, pp. 595–6.

3 Letters of Lady Rachel Russell, 4th ed., London, 1792.

1 Letters of Lady Rachel Russell, p. cxciv.

2 Gilbert Burnet’s History of his own Time, vol. ii, p. 219.

3 Letters, pp. 433–9.

4 Ibid., p. 501.

5 Ibid., pp. 244–5.

1 Letters, p. 461.

2 Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough, p. 22.

3 Memoirs of the life of the late Mrs. Catharine Cappe, written by herself, London, 1823, p. 40.

4 Some Account of the life of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell … followed by a series of letters, London, 1819.

5 Ibid., p. 21.

6 Ibid., p. 64.

1 The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris, London, The Cresset Press, 1947

2 Thomas Birch, The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, with an account of the Life of the Author, London, 1751.

1 The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, with an account of the Life of the Author, p. xlvi.

2 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 153.

3 Ibid., p. 160.

1 The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, with an account of the Life of the Author, vol. ii, pp. 166–7.

2 Ibid., p. 190.

1 With an Epistle Dedicatory signed J. M.

1 In his life of Congreve (1888), who had likewise been deceived and wrote a poem in honour of Lady Gethin published in her Remains. Leslie Stephen called Gosse’s attention to the error. T wonder neither you nor Congreve spotted “reading makes a full man” !’ Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Edmund Gosse, London, 1931, p.207.

2 Linguarum Vetterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus, Oxford, 1705, p. XLVII.

1 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer, Oxford, 1955, vol. iv, p. 69.

2 Some Account of the Life, etc., p. 10.

3 Quoted by Ballard, p. 390, from the Preface to Controversial Letters, vol. ii.

4 Ballard, p. 393.

1 Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of both sexes from the New Atalantis, London, 1720, vol. iii, pp. 245–6.

2 The Ladies Library, vol. ii. ‘Written by a Lady’. ‘Published by Mr. Steele’, London, 1714 Dedication, unpaged.

3 Hicks wrote a dedication to Lord Cornbury, the son and heir apparent to the Earl of Clarendon, for a treatise on the proper behaviour of young men entitled The Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life. My copy is the 6th ed., London, 1726.

4 Instructions for the Education of a daughter by the author of Telemachus. Done into English, and Revised by Dr. George Hickes, 4th ed., London, 1721.

1 Two Treatises: one of the Christian Priesthood and the other of the Episcopal Order, 2nd ed., London, 1707. Preface, pp. i-iii.

2 Bodleian Library: Ballard MSS. XLIII, 59, which is an account of her life written by herself for George Ballard, quoted by Ada Wallas in her chapter on Elizabeth Elstob in Before the Bluestockings, London, 1929, p. 133.

3 dulcis et indefessa studiorum meorum comes, from William Elstob’s Latin letter to his sister, printed as an Introduction to his Latin version of the homily, An English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory, ed. Eliz. Elstob, London, 1709, unpaged.

1 A collection of Sermons formerly preached by the Rev. George Hickes, D.D., London, 1713, vol. i, The Dedication, pp. 3–4.

2 Ballard MSS. XLIII, 59. No other woman devoted herself to Anglo-Saxon for a hundred years. Anna Gurney (1795–18 57) was the next, but her work was that of a good amateur of scholarship rather than a scholar. She translated the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from printed sources and printed it for private circulation among her friends, see G. N. Garmonsway, ‘Anna Gurney: Learned Saxonist’, in Essays and Studies 1955, published by the English Association, pp. 40–57.

1 The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue, London, W. Bowyer, 1715.

2 Ibid., p. ii.

3 The Diary of Ralf Thoresby, F.R.S., ed. Joseph Hunter, London, 1830, vol. ii, p. 131.

4 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. ii, pp. 354–5.

5 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 188.

6 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 199.

1 Grammar, p. ii.

2 The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, London, 1861, vol. i, pp. 15–16.

1 Mrs. Delany, vol. i, pp. 263–4.

2 Ballard MSS. XLIII, 59.

1 Mrs. Delany, vol. ii, p. 31.

2 Two phases of Anglo-Saxon scholarship were brought together for a moment in 1807 when the Rev. James Ingram, in his inaugural lecture as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, observed that Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob had been ‘the first preceptress to his Grace the present Chancellor of Oxford’, that is, the third Duke of Portland, known to Elizabeth Elstob as the Marquis of Titchfield. An Inaugural Lecture on the Utility of Anglo-Saxon Literature, Oxford, 1807.

3 Mrs. Delany, vol. iii, pp. 428–9.

1 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. iv, p. 133.

2 Ballard MSS. XLIII, 89.