blue-stocking

"I'm not in favour of blue-stocking girls. A girl should think about making herself look attractive so she can get a good husband later on. Looks is more important than books, Miss Hunky..."

She wanted to be broad-minded if she could, for she was rather a blue-stocking.

There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.

Ms Morgan, a 41-year-old former Treasury minister and “reliable blue-stocking”, in the semi-admiring words of one Tory minister, should be up to the job of shepherding Mr Gove’s many unfinished reforms.

But a learned woman, a blue-stocking, is not the creature to minister to a man's happiness.