35 Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), ii. Felicity Nussbaum argues that the mid-eighteenth century heralded an ‘inaugural moment for the celebration of a national female genius’. See ‘Effeminacy and Femininity: Domestic Prose Satire and David Simple’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, n/4 (1999), 421—44, at p. 426.