Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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.
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
...
Friends, Associates
Judith Cowper Madan
The poems that Judith Cowper wrote as an unmarried young woman suggest that she moved easily both in court and in literary circles. She probably met the poet Alexander Pope
in Jervas
's studio. Pope...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Griffith
He describes her with a line from Donne
's Second Anniversary. EG
's range of reference here includes Rousseau
, Milton
, Frances Greville
, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
. Characters discuss and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Rigby
The essay begins with a quotation from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
and goes on to review several publications on the subject, including the Journal of the Women's Education Union (co-edited by Emily Shirreff
). ER
Intertextuality and Influence
Mariana Starke
The play's central theme was suttee or sati, the practice of burning a widow at her husband's death. The playbill advertised a Procession representing the Ceremonies attending the Sacrifice of an Indian Woman on the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Hands
EH
's pastorals include some touching love-stories, but they also regularly reverse the gender situations traditional to the genre. It is pairs of nymphs (not pairs of shepherds) who are alike ambitious to excel in...
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.
prelims
Her satire on the sexuality of a male ecclesiastic suggests works of several generations earlier by...
Intertextuality and Influence
Fanny Aikin Kortright
FAK
's literary allusions here are interesting. Thomas Hood
's The Song of the Shirt is cited more than once, though Kortright insists that the governess is worse off than the seamstress because she is...
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.
Intertextuality and Influence
Louisa Stuart Costello
These first two volumes were not well-received. The Athenæum reviewer suggested that the dust of the road is ill-exchanged by Miss Costello for the dust of the library.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
857 (1844): 287
The ensuing two volumes...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Sappho
's name was an honorific for women writers for generations. George Puttenham
may have been the first to use it to compliment a writing woman: in Parthienades, 1579, he said that Queen Elizabeth
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
MAS
adds a new aesthetic category, the contemplative sublime, alongside the Burke
an or terrible sublime and other categories related to the Burkean beautiful. She derives her thinking from women as well as men. In...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Beverley
The title-page further develops the ship image of the title into a full-blown allegory, a kind of commercialised version of the voyages to an island of love depicted by Madeleine de Scudéry
, Aphra Behn
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Louisa Stuart
Despite family discouragement of her literary interests, with reference to the awful example of her grandmother (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
), LLS
, at the age of nine, had plans for writing full-length works...
Timeline
April 1879: James Murray—editor since 1 March of what...
Writing climate item
April 1879
James Murray
—editor since 1 March of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary—issued an Appeal for readers to supply illustrative quotations.
February 1906: Publisher J. M. Dent launched Everyman's...
