Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, with a new edition of her poems, some which have never appeared before; to which are added, some miscellaneous essays in prose, together with her Notes on the Bible...by Montagu Pennington M.A....
London: Printed for F.C. and J. Rivington, 1807. First edition. Engraved frontispiece. Front joint cracked, but sound, back joint just starting. Binding extremities rubbed, endpapers and plate lightly foxed, offsetting from portrait onto title-page. Minor foxing otherwise. Nineteenth-century armorial bookplate. A very good copy overall. Contemporary calf, gilt decorated flat spine, gilt borders on both covers, edges sprinkledred. Quarto. [8], 643, [1] pp. Item #15434
Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) was, to quote Priscilla Dorr in Schleuter’s Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, “the most learned lady in England during the eighteenth century.” She was one of the most famous members of the Blue Stocking Circle, which also included Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Vesey, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Chapone, and Hannah More. Despite an early learning disability and “with a persistence that won the praise of V. Woolf in A Room of One’s Own,” (as Margaret Drabble reminds us in the Oxford Companion to English Literature) she learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in childhood with her brothers, and later studied French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Arabic. She was a friend of Samuel Johnson, who thought her one of the best Greek scholars he had known, and invited her to contribute to The Rambler. She made a number of translations, of which her Epictetus is the masterpiece.
Jackson, Romantic Poetry by Women, page 52.
Price: $1,500.00