Bluestockings

Sipping tea in a glittering London drawing room, a circle of women discuss theatre, philosophy and the classics, competing to outdo each other in wit and brilliance.

Later, one of these women lies on the floor of her husband's brewhouse, blood seeping through her skirts as she miscarries her child. Hester Thrale's husband had ignored her repeated pleas to take her home until his business there was finished.

In Bluestockings, Susannah Gibson charts the struggles and immense achievements of a group of trailblazing women who risked their reputations to become public intellectuals. Burdened with ailing children and unsympathetic husbands, enduring the sneers of contemporaries who thought books frazzled women's brains and damaged their wombs, they read, wrote and published their work. Copies of Hannah More's poems were requested by King George III, Elizabeth Montagu's rebuttal to Voltaire's critique of Shakespeare thoroughly rattled the great Frenchman, and Catherine Macaulay's histories were so acclaimed in America that on her visit there she was hosted by George Washington. Earning money, fame, and a modicum of power, the Bluestockings laid essential foundations for future feminists to build upon.

Bluestockings tells the fascinating, devastating, forgotten stories of these heroines of Britain's very first women's movement.