This paper examines attitudes to the education of children in elite families in eighteenth-century Scotland revealed in various letters, private papers, and memoirs. It takes as its starting point Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s famous advice to her daughter, Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute (1718-1794), on the education of her granddaughters. Lady Louisa Stuart, one of those six granddaughters, went on to become a writer as well as an avid reader, and later recalled the childhood pleasures of reading books from her grandmother’s vast library. Provision for the education of her daughters and grandchildren, at home and abroad, can also be traced in some detail in the meticulous Household Book and notebooks kept by Lady Grisell Baillie (1665-1746). Her daughter Griseld, Lady Murray (1693-1759), later commemorated her famous mother’s commitment to education. Attitudes to reading, learning languages and education through travel to Europe can be traced in the private papers of these families, and in the views of the children who went on to express their appreciation in memoirs and biographies published in honour of their mothers and grandmothers.