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  • Femininity and National Identity:Elizabeth Montagu's Trip to France
  • Emma Major

In November 1776, Elizabeth Montagu, author and literary hostess, wrote from France to her friend the Scottish poet and scholar James Beattie:

If I have reaped any better advantage from my excursion it is a stronger sense of the felicity of living under a free Government & Religion rational & pure. The principles which most elevate and enoble the human character are piety and patriotism, these can never exist in their genuine state in a Land of slavery & Superstition.1

Here, Montagu speaks of the "felicity of living under a free Government" that she shares with Beattie as a Protestant Briton: a powerful shared identity, yet one which was under constant debate during the eighteenth century. As historians such as Linda Colley and Kathleen Wilson have argued, the definition of a Briton was often a contingent and volatile question, shaped by religion, class, and region.2 Montagu's imagined community of letter-writers—which included many Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, and extended well beyond its core of London authors, clergymen, politicians, and society figures—forms a version of polite Britain, self-consciously literary, religious, and patriotic.3

It is suggestive that Montagu repeatedly referred to herself as "an Englishwoman," not as a British woman, while invoking Britain or "our Island" in other contexts; yet as I will argue, eighteenth-century notions of Englishness often rely tacitly upon the supposedly "savage" traits of the Celtic countries to purify the possibly corrupt but high degree of civilization claimed for England. Krishan Kumar has shown that the uneasy equation of English with British is an important and ubiquitous feature of writing on British history, pervading even the groundbreaking work of Gerald Newman.4 In Montagu's correspondence, we can see how English, British, and Celtic national identities are written over one another, producing a palimpsest effect: Montagu is fascinated by the differences between the nationalities brought [End Page 901] together to form Britain, and draws on a range of national histories to underpin her versions of the country. Her polite interests in literature, landscape, travel, and philosophy enable her to discuss questions of nationality in ways which can illuminate the complex and shifting relationships between the different countries involved in her epistolary creation of a polite island nation.

Montagu's letter to Beattie continues: "However[,] a mitigated despotism & a gentle Hierarchy have permitted the Muses & the arts & all that embellishes social life" to flourish, allowing "the french to rise superior to their Neighbours on the Continent." Political systems, politeness, and religion are interlinked in this passage: Britain's "free Government & Religion rational & pure" foster "piety and patriotism," while the French "mitigated despotism" has encouraged the polite arts. In this letter, Montagu restricts the superiority of the French to "their Neighbours on the Continent"; but the comparison of English and French politeness is a theme to which she repeatedly returns in her correspondence before, during, and after her trip to France. This article discusses some of the ways in which Montagu's comparison of French and English women can be read as linked to broader questions of national identity, and to what Montagu terms "[t]he principles which most elevate and enoble the human character . . . piety and patriotism."

Montagu's equation of "a free Government" with "Religion rational & pure," and "slavery" with "Superstition," proceed from an alignment of types of religious and civil power in which the Roman Catholic Church is favorable to despotism and the Church of England to a limited monarchy. As Colley has argued, religion is important in the formation of eighteenth-century ideas of nation, and Britain's limited monarchy and its national church were often spoken of as together occupying a privileged center ground that avoided imprudent extremes.5 Ten years later, on her own tour of Europe following her scandalous second marriage to the musician Gabriel Piozzi, Montagu's social rival Hester Lynch Piozzi observed that

England certainly does keep the Golden Mean; and though wickeder than one would wish it, & more defective both in Faith & Works—I verily do believe it is the best part of Europe to live in, for almost every Reason.6

"Faith & Works" and...

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