… women and the evils of slavery. She devised an original philanthropic model of sociability, a sociability of the heart, with a strongly religious dimension, thus outlining a new role for women as prime agents of social and moral reformation. … where it won her public recognition. 1 There, thanks to her friends’ letters of introduction, she rubbed shoulders with the literati of the bluestocking circle, dominated by Mrs Montagu of whom she quickly became a protégée . It is undoubtedly her status as a playwright that enabled her to strike a lifelong friendship with David Garrick and his wife Eva and to lionize Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole . What has been called ‘the …