The Bluestocking writer Elizabeth Montagu and the Scottish philosopher, historian, and jurist Lord Kames met in Edinburgh in 1766. After their initial meeting, Montagu and Kames began a correspondence that would last until Kames's death in 1781. Ranging in tone from flirtatious to deeply philosophical, their letters document a significant instance of a woman writer's contribution to the development of Enlightenment thought. In her first letter to Kames, Montagu writes,

In likening their first meeting to the resumption of an ongoing story or an already published book, Montagu presages their intellectual collaboration, which took the form of letters that included shared revisions to the fourth edition of Kames's Elements of Criticism (1769) and the co-writing of portions of his yet to be published Sketches of the History of Man (1774), which both Montagu and Kames considered his greatest work. Their subsequent letters debated the nature of progress and women's contributions to aesthetic and social development, making their correspondence an ideal “prefatory complement” to my own book and its exploration of women writers’ contributions to and critiques of Enlightenment narratives of progress.

In a later letter celebrating the publication of Adam Ferguson's Essay on Civil Society in 1767, Montagu describes progress as a gendered and uneven movement.