Famous Blue-Stockings (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Though the term “bluestocking” today connotes a female intellectual, the literary Blue-Stocking Society established by Elizabeth Montagu in the 1750s included highly educated members of both sexes, including Queen Charlotte, Fanny Burney, and Elizabeth Carter as well as Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson. Many leading minds and ideas of the age are profiled in this 1910 survey.