The Bluestocking Sisters: Women's Patronage, Millenium Hall, and 'The Visible Providence of a Country'

Sarah Scott's life and opus have become separated from those of her sister, Elizabeth Montagu, by some accidents of history and ideology that have determined and partly falsified our interpretations of their work.¹ The persistence of the notion that the sisters' lives took divergent, if not actively antagonistic, courses at or before Scott's marriage in 1751 is curious, since, even after sanitizing excisions made by early editors, Montagu's correspondence with Scott and other family members indicates not only that the sisters spent part of each year together and remained in close physical and epistolary contact throughout their lives, but also that they knew the same people, collaborated in the same philanthropic activities, shared reading matter, political positions, and a secretary, discussed each others' writings, and gave each other mutual authorial aid, as well as personal, familial, and social support.

Rereading the sisters' relationship through their discussions about patronage and lifelong cooperation in a variety of philanthropic endeavors reintegrates Sarah Scott and her opus into the Bluestocking circle, as recent collections by Nicole Pohl, Betty Schellenberg, and Gary Kelly have begun to do.² Restoring Montagu to her place in Scott's life, and Scott to her place in Montagu's inner Bluestocking circle, changes our understanding of Scott's concept of philanthropy and of the social position from which she advocated reform. It also gives Scott's estate novels central political relevance, and makes Montagu and second-generation Bluestockings heirs to Scott's utopian vision at Millenium Hall.

The sisters also add significantly to what we know about women's patronage. It has become clear that eighteenth-century women in the upper ranks did exercise power and participate in the public sphere in a number of important but informal ways. But perhaps inevitably, given our disciplinary divisions, we have been discovering these separately. Feminist historians, such as Elaine Challus, Sarah Richardson, and Judith Lewis, have uncovered the important roles that aristocratic women played both in electoral and family politics, and as patrons or brokers in the patronage system on which all political and ecclesiastical appointments depended.³ Literary and cultural historians, such as Dustin Griffin and Sarah Prescott, have shown that ladies were also active participants in the literary patronage system.⁴ Other scholars, such as Beth Fowkes Tobin, Patricia Comitini, and Dorice Williams Elliott, have traced upper- and middle-class women's ultimately successful efforts to appropriate the new managed and institutionalized forms of philanthropic activity as a "properly female" activity, while demonstrating the efficacy of fictions such as Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife.⁵

In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, these several strands of female power and activity were not yet necessarily separate and distinct. They were interwoven, first of all, in the language. Patronage referred both to the right to dispose of government or military offices, church livings, or other employments, and to "the action of a patron in giving influential support, favor, encouragement or countenance to a person, institution, or work" (OED). In this latter sense, institutional philanthropy—the financial support of a charity school or hospital—and the support or reward of a writer figured as forms of patronage.⁶ Indeed, as late as 1772, booksellers were being described as writers' patrons, as was the public when authors printed by subscription or on their own account.⁷ These different strands of patronage were also interwoven in women's lives in sometimes unexpected ways, for a variety of conflicting motives. The Bluestocking sisters, Sarah Scott and Elizabeth Montagu, who have not been considered from this point of view either in the literature on patronage and philanthropy or in critical studies of their lives and writings, have something to teach us here.

Familial and Philanthropic Patronage

A much-cited letter from Elizabeth Montagu to one of her cousins, William Freind, describes Scott's and Lady Bab's household at Bath Easton, after the breakup of Scott's marriage, as a convent, "for by its regularity it resembles one." With Lady Bab's support...