Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

-
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.
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.
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
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Burnet
This marriage gave EB a family of five stepchildren (bequeathed to her care by their own mother when she was close to death). They were three boys (all of whom went on to careers ranking...
Family and Intimate relationships Ann Thicknesse
Philip Thicknesse was a somewhat shady character, one of the greatest self-publicists of the eighteenth century.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Philip Thicknesse
After travelling the world in various capacities he had eloped with an heiress in 1742...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Margaret Calderwood
MC 's brother, another James Steuart , was educated at school and university and on the Grand Tour. He married Lady Frances Wemyss in 1743, and two years later, because she was ill with smallpox...
Family and Intimate relationships Judith Cowper Madan
Soon afterwards Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , appropriating her voice in Miss Cooper to —, makes the unmarried Judith Cowper express a tormented love for Lysander, who in this poem is uncaring and...
Family and Intimate relationships Anne Irwin
Nearly a decade after his death Lady Mary Wortley Montagu addressed to the widow an poetic argument against infidelity so jaunty as to suggest she did not think him a husband worth mourning.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Editors Halsband, Robert and Isobel Grundy, Oxford University Press.
257-8
Family and Intimate relationships Susan Tweedsmuir
Through her mother ST was descended from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu . She was happy to claim Lady Mary as an ancestress, but did not pay her particularly close attention: she was mistaken in 1952...
Family and Intimate relationships Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
Her mother, born Mary Gilbert , from a gentry family in Hertfordshire, was her father's second wife, married more than twenty years after the death of his first. (That first wife, the beautiful, scholarly, fourteen-year-old...
Friends, Associates Joseph Addison
JA 's time at Charterhouse began, and his time at Oxford confirmed, his friendship with Richard Steele , with whom his name was to become inextricably linked as a result of their shared periodical ventures...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach
EMA continued to live a crowded social life despite the circles where she was not received. She corresponded with Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe ,
Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach,. “Introduction”. The Beautiful Lady Craven, edited by Lewis Saul Benjamin and Alexander Meyrick Broadley, Bodley Head, p. i - cxxxviii.
cvii
and claimed to have built a friendship with Lady Bute (daughter...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter (the most intellectually...
Friends, Associates Jonathan Swift
Swift helped and befriended a number of women writers. He was a patron of Mary Barber , Constantia Grierson , an unidentified Mrs Sican , Mary Davys , and Laetitia Pilkington , a colleague of...
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...
Friends, Associates Grisell Murray
At almost every stage of GM 's life, her family had the habit of spending part of their time at their London house, where she evidently moved in literary as well as fashionable circles. She...
Friends, Associates Alexander Pope
Pope's relationships with women, particularly women who wrote, tended to be complicated and turbulent. They have been ably studied by scholar Valerie Rumbold . Contrary to rumour, he apparently liked and respected Anne Finch ...

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.

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 .

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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 periodicalThe Babler, opening with the usual bow towards the Tatler and Spectator.

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.

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.

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 .

Texts

No bibliographical results available.