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Bluestockings Displayed : Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730-1830

Bluestockings Displayed: portraiture, performance and patronage, 1700-1830 is a collection of scholarly essays that derives from the

academic conference held to mark the exhibition Brilliant Women at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008. The conference gathered together a group of international experts and received the support of King’s School of Humanities, The British Academy and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, attracting 150 delegates and a waiting list of over 60 - all indications of the importance of the speakers' work to the fields of literary and art history, and feminist cultural and intellectual history more broadly.

When Eger decided to edit a selection of papers from the conference she knew that she had to carry out a significant amount of work in re-shaping and refining the focus of the conference in order to

develop the exciting new work that started in discussion at the conference. By addressing portraiture as inextricably linked to the themes of patronage and performance, she was concerned foremost to make the case for interdisciplinary research in the field of eighteenth-century literary art history and to place women's work at the centre of historical debates about aesthetic and print culture. In addition to providing authors with regular and substantial feedback on versions of their essays she commissioned three new essays for the collection by scholars pre-eminent in their respective fields - by Joseph Roach, Markman Ellis and the late Angela Rosenthal (who sadly died before she completed her essay. The book is dedicated to her). She responded to two rounds of expert readers' reports from CUP, the last of which remarked: 'a landmark collection - the editor had improved the argument and shape of the book immeasurably since its original incarnation.'