Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Lennox made the adaptation at Garrick
's suggestion, following an unsuccessful one by Robert Dodsley
decades earlier.
Carlile, Susan. Charlotte Lennox. An Independent Mind. University of Toronto Press.
259
An edition followed on 27 November. Lady Bute
(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's daughter) had politely...
Reception
Judith Cowper Madan
Pope
complimented Judith Cowper (later Madan)
in To Erinna on her (still unpublished) lines to him. He praised her for not seeking, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, to emulate the sun's brightness, but for...
Reception
Anne Irwin
AI
's Epistle to Pope was anthologized in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, in the 1770s. Mary Robinson
, praising it in 1799, thought it was written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
Reception
Marie-Catherine de Villedieu
This was one of three publications by MCV
which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
had in her library (besides a sequel to another Villedieu work).
“List of Lady Mary Wortley’s books packed up to be sent abroad”. Wharncliffe Muniments, Sheffield, p. M / 135 / 3.
Reception
Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
Reception
Caroline Norton
She treated her own request as if it were just any appeal for patronage: I do not know if there be any precedent for appointing a female poet laureate even in a Queen's reign...
Residence
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
During the final months before separating from her husband, Rosina Lytton lived at Berrymead Priory at Acton west of London (the house from which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
had made an early, unsuccessful attempt to...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Though Theresa writes most of the letters in the book, the opening one, as often in women's epistolary novels at this date, is an exchange between men. Tomlins, however, does not attempt to capture a...
Textual Features
Anna Seward
The series (completed in 1791) developed from AS
's strictures on John Weston
's contributions to a book entitled Records of the Woodmen of Arden. She compared Dryden
with Pope
to the advantage of...
Textual Features
Anna Seward
The sonnets are written in strict Milton
ic form. One of their favourite themes is love of nature and the countryside; one or two deal with Seward's love for Honora Sneyd
. In rendering Horace...
Textual Features
Dorothea Du Bois
After seven pages on grammar, she offers pattern letters: those in verse are in effect an anthology of epistolary poems by women, a patriotically generous selection of Irish writers (Mary Monck
, Mary Barber
Textual Features
Sarah Murray
In this volume the social restrictions on women's minds (which have often been silently in evidence in the earlier volumes) seem to come more into question, though they are never debunked. Maria reports that the...
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
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...
