Oxford DNB home page Home | About Oxford DNB | What's new | Subscriber services | Contact us | Help
>Go back Go to the Oxford DNB reading room>

Brilliant women: the Bluestocking circle

Brilliant Women, the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition, celebrates the Bluestockings—a remarkable group of creative and intellectual women in eighteenth-century Britain. To accompany the exhibition we present the Oxford DNB biographies of some of Hanoverian Britain's most talented women, along with two men who championed their work. Just click the portraits to read on.



Elizabeth Carter
(1717–1806)

Elizabeth Montagu
(1718–1800)

Frances [Fanny] Burney
(1752–1840)

Ann Yearsley
(bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Elizabeth Vesey
(c.1715–1791)

Catharine Macaulay
(1731–1791)

Hannah More
(1745–1833)

Mary Moser
(1744–1819)
by George Romney c.1770–71
National Portrait Gallery, London

Anna Seward
(1742–1809)

Maria Edgeworth
(1768–1849)

Hester Chapone
(1727–1801)
by R Page, after an unknown artist, 1812
National Portrait Gallery, London

Angelica Kauffman
(1741–1807)

Frances Boscawen
(1719–1805)
by Allan Ramsay, c.1747–8
Private Collection

Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759–1797)

Benjamin Stillingfleet
(1702–1771)

Samuel Johnson
(1709–1784)