During the 18th century a remarkable group of women formed the Bluestocking Salon, where women and men met to debate contemporary ideas and promote the life of the mind. Together, these cultural innovators helped forge new roles for women as influential thinkers, writers, and artists, and their creative achievements were publicly celebrated. 
Richly illustrated with portraits, prints, and personal artifacts, Brilliant Women tells the story of this fascinating group of women. The authors chart the changing fortunes of the female intellectual and explore how a number of bluestocking women, such as 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 the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. 
Brilliant Women pays tribute to the friendships and achievements of these bluestocking women, presenting new information on the range of cultural activities in which they were engaged, as well as celebrating their legacy.

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings

Arts & Photography

Eger, Elizabeth

Peltz, Lucy

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Lucy Peltz explores the practice of extra-illustration in relation to the popularization of antiquarianism, the commercialization of print culture, the reception of engraved portraiture, and the rise of the amateur, the collector, and the connoisseur. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of books were customized with prints and drawings in a practice called extra-illustration. These books were often massively extended, lavishly bound, and prized by their owners as objects of display, status, and exchange. The scale of these compilations as well as their interdisciplinary nature -- at once literary texts, printed books, art collections, and indexes of visual culture -- have typically excluded them from histories of art and literature. In this book, Lucy Peltz maps a history of extra-illustration and its social and cultural meanings, providing a fascinating account of the practice itself and the often colourful personalities who engaged in it. The remarkable contents of key extra-illustrated books are explored, along with the broader historical and commercial contexts in which they were produced and enjoyed. Lucy Peltz is Senior Curator of Eighteenth-Century Collections and Head of Collections Displays (Tudor to Regency) at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain 1769-840

Angel City Press

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Books by Peltz, Lucy