Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

26 May 1689 - 21 August 1762

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

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort ascending	Author name	Excerpt
Textual Production	Anita Desai	At Cambridge in 1991, AD composed an introduction for an edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 's Turkish Embassy Letters, which appeared from Pickering and Chatto in 1993 and from Virago Press in 1994.
Textual Production	George Paston	Another eighteenth-century biography by GP appeared: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times. TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive. 277 (3 May 1902): 140 Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production	Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford	The circumstances of misattribution are mysterious, but literary historian Michael F. Suarez guesses that Dodsley and William Shenstone deliberately printed this poem as Montagu 's in order to preserve the reputation of the real author...
Textual Production	Dervla Murphy	DM wrote the introduction to an edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 's Embassy Letters published by Century in 1988 as Embassy to Constantinople. This edition is remarkable for its accompanying reproductions of early...
Textual Production	Anne Francis	AF explains in her preliminary discourse (dated 24 July 1781) that she began by making a prose translation. Then she endeavour[ed] to soften, with the flow of numbers, the rugged, inharmonious style of literal translation...
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...
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...
Textual Production	Elizabeth Carter	EC had promised Catherine Talbot that she would undertake the project of making a scholarly translation of the Enchiridion by Epictetus . This work of ancient Greek stoic philosophy was something of a favourite with...
Textual Production	Judith Cowper Madan	The Family Miscellany, collected and transcribed by JCM 's brother Ashley Cowper , dated 1747 and now British Library MS Add. 28,101, includes plenty of poems by Ashley himself and plenty more ascribed to...
Textual Features	Elizabeth Nihell	Like Elizabeth Cellier , Nihell claims authority for women from ancient history. It was probably Eve, she says, not Adam, who delivered the first human babies. The mother of Socrates was a midwife, and inoculation...
Textual Features	Clara Reeve	Her Address to the Reader notes the recent increase in the number of women writers commanding critical respect, and observes that every woman publishing with success will inspire a couple of others to try. Most...
Textual Features	Catherine Sinclair	In Lady Mary Pierrepoint the title character is a Protestant whose virago widowed mother-in-law (Lady Pierrepont) intends to disinherit her son Sir Cosmo (Mary's husband) and leave her lands to the Roman Catholic Church ...
Textual Features	Jane Collier	The commonplace-book throws light on Collier's other extant writings as well. A casual mention of what Sally calls the Turba proves definitively that at least one neologism in The Cry stemmed not from her but...
Textual Features	Clara Reeve	In her preface a character named Preceptor makes Reeve's didactic purpose clear by enunciating a recipe for forming model citizens: It is a mark of a well-disposed mind, to believe your own country is the...
Textual Features	Delarivier Manley	The New Atalantis is crammed with offensive personal attacks on individuals (women as well as men); most though not all of them pertain to the misuse of political or sexual power. Particularly notorious is the...

Timeline

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 Library, aiming to reprint 1,000 classic titles: the first year's 155 volumes included Æschylus , Shakespeare , Jane Austen practically complete,

Clair, Colin. A Chronology of Printing. Cassell.

169

and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .

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