Precarious and Fatiguing: Elizabeth Elstob and Women’s Intellectual Careers as Tragedy

Abstract

The eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) has often served as both a positive and negative example of what was historically possible for a ‘learned woman’: both for her early successes and for the financial misfortunes that forced her into obscurity as a teacher in a provincial school, before becoming governess to the children of the Duchess of Portland. This essay examines not only Elstob’s own statements about her life and work, but also the critical tradition that has reinscribed her life through the narrative structures of a specifically female kind of tragedy, in which intellectual work is contrasted with domestic labour and marriage potential. Implicit is the comparison with a more progressive present: Mechthild Gretsch, for example, concludes that ‘If Elizabeth Elstob had lived in our days, she would, perhaps, have found a post in an English department’. My reading of Elstob, however, is informed by the many years that I have spent as a precariously employed female academic in a teaching-focused role, as well as a consciousness of the many kinds of contingency and interruption that can still affect women’s intellectual careers.