This opulently illustrated volume is a collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery's eighteenth-century curator, Lucy Peltz, and a literature scholar, Elizabeth Eger. It is the catalog for a National Portrait Gallery exhibition that they cocurated, although its four essays offer more discursive reflection than one might expect in an exhibition catalog. Written for the general reader, the volume assumes no specialist knowledge. Nonspecialists will find it a useful introduction to current approaches in feminist art history and literary studies. Specialists will be familiar with many of the facts rehearsed about women writers and artists and many of the images, but they should be interested in less well-known images gathered by the cocurators, in their intelligent readings of the images and in their broad-ranging reflections on the achievements, problems, and ironies of attempts to create visual representations of female intelligence.

A contrast between two group portraits is designed to suggest that the eighteenth-century flourishing of women bluestockings was followed by a nineteenth-century backlash. The first, Richard Samuel's The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (or Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1779, serves as the exhibition's center. Radiating from this center are individual portraits of intellectual women among these nine, including the salonierre and literary critic, Elizabeth Montagu, called the Queen of the Blues; historian Catharine Macaulay; classicist and poet Elizabeth Carter; poet and critic Anna Barbauld; Hannah More, then a young poet and playwright; and the painter Angelica Kauffmann. A second group portrait, Daniel Maclise's 1836 Regina's Maids of Honour, depicts eight then-contemporary women writers, including Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Harriet Martineau, and Lady Sydney Morgan. Eger contrasts Samuel's heroic muses, represented in “an abstract and idealized exterior location,” several with the implements of the arts they practiced, with Maclise's tea-drinking ladies, “safely contained within a familiar, domestic interior.” Eger remarks, “If it weren’t for the book that Caroline Norton is holding, … there would be no way of knowing that these women were literary, let alone significant contributors to the cultural and political life of their time” (133).

Among the most striking and less familiar individual portraits in the exhibition are John Fayram's Elizabeth Carter as Minerva (ca. 1735–41) and Henry William Pickersgill's Hannah More (1821). Carter looks directly and confidently at the viewer. As Minerva, she is clad in dark, elegantly decorated armor, her helmet adorned with a small gold owl and a dashing white plume. She holds a large, red volume of Plato, which she could read in Greek. This portrait is a refreshing contrast to more typical images of virtuous learned women in modest mobcaps. Pickersgill presents More at seventy-six, also looking directly at the viewer, extraordinarily alert. According to William Vaughan in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, this was one of the pictures that gave Pickersgill his reputation for “sober and accurate portraiture.” The colors are at once subdued and vivid: More sits in a chair of dull red, wears a dark blue dress with brighter blue highlights, and sports a piece of bright white head gear in which a mobcap has been transformed by replacing the usual chin string with a four-layer Elizabethan ruff and a complicated light-blue bow perched on its top. Throughout the volume, Peltz attends fruitfully to the significances of sitters' poses, costumes, and to relevant iconographic traditions. Here she finds Pickersgill drawing on a “compositional vocabulary” familiar from portraits of statesmen and bishops with their “throne-like” chairs and writing tables and suggests that the portrait “could be taken as the honorific embodiment of the repeated comment that More was a ‘Bishop in petticoats'” (115).

In addition to group and individual portraits, Eger and Peltz range widely through visual material culture to consider the dissemination of images of “brilliant women.” For example, Eger describes a beautiful enamel and gold “friendship” box the Duchess of Portland commissioned from Christian Friedrich Zincke to contain enamel miniatures of herself and three friends, including Montagu “wearing the black Tudor costume of Anne Boleyn, a queen famous for her learning and vivacity” (39). In contrast to this unique object, the cocurators show Wedgwood's much less expensive commercially produced cameos of Montagu and Barbauld. Part of a series of “Heads of Illustrious Moderns” from Chaucer to the present, Montagu here appears with a Roman matron's veil, “in severe profile, as if imitating ancient coins and cameos” (66). Among hostile representations of bluestockings, they offer William Holland's 1790 Don Dismallo Running the Literary Gantlet, in which Edmund Burke is scourged by liberals and radicals including Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, and Macaulay.

Eger's final essay, “The Bluestocking Legacy,” considers images of women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer. Paula Rego's powerful 1995 Germaine Greer shows her sitter in a pose inconceivable in an eighteenth-century portrait. Eger is concerned to speak to the general reader aware of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë but not familiar with women nonfiction writers of the nineteenth century. This, coupled with her desire to emphasize backlash and her rhetorical goal of arriving at a final sentence that suggests “it was easier to be a bluestocking in the eighteenth century than it is in our own age” (149), produces an unconvincing literary history. There are better examples of nineteenth-century bluestockings than Austen and Brontë and, I believe, women intellectuals and artists “in our own age” have far more opportunities and encounter much weaker resistance than the eighteenth-century bluestockings did. Nevertheless, throughout the volume, Eger and Peltz offer good accounts of the complex mixtures of celebration and scorn the original bluestockings encountered and of the bluestockings’ own ambivalences about whether or not they ought to cultivate or to display their gifts. (We are fortunate that those including Frances Burney and More, who had scruples about sitting for their portraits, overcame them.) Whether or not women intellectuals today are better or worse off, readers today may judge for themselves.