‘If I Do Not Satisfy My Present Inclination in Writing, It is Very Probable I May Haunt you’: Astral Projection in Bluestocking Letters (1740–1770)

ABSTRACT

This article examines the concept of ‘astral projection’ in the letters of the Bluestocking intellectuals Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), and Catherine Talbot (1721–1770). By this term, I am referring to episodes in their correspondence in which they imaginatively project themselves into the physical presence of the letter’s reader, or deploy images of death and haunting to poetically bridge social distance. Exploring this concept through the frameworks of Susan Lanser’s engagement with Bluestocking Queerness, as well as the concept of material remediation of affect drawn from Sarah Ahmed and others, I would like to address this technique as a device for the affective bridging of distance, as well as exploring the central case study of Elizabeth Montagu’s use of astral projection in her letters to Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in which astral projection is utilised to bridge not just physical distance, but the barriers of social status, and Montagu’s own outsider status from Scottish Enlightenment philosophical circles. Ultimately, I argue that astral projection acts as a synecdoche for the familiar letter as a uniquely transformative textual space, in which meanings of all kinds are renegotiated and redefined, including the meaning of distance and separation.

KEYWORDS:

• Bluestocking
• Talbot
• Carter
• correspondence
• hauntology
• Derrida
• affect
• Kames

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A significant portion of the final section of this article is drawn directly from Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis, ‘Reading and Sociability in the Epistolary Networks of Elizabeth Montagu and Friends’, (Swansea University, 2019). I would like to thank everyone on 18^th century epistolarity Twitter who helped me with my epistolary theory references, and Lily Hulatt for directing me to the Lucy Arnold essay cited below.

2. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), passim, esp. pp.xvi-xvii; Soile Ylivouri, ‘Time Management and Autonomous Subjectivity: Catherine Talbot, Politeness, and Self-Discipline as a Practice of Freedom’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 6 (2017), pp. 113–32; Orchard, ‘Reading and Sociability’, pp. 39–40.

3. See, for example, Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre, (Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 245–56 and Judith Hawley, ‘Elizabeth Carter and Modes of Knowledge’, in Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott and Louise Duckling, eds. Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations during the Long Eighteenth-Century (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2010), pp. 157–72.

4. Emma Major, ‘The Life and Works of Catherine Talbot: A Public Concern’, in Hannah Smith and Sarah Apetrei, eds, Women and Religion in Britain, c. 1660–1760, (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 163–78 (p.168).

5. Sylvia Harcstark-Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Deborah Heller, ‘The Bluestockings and Virtue Friendship: Elizabeth Montagu, Anne Pitt, and Elizabeth Carter’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81.4 (2018), pp. 469–97.

6. Susan Lanser, ‘Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 65.½ (2002), pp. 257–75, (p.267)

7. Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p.118.

8. Ibid, p.123.

9. See, for example, ‘Montagu, Sandleford, Berkshire to Piozzi, Streatham Park, London, 16 May [1780], ed. Michael Franklin, Elizabeth Montagu’s Correspondence Online, https://emco.swansea.ac.uk/emco/letter-view/7/, EMCO 7. [Hereafter Montagu letters will be identified by their EMCO number unless otherwise noted] & ‘Montagu, Monk’s Horton, Kent, to Duchess of Portland, Bulstrode Park, Buckinghamshire, 19 February 1735’, EMCO 138. For examples of recent scholarship engaging with the questions of time lag and negotiation of distance, see Sally Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 51–52; Leonie Hannan, Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in Early Modern England, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), passim, esp. pp. 134–39; Rachel Bynoth, ‘A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century’, History: The Journal of the History Association, 106:373 (2021), pp. 727–50.

10. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Routledge, 2006), p.123. [emphasis mine]

11. Elizabeth Eger, ‘Paper Trails and Eloquent Objects: Bluestocking friendship and material culture’, Parergon, 26:2, (2009), pp.109–38; Madeleine Pelling, ‘Collecting the World: Female Friendship and Domestic Craft at Bulstrode Park’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41:1 (2018), pp. 101–120; Anni Sairio, Language and Letters of the Bluestocking Network: Sociolinguistic Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Epistolary English (Helsinki: Societie Neophilologique, 2009).

12. Spectres, p. 10.

13. See, for example, Montagu’s conception of Vesey as a creature of imagination in ‘Montagu, Sandleford, Berkshire, to Carter, Deal, Kent, 19 September 1779’, EMCO 3538, or fantasies of her as a sea nymph, ‘Montagu, London, to Carter, Deal, Kent, 13 December 1768’, EMCO 2618, or figuration of the ancient Celtic poet Malvina ‘Montagu, Sandleford, Berkshire, to Vesey, Lucan, Dublin, 15 June 1765’, EMCO 1672. For a fuller engagement with the Bluestocking Sylph imagery, see Deborah Heller, ‘Subjectivity unbound: Elizabeth Vesey as the Sylph in Bluestocking Correspondence’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 65:1/2, (2002), pp. 215–34.

14. Heller, ‘Elizabeth Vesey’s Alien Pen: Autography and Handwriting’, Women’s Writing, 21:3 (2013), pp. 357–384, (p.363).

15. For a parallel instance of the validation of epistolary irrationality, see ‘Catherine Talbot, Cuddesden, Oxfordshire, to Jemima Yorke, Marchioness Grey [née Campbell], Wrest Park, Bedfordshire: Monday, 5 October 1744’. Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence, ed. Robert McNamee et al. accessed 22 July 2022 https://doi.org/10.13051/ee:doc/montelEE0280001a1c [hereafter EE]

16. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p.8, cited in Lucy Arnold, ‘Spooks and Holy Ghosts: Spectral Politics and the Politics of Spectrality in Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57:3 (2016), pp. 294–309.

17. For a discussion of Pennington’s editorial interference, see Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters: Manuscript Circulation & Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 207–12.

18. A Series of Letters between Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot, 1741–1770, with letters from Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Vesey, 4 vols, (London: Printed for F.C & J. Rivington, 1809), pp. 2–3.

19. Lanser, ‘Bluestocking Sapphism’, p. 268.

20. Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 144–46.

21. For a comparable characterisation of Bluestocking friendship as opposed to polite sociability, see ‘Jemima Grey, Wrest Park, Bedfordshire to Catherine Talbot, Cuddesden, Oxfordshire September 1741’, Lucas Papers, Bedfordshire and Luton Archives, L30/9a/3, f. 7.; L30/9a/3.

22. The sharing of letters is well documented in eighteenth-century scholarship, see, for example Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688– 1820, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.xviii; and for an example of this in the Bluestocking archival record, see Markman Ellis, ‘Letters, Organization, and the Archive in Elizabeth Montagu’s Correspondence’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81:4 (2018), pp. 603–32, (pp. 613–15).

23. ‘Elizabeth Carter, Deal, Kent to Catherine Talbot, Cuddesden, Oxfordshire, 16 August 1741’, Series, pp. 4–5.

24. For a critique of chrononormativity in eighteenth-century courtship, see Ziona Kocher, ‘Squaring the Triangle: Queer Futurities in Centlivre’s The Wonder’, Humanities, 10:53 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010053, accessed 10 May 2022.

25. For speculations on the dates of composition for Talbot’s posthumously published works, see a discussion of her second essay collection Essays on Various Subjects (1772) in Jack Orchard, ‘Essays on Various Subjects’. The Literary Encyclopedia. (2017), http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38747, accessed 28 June 2022.

26. Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Friendship in Death, (London: T. Worral, 1728), p. 13.

27. Bigold, Women of Letters, p.52; see also Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction, 1684–1740, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); pp. 32–33; Peter Walmsley, ‘Whigs in Heaven: Elizabeth Rowe’s ‘Friendship in Death’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44:3 (2011), pp. 315–30, (p. 323–4).

28. Bigold, 55, 57.

29. Catherine Talbot, The Works of Miss Catharine <sic> Talbot, ed. Montagu Pennington, (London: F.C & J. Rivington, 1819), pp. 215–28.

30. Talbot, Works, pp. 220, 224.

31. Ibid, p. 219.

32. Ylivuori, p.126; 129.

33. Ibid, p. 222.

34. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Six Sketches of the History of Man, 2 vols, (Edinburgh: Printed for W. Creech, 1774), I, p. 219; for another prominent example of this theory from within the Scottish Enlightenment milieu, see William Alexander, The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 2 vols, (London: Printed for W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1779).

35. Karen O’ Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Britain, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 74–77; JoEllen Delucia, A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 64–5.

36. Kerri Andrews, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry, (London: Pickering

and Chatto, 2013), p. 27; See also Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment

to Romanticism, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 118.

37. For a full analysis of Kames’ plagiarism of Montagu’s ‘Essay on Ornament’ see Jack Orchard, ‘Reading and Sociability in the Correspondence Networks of Elizabeth Montagu and Friends’, unpublished PhD Thesis, Swansea University, 2019  .

38. For Montagu’s reading of Smith, see ‘Montagu, Sandleford, Kent to James Beattie, Aberdeen, 12 April 1776’, EMCO 2915, and for her discussion of Ferguson, see ‘Montagu, London, to Henry Home, Lord Kames, Edinburgh, 24 March 1767’, Kames Family Papers, National Library of Scotland, GD24/1/573/f.9–12. For a full discussion of Montagu’s relationship with Beattie, and the ideological sympathies which underpinned it, see Caroline Franklin, ‘An Honorable Alliance: The Friendship between James Beattie and Elizabeth Montagu, as Revealed by Her Letters’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81.4, (2018), pp. 497–512.

39. ‘Kames, Edinburgh to Montagu, Denton, Northumberland, 17 November 1766’, Montagu Collection, Huntington Library, California, Montagu Papers, MO 1164.

40. ‘Kames, Blair-Drummond, Stirling, to Montagu, 16 April 1767’, EE http://dx.doi.org/10.13051/ee:doc/homeheEE0020070a1c, accessed 22 July 2022.

41. For a discussion of the male homosociality of Scottish Enlightenment, and the degree to which its model of feminized sociability provided a window for Enlightenment female intellectual practices, see Jon Mee Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention and Community, 1762–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 63–5 and Kate Barclay and Rosalind Carr, ‘Women, love and power in Enlightenment Scotland’, Women’s History Review, 27.2 (2017), pp. 176–198, (p. 180).

42. ‘Kames, Blair-Drummond, Stirling to Montagu, 31 Hill Street, Mayfair, London, 22 October 1767’, Huntington Library, MO 1167.

43. Rancière, Politics, p. 8;

44. ‘Montagu, 31 Hill Street, Mayfair, London to Kames, Edinburgh, 11 February 1767’, GD24/1/573/f.5–8.

45. See, for example, Adam Bridgen, ‘Patronage, Punch-Ups and Polite Correspondence: The Radical Background of James Woodhouse’s Early Poetry’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 80.1 (2017), pp. 99–134; Orchard, ‘Reading and Sociability’, pp.160–169; Adam Bridgen & Steve Van Hagen, ‘“Proud wealth lies wasted, and God’s work disgrac’d!”: James Woodhouse, Elizabeth Montagu, and Improvement as Communitarian Restoration’ in The Prospect of Improvement: A Bluestocking Landscape, ed. Markman Ellis and Jack Orchard, (forthcoming, Boydell & Brewer).

46. See, for example, her famous description of herself as ‘a Critick, a Coal owner, a Land Steward, a Sociable Creature’ in ‘Montagu, London, to Sarah Scott, 26 December 1767’, MO 5871.

47. ‘Montagu, Denton, Northumberland to Kames, Edinburgh, 12 December 1766’, GD24/1/573/f.1–4.

48. For a more extensive engagement with the juxtaposition between urban and rural, as conceived in Bluestocking letters, see Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth Century Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

49. ‘Montagu, Sandleford, Kent, to Kames, Blair Drummond, Stirling, 28 August 1772’, GD24/1/573/f.52–54

50. Elizabeth Montagu’s letters provide several instances of her sublime reveries provoked by the Scottish landscape, including the collapse of the boundaries between the present day and Ossianic Scotland of 300 C.E, for an indicative example, see ‘Montagu, Denton, Northumberland to George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton of Frankley’, 14 September 1766, EMCO 1957.

51. ‘Montagu, Sandleford, Kent, to Kames, Blair Drummond, Stirling, 28 August 1772’, GD24/1/573/f.52–54

52. Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Orchard

Jack Orchard is the Content Editor of the Electronic Enlightenment project based at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. He previously worked for the Elizabeth Montagu’s Correspondence Online project at the University of Swansea. He has published several articles on Eighteenth-Century Correspondence, Digital Humanities, and historical reading practices. His current research focuses on the affective resonances between historical reading experiences and contemporary videogame culture.