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In April 1800, Charles Lamb wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to apologize for a minor annoyance he and his sister Mary had caused the mercurial poet. The letter is included in Lamb's collected correspondence under the title ‘With the Blue Stockings’, and it signals both the significance of women's literary networks during the Romantic period and the competing discourses surrounding such networks and female authorship more generally:
You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley; the woman has been ten times after us about it, and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. […] Miss Wesley and her friend, and a tribe of authoresses that come after you daily, and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off, by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger about me, and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benje, or Benjey—I don't know how she spells her name. I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your authoresses, that you first foster, and then upbraid us with.
The ‘Miss Wesley’ Lamb references is Miss Sarah Wesley, better known as Sally, the daughter of Charles Wesley and Sarah Gwynne Wesley. Charles Wesley is perhaps best known as the younger brother of John Wesley, founder of Methodism, though Charles himself was instrumental in the foundation of the movement and served as its chief poet and hymnist. Like her father, Sally Wesley was a gifted poet, though few of her poems saw print, and she had several anonymous essays published in The Monthly Magazine.
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