English Visiting Speaker Seminar 2026 Fleeman Fellow James Metcalf (University of Manchester)

‘”How I long for a telescope”: Elizabeth Carter and Astronomy'

Poet, essayist, translator, classical scholar, and voluminous letter-writer Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) is one of the most erudite and versatile writers of the eighteenth century. Addressing subjects from domestic scenes and social behaviours to the proper Stoic attitude to life's hardships, she takes her era's familiar aesthetic forms in new directions as an innovative woman writer pushing the boundaries of what was thought suitable to her sex. This talk will take up one of those directions, examining Carter's use of astronomy across her work. Carter contributed directly to the popularisation of Newtonian science in her translation Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explained for the Use of the Ladies (1739). In more subtle expressions, her letters and poems draw on astronomy for a repertoire of images, both philosophical and beautiful, through which she describes problems of epistemology, perception, faith, and friendship at a distance.