Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

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Standard Name: Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley
Birth Name: Mary Pierrepont
Styled: Lady Mary Pierrepont
Nickname: Flavia
Nickname: Sappho
Married Name: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Indexed Name: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Pseudonym: Strephon
Pseudonym: Clarinda
Pseudonym: A Turkey Merchant
LMWM , eighteenth-century woman of letters, identified herself as a writer, a sister of the quill
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Halsband, Robert, Clarendon Press, 1965–1967, 3 vols.
3: 173
haunted by the daemon of poetry. She wrote poems, essays, letters (including the letters from Europe and Turkey which she later recast as a highly successful travel book), fiction (including adult fairy-tale, oriental tale, and full-length mock romance), satire, a diary, a play, a political periodical, and a history of her own times. Not all of these survive. Best known in her lifetime for her poetry, she is today still best known for her letters.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Halsband, Robert, Clarendon Press, 1965–1967, 3 vols.
3: 173, 183
Photo of a full-length painting of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson recording her time in Turkey. She stands outdoors, with famous buildings of Constantinople (Istanbul) visible beyond. She is dressed in gold: a caftan whose deep V-neck and open skirt reveal a lace shift and long harem drawers. She also wears a gold cap which she calls a talpock on her dark hair, a blue cloak edged with ermine, pearl drop earrings, and pointed slippers. The presence of the young Black boy behind her is start

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Mary Astell
Only four days after she and Montagu had both written poems together on the death of a young bride , MA wrote the bulk of her verse and prose preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Friends, Associates Mary Astell
Elizabeth Hutcheson (an associate of nonjuring devotional writer William Law , as was Hastings) later became MA 's executor. Her friendship with Lady Chudleigh was conducted largely by letter, since Chudleigh lived in Devon. Astell...
Textual Production Mary Astell
MA was an inveterate annotator of books; she had some volumes bound with blank pages added for her notes. Among occasional writings produced by her friendship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were angry marginalia in...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Astell
MA influenced a whole generation of writing women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Mary Chudleigh , Elizabeth Thomas , Judith Drake , Damaris Masham (although Masham's opinions were markedly different), Elizabeth Elstob , and Jane Barker
Textual Production Mary Astell
Books with Astell's annotations survive among those from William Law 's charitable library in Northamptonshire Record Office and among the survivors of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 's collection in private, family hands. The Northamptonshire books...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Atkins
This novel keeps its good and bad characters carefully distinct. Olive ministers to the fallen Mary; Matthew, when he gets an opportunity, strangles his wife. In due course follows a court scene, and he is...
Family and Intimate relationships W. H. Auden
Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a...
Leisure and Society Joanna Baillie
In the earlier 1840s, however, she was still a keen reader. She tackled the first edition of Frances Burney 's Diary and Letters out of a desire to get some insight into the literary society...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
Some of Barbauld's acutest social comment was linked with her pedagogy. Fashion, a Vision, probably written about 1792 for her first private paying pupil, and picking up some ideas from Wollstonecraft 's Vindication,...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB draws on Hannah More , her niece Lucy Aikin , and (anonymously) Joanna Baillie . She is even-handed in that she includes six excerpts from James Fordyce 's Sermons to Young Women, a...
Intertextuality and Influence Henrietta Battier
HB (if it is she) presents herself as a brand-new author: a Bardling! - bursting from her Shell!
Battier, Henrietta. The Mousiad. P. Byrne, 1787.
prelims
Her satire on the sexuality of a male ecclesiastic suggests works of several generations earlier by...
Intertextuality and Influence Aphra Behn
Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Wortley Montagu) wrote an imitation of A Voyage to the Island of Love at the age of about fourteen.
Textual Features Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld for praising Elizabeth Rowe . She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington is the real author of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Berry
MB presents the fruits of wide reading in such sources as printed memoirs and letters and even archival collections. Her cultural history was not unique: Lucy Aikin had set out in 1818 to use a...

Timeline

18 March 1748: Robert Dodsley first offered for sale his...

Writing climate item

18 March 1748

Robert Dodsley first offered for sale his influential Collection of Poems by Several Hands.
Suarez, Michael F., and Robert Dodsley, editors. “The Formation, Transmission, and Reception of Robert Dodsleys Collection of Poems by Several HandsA Collection of Poems by Several Hands, Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997, pp. 1-118.
6, 14, 25ff, 47, 67

1750: The progressive Pope Benedict XIV appointed...

Building item

1750

The progressive Pope Benedict XIV appointed a woman, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-99), as professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna .
“The Catholic Encyclopedia”. New Advent.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Babbage

1752: A severe epidemic of smallpox resulted in...

Building item

1752

A severe epidemic of smallpox resulted in 3,500 deaths in London, more than seventeen per cent of all recorded deaths this year.
Shuttleton, David. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660—1820. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
106

1754: The Royal College of Physicians made public...

Building item

1754

The Royal College of Physicians made public their official approval of inoculation for smallpox, as introduced to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu thirty-three years before.
Hopper, Karine. “Doctors, Ministers, and Women Novelists: The Effect of Print on the Inoculation Debate in the later Eighteenth Century”. Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) Conference, Quebec City, QC, 24 Oct. 2002.

By 22 May 1755: George Colman and Bonnell Thornton edited...

Women writers item

By 22 May 1755

George Colman and Bonnell Thornton edited and published an anthology entitled Poems by Eminent Ladies.
Griffiths, Ralph, 1720 - 1803, and George Edward Griffiths, editors. Monthly Review. R. Griffiths.
12: 512
Eger, Elizabeth. “Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology”. Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment, The Making of a Canon 1730-1820, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, St Martin’s Press, 1998, pp. 201-15.
210
Guest, Harriet. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
86-7
Lavoie, Chantel Michelle. Poems by Eminent Ladies: A Study of an Eighteenth-Century Anthology. University of Toronto, 1999.
286-7

15 January 1759: The British Museum (including what had formerly...

Building item

15 January 1759

The British Museum (including what had formerly been known as the King's Library ), established six years earlier, was first opened to the public.
Gray, Thomas, and Herbert Willmarth Starr. Correspondence. Editors Toynbee, Paget and Leonard Whibley, Clarendon Press, 1971, 3 vols.
2: 620 and n14

13 September 1759: A British party under James Wolfe climbed...

National or international item

13 September 1759

A British party under James Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham at Quebec and beat the French in battle there.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Wharncliffe, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, first Baron, Richard Bentley, 1836, 3 vols.
3: 191
Newman, Gerald, editor. Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714-1837: An Encyclopedia. Garland, 1997.
778

12 February 1767-5 June 1769: Hugh Kelly issued his periodical The Babler,...

Writing climate item

12 February 1767-5 June 1769

Hugh Kelly issued his periodical The Babler, opening with the usual bow towards the Tatler and Spectator.
Kelly, Hugh. The Babler. Harrison, 1786, http://U of A Special Collections.

April 1768: The first volume of The New Foundling Hospital...

Writing climate item

April 1768

The first volume of The New Foundling Hospital for Wit was published: an influential poetry anthology linked to the political opposition.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
25 (1768): 314
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

January 1781-December 1782: The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties...

Writing climate item

January 1781-December 1782

The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties of British Poetry appeared, published by James Harrison in four half-yearly numbers; it is arguable whether or not it kept the first number's promise of generous selections of work...

14 May 1796: After some years of investigating the protection...

Building item

14 May 1796

After some years of investigating the protection given by cowpox against smallpox, Edward Jenner carried out his first, experimental cowpox injection of a healthy young boy. His subject showed no reaction when later inoculated with...

July 1796: The explorer Mungo Park, abandoned and anxious...

Building item

July 1796

The explorer Mungo Park , abandoned and anxious on the banks of the Niger River in what is now Mali, was taken in, housed and fed by African village women, who composed and sang...

May 1829: A Ladies' Bazaar to benefit Spanish refugees,...

Building item

May 1829

A Ladies' Bazaar to benefit Spanish refugees, held at the Hanover Square Rooms in London, patron the Duke of Wellington , raised the remarkable sum of £2,000.
“Deaprtments. Travel. Stanhope, Lady Caroline”. Bernard Quaritch Ltd.

1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...

Writing climate item

1861

A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...

1879: Walter Bagehot's Literary Studies, a two-volume...

Writing climate item

1879

Walter Bagehot 's Literary Studies, a two-volume collection of his literary essays, was published posthumously with a memoir by Richard Holt Hutton .
Bagehot, Walter. Literary Studies. Editor Hutton, Richard Holt, 4th ed., Longmans, Green, 1891, 2 vols.

Texts

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, and John, Baron Hervey. Verses Address’d to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace. Equal 1st, James Roberts, 112 ll., folio.