Elizabeth Carter\u27s Legacy: Friendship and Ethics examines the written evidence about the relationships between Elizabeth Carter and her father, Dr. Nocolas Carte; Catherine Talbot; Sir William Pulteney (Lord Bath); and Samuel Johnson to explain how intellectual and personal relationships may become the principal ethical sdource of human happiness. Based on their own set of moral values, such as intellectual and individual liberty and equality, the relationships between Carter and her friends challenged eighteenth-century traditional norms of human relationships.
The primary source of this study, Carter\u27s poetry and prose, including her letters, present the poet\u27s experience of intellectual and individual friendship, reflecting Aristotle\u27s ethics, specifically his moral teaching that views friendship as a human good contributing to human happiness--to the chief human good. Carter\u27s poems devoted to her friends, such as Dr. Carter, Talbot, Montagu, Lord Bath, as well as her A Dialogue between Body and Mind, demonstrate her ethical legacy, her specific moral principles that elevated human relationships and human life. Carter\u27s discussion of human relationships introduces the moral necessity of ethics in human life
