Literature Compass 14/11 2017: e12426, 10.1111/lic3.12426 Bluestocking Studies 2011–2017: The Transnational Turn Alessa Johns * Department of English, University of California, Davis Abstract As international trade, exploration, and communication proliferated in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a significant group of British intellectual women, the Bluestockings, came to recognize themselves as part of a transnational network. They were attentive especially to intellectual pursuits, women’s cultural, sociopolitical, and economic interests, and various forms of social progress, and some of these preoccupations developed over the period and fed into first-wave feminist programs later in the 19th century. I consider the extensive Bluestocking scholarship concentrating on transnationalism as well as recent research that has incorporated international themes. The field of bluestocking studies at this juncture forcefully extends the feminist recovery project and, because of its international interest, might help to counter nationalist and anti-feminist pressures currently challenging the academy. Since Deborah Heller’s article “Bluestocking Studies: the State of the Field – and into the Future” was published 6years ago (Literature Compass 8/4 [2011]: 154–163), work on British bluestockings has proliferated and warrants a new assessment. Heller had focused on how scholarship about bluestockings at that time concerned their public presentation; she argued that it leaned on Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere and a displacement of “separate spheres” theory previously countenanced in 18th and 19th-century gender studies. Since then, the bounty of scholarship has enabled synthetic studies of the bluestockings that evince an increasing focus on their transnationalism. Such an expanding interest was perhaps predictable, given that widening the Bluestocking circle preoccupied scholars from the start. Sylvia Myers, path-breaking author of The Bluestocking Circle (1990), herself added a second generation to the initial group; Gary Kelly, general editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Bluestocking Feminism (1999), defined the Bluestockings outward from an urban center into the provinces. Subsequent studies focused on how the core of Anglican members came to include Dissenters and Evangelicals; a monied philanthropical elite came to include middle-class intellectuals and working-class poets; fields of study expanded from literary conversation and correspondence to include scientific research, business ventures, and pictorial representations; the timeframe moved both backward and forward to encompass the long 18th century and more (see e.g. Pohl and Schellenberg, Eger, and Guest). Post-colonial theory, scholarship on cosmopolitanism, and historical work on colonial and imperial developments over the period facilitated the study of international exchange among bluestockings. Seen in combination, activities of the bluestockings then – and the research about them now – suggest that they came to understand themselves as a transnational network, attentive especially to intellectual pursuits, women’s interests, and various forms of social progress, which developed over the period and, as such scholars as Bonnie S. Anderson and Eileen Hunt Botting have argued, ultimately fed into first-wave feminist programs later in the 19th century. First, I consider scholarship concentrating on transnationalism, and then I offer an overview of noteworthy work on bluestockings where transnationalism plays a significant part even if it is not the central focus. I conclude with a suggestion that the field of bluestocking studies at this © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd