Elizabeth Elstob

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Standard Name: Elstob, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Elstob
Pseudonym: A Person of the Same Sex
Pseudonym: Mrs Frances Smith
EE is noteworthy as the first female scholar in the newly opening field of the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) language. She was also a translator, a biographer, and a promoter of learning for women and of the study of women's history and culture: in short, a feminist.
Line engraving with portrait of Elizabeth Elstob inside an initial letter G, by Simon Gribelin, from "An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-day of St. Gregory", 1709, which she translated from Old English. She looks towards the viewer, slightly angled to her left with her head turned to her right. She wears a dress with a low neckline, and her hair is styled with curls framing her forehead and face, while the rest hangs behind her shoulders.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Sarah Chapone
As a country clergyman's daughter SC was an Anglican of the English professional class. Her correspondence with John Wesley bears witness to the strength and immediacy of her Christian faith, but she did not agree...
Education Mary Jones
MJ 's brothers went to school. She herself was clearly very well read. She was taught French and Italian by a visiting master, and could translate from Italian by the age of fifteen.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press, 2013.
165
Nicholls, C. S., editor. The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Jones, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Dodsley, 1750.
45
Family and Intimate relationships Henrietta Rouviere Mosse
The full title of Isaac Mosse's book was Enclytica, the outlines of a course of instruction on the principles of universal grammar, as deduced in an analysis of the vernacular tongue. He regretted the...
Family and Intimate relationships Dorothea Celesia
DC 's stepmother, born Lucy Elstob , was a distant relation of the scholar Elizabeth Elstob .
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Edward Gibbon reported that she had intellectual ability but was a talkative, positive, passionate, conceited creature, and that...
Friends, Associates Sarah Chapone
SC was a great networker. Having met George Ballard , a local man (perhaps because her sister was a patient of his mother, who was a midwife), she introduced him to Elizabeth Elstob and to...
Friends, Associates Mary Delany
As an unusually talented woman moving in fashionable and high-culture circles, the future MD knew almost everybody of interest during her lifetime, including literary celebrities. She was a good friend of the Bluestocking group, and...
Friends, Associates Anne Finch
AF enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken . She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones , to whom...
Friends, Associates Mary Astell
Elizabeth Hutcheson (an associate of nonjuring devotional writer William Law , as was Hastings) later became MA 's executor. Her friendship with Lady Chudleigh was conducted largely by letter, since Chudleigh lived in Devon. Astell...
Friends, Associates Susanna Hopton
After 1689 SH became a good friend of George Hickes , antiquarian, sometime Dean of Worcester, and patron of Elizabeth Elstob . Hickes, a member of a generation younger than Hopton, was a Non-juror (one...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Astell
MA influenced a whole generation of writing women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Mary Chudleigh , Elizabeth Thomas , Judith Drake , Damaris Masham (although Masham's opinions were markedly different), Elizabeth Elstob , and Jane Barker
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Wharton
Elizabeth Elstob cited AW 's poetic achievement along with that of the far better-known Katherine Philips and Anne Finch .
Elstob, Elizabeth. The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue. J. Bowyer and C. King, 1715.
xxiv
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Astell
Among those directly influenced by this work were Judith Drake , Elizabeth Thomas , Mary, Lady Chudleigh , and Elizabeth Elstob .
Perry, Ruth. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. University of Chicago Press, 1986.
106
George Berkeley 's use of long passages from this text, unattributed, in...
Literary responses Catharine Trotter
Anne Kelley traces in detail successive judgements passed on Trotter (later Cockburn) by her contemporaries and by the later eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries,
Kelley, Anne. Catharine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism. Ashgate, 2002.
15-45
and delivers her own judgement that she was a radical...
Literary responses Mary Astell
The Tatler fastens on Astell's age, her virginity, and her assumed incompetence in practical or worldly matters. A further attack followed on 3 September, which linked her name with those of Elstob and Manley
Occupation Mary Astell
During the 1690s, long before her involvement with a charity school for poor girls, MA apparently hoped to found a community of serious-minded, self-educating, middle-class, single women, of the kind she recommends in A Serious...

Timeline

1 April 1684: George Hickes (later a patron of Elizabeth...

Building item

1 April 1684

George Hickes (later a patron of Elizabeth Elstob ) preached at St Bridget's Church in London a sermon on almsgiving which made particular mention of charities to benefit women, including schools and colleges along the...

1714: Following the death of Mary Kettilby, her...

Building item

1714

Following the death of Mary Kettilby , her executrix published her A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery; for the use of all good wives, tender mothers, and careful nurses.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
Maslen, Keith. “Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: Further Extending the Canon”. Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, Vol.
36
, No. 3, Aug. 2012, pp. 133-54.
146-7

23 November 1752: George Ballard dated his preface to Memoirs...

Women writers item

23 November 1752

George Ballard dated his preface to Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain . . . (better known as Memoirs of Eminent Ladies); it was published that year.
Ballard, George. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. Editor Perry, Ruth, Wayne State University Press, 1985.
41
Griffiths, Ralph, 1720 - 1803, and George Edward Griffiths, editors. Monthly Review. R. Griffiths.
8: 124
Staves, Susan. “Church of England Clergy and Women Writers”. Reconsidering the Bluestockings, edited by Nicole Pohl and Betty Schellenberg, Huntington Library, 2003, pp. 81-103.
84

Texts

Elstob, Elizabeth, and Charles Peake. An Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1956.
Ælfric, Abbot of Eynesham. An English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory. Translator Elstob, Elizabeth, W. Bowyer, 1709.
Scudéry, Madeleine de. An Essay Upon Glory. Translator Elstob, Elizabeth, Printed for J. Morphew, 1708.
Elstob, Elizabeth. “Introduction”. An Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities, edited by Charles Peake, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1956, p. i - v.
Elstob, Elizabeth, and George Ballard. “Notes”. Ballard MS 64.
Elstob, Elizabeth. Some Testimonies of Learned Men. W. Bowyer, 1713.
Elstob, Elizabeth. The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue. J. Bowyer and C. King, 1715.