“... for her Essay on Shakespear (1769). Elizabeth Carter produced a notably successful translation of Epictetus (1758) as well as several editions of her poems, and Hester Mulso Chapone pulled off something of a bestseller with her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773). Yet for all their mental energy and ambition, the first generation of bluestockings ...”

“... to Greek or to early Roman Stoicism but to the later, more narrowly ethical version of Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. This was less a system of ideas than an attitude of mind: an attitude which, when spiced with a dash of Platonism, could be made to look almost identical to the Platonist interpretation of Christianity. Stoics thought that if ...”

“... speaking to us.’ The author and scholar Catherine Talbot, writing to the poet and translator of Epictetus, Elizabeth Carter (and not, as Martin has it, the other way round), said of a piece of Johnson’s anonymous writing: ‘I discern Mr Johnson … as evidently as if I saw him through the keyhole with the pen in his hand.’ Just as his singularity ...”

“... there is a solitude which transcends the terms of power. It is a solitude based on the idea of Epictetus that there is a difference between being lonely and being alone. This third solitude is the sense of being one among many, of having an inner life which is more than a reflection of the lives of others. It is the solitude of difference.Each of these ...”