‘If I Do Not Satisfy My Present Inclination in Writing, It is Very Probable I May Haunt you’: Astral Projection in Bluestocking Letters (1740–1770)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the concept of ‘astral projection’ in the letters of the Bluestocking intellectuals Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), and Catherine Talbot (1721–1770). By this term, I am referring to episodes in their correspondence in which they imaginatively project themselves into the physical presence of the letter’s reader, or deploy images of death and haunting to poetically bridge social distance. Exploring this concept through the frameworks of Susan Lanser’s engagement with Bluestocking Queerness, as well as the concept of material remediation of affect drawn from Sarah Ahmed and others, I would like to address this technique as a device for the affective bridging of distance, as well as exploring the central case study of Elizabeth Montagu’s use of astral projection in her letters to Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in which astral projection is utilised to bridge not just physical distance, but the barriers of social status, and Montagu’s own outsider status from Scottish Enlightenment philosophical circles. Ultimately, I argue that astral projection acts as a synecdoche for the familiar letter as a uniquely transformative textual space, in which meanings of all kinds are renegotiated and redefined, including the meaning of distance and separation.