Susannah Gibson charts the struggles and immense achievements of a group of trailblazing women who risked their reputations to become public intellectuals. Burdened with ailing children and unsympathetic husbands, enduring the sneers of contemporaries who thought books frazzled women’s brains and damaged their wombs, they read, wrote and published their work. Copies of Hannah More’s poems were requested by King George III, Elizabeth Montagu’s rebuttal to Voltaire’s critique of Shakespeare thoroughly rattled the great Frenchman, and Catherine Macaulay’s histories were so acclaimed in America that on her visit there she was hosted by George Washington. Earning money, fame, and with these, power, the Bluestockings laid essential foundations for future feminists to build upon. This book tells the forgotten stories of these heroines of Britain’s very first women’s movement.