A Conversation of Their Own: Watering-Place Correspondence Among the Bluestockings

This article analyzes the role resort towns such as Bath, Bristol, Brighton, and Tunbridge Wells played in establishing a legitimate space for female correspondence (the intercourse or relation between individuals and groups of individuals as well as the letters they produced) within the public sphere. Spas helped women bypass the prevailing models of female friendship and female letters that submerged women's alliances beneath the imperatives of a patriarchal society, thereby allowing them to develop a distinctive style of spa correspondence. In its reading of Bluestocking letters, this essay describes this correspondence as characterized by a communal sense of female identity and a "spectatorial" epistolary style.