"Speaking on the Edge of My Tomb": The Epistolary Life and Death of Catherine Talbot

Bluestocking Catherine Talbot is now perhaps best known as the closest and most "angelic" friend of the learned Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, poet, translator, and prolific letter-writer. But Talbot's literary afterlife as a relatively marginal figure in Carter's illustrious career is hardly accidental. Hers are the only letters placed alongside Carter's in the volumes published by Montagu Pennington after Carter's death, and yet she is introduced to us (and remains throughout) Carter's "deceased friend." The letters chart her painful decline and then repeatedly eulogize her after death, keeping her memory alive. Though the letters are obsessed with Catherine Talbot, living and dead, Talbot's is always a voice from the past, from memory, from the margins, and that voice serves an important function: it becomes a way for Carter to represent the unrepresentable, death.