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Nicole Pohl, ed., The Letters of Sarah Scott, 2 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). Pp. 340 (Vol. 1) + Pp. 478 (Vol. 2). $350.00.
Scholars interested in the Bluestockings have long awaited these volumes of letters by Sarah Scott (1721-1795), the first author to articulate fully what Gary Kelly has called the "Bluestocking programme" of social reform. Scott for the most part lived a retired rural life, but she was connected to important sociocultural networks through her established family and powerful friends and was therefore well positioned to comment on social, cultural, and political events, as well as to critique social mores and gender roles. She created a multifaceted and integrated utopian vision in her popular novels Millenium Hall of 1762 (edited by Gary Kelly for Broadview Press, 1995) and its sequel The History of Sir George Ellison of 1766 (ed. Betty rizzo, university of Kentucky Press, 1996). The Letters of Sarah Scott, carefully edited by nicole Pohl and spanning Scott's entire adult life, offers scholars a window on the simultaneously personal and political sources of her published contributions to early British feminism, women's history, and Enlightenment reform discourses, even as the correspondence provides a lively idea of an uncommon woman's country life in the second half of the eighteenth century. Here we view the quotidian origins of reformist ideas.
To begin, Pohl has discovered and published the first pictures we have of Sarah Scott, who until now was known only by the orderly penmanship of her manuscript letters or by the published works themselves. volume 1 opens with an Edward Haytley portrait of Scott in her twenties, seated, fashionably attired, looking confidently at the viewer and holding a book; this picture is followed a few pages later with a family conversation piece: Scott and her sister Elizabeth Montagu stand on either side of Montagu's seated husband Edward, outdoors at the Montagus' Sandleford Priory estate. Well-dressed servants in the background appear to be making hay, and an attendant in the foreground responds to a gesture by Elizabeth, who clearly runs a tidy, well-organized, peaceable operation.
The handsome volumes consist of an introduction, an explanation of "editorial principles," a bibliography, and then four sections of letters organized chronologically: "Adolescence and Marriage 1740/1-52"; "A literary and...