SOURCE: Larson, Edith Sedgwick. “A Measure of Power: The Personal Charity of Elizabeth Montagu.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 197-210.

In the following essay, Larson analyzes Montagu's letters, arguing that money played an important role in her life and that she wielded power through financial charity.

Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1720-1800) is too often perceived in terms of stale images conjured up by Samuel Johnson's sobriquet for her, “Queen of the Blue-Stockings.”¹ Disparaging connotations of pretentious self-interest sometimes associated with the bluestockings have made it easy to dismiss her and her friends as women largely superfluous in terms of wielding any real humanitarian power. Curiosity, prolonged acquaintance, and a fresh perspective are all needed to separate Elizabeth Montagu from the hackneyed two-dimensional stereotype evoked by old labels. Happily, her manuscript letters at the Huntington Library can provide such a new perspective and reveal a practical, assertive, humanistic, but financially oriented...