‘A most indefatigable love of history’: Carter, Montagu, and female discussions of history, 1740–1790

Abstract

Over the past ten years or so there has been a good deal written about women's engagement with history in pre-modern England, whether through the writing of it or through more informal engagement with the past. This article explores eighteenth-century women's attitudes to certain histories and historians, conveyed in familiar letters as exemplified by the ‘Bluestockings’, Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter. The article suggests that women had in fact developed a quite sophisticated historiographic capacity by the late eighteenth century; that their approach to it bridged the gap between those who wrote history and those who read it; and that their literary sense of the historical was inseparable from their sentimental reaction to particular places, objects and monuments observed in the English landscape and abroad.