Re-Orienting the Bluestockings: Chivalric Romance, Manliness, and Empire in Joseph Emin’s Letters

In this essay, Humberto Garcia examines the chivalric romance tropes informing the correspondence between the Armenian freedom fighter Emin Joseph Emin (1726–1809) and his patronesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot. To master English politeness, Emin played a humble knight-errant or “Persian Slave” before his exotic Queen Montagu. The working-class foreigner thereby presented himself as a patriotic gentleman, while his female friends expanded their gender roles by adopting cosmopolitan identities. This reciprocal self-fashioning responded to a crisis in British masculinity caused by military setbacks during the Seven Years’ War. The essay points to transnational affiliations that were wider than the ethnocentric patriotism that scholars have assigned to Bluestocking correspondents’ nationalist self-conception.