Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings

Brilliant Women explores the impact of the original ‘Bluestocking’ Circle – a group of intellectual women who were celebrated for forging new links between gender, learning and virtue in eighteenth-century Britain. With famous masterpieces and rarely seen portraits, graphic satires and other personal artefacts, this exhibition considers the way a wider range of ‘bluestockings’, such as the artist Angelica Kauffmann, historian Catharine Macaulay and early ‘feminist’ Mary Wollstonecraft, used portraiture to advance their work and their reputations in a period framed by Enlightenment and Revolution.

A fully illustrated book by curators Dr Elizabeth Eger and Dr Lucy Peltz accompanies the exhibition. Price £18.99 (hardback).