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.
This novel provides a satirical portrait of high society in early eighteenth-century England. It centres on Henrietta, Countess of Marchmont, an upper-class orphan enduring a loveless marriage and imperilled by her first visit to...
Textual Features
Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
An epilogue by Thomas Moore
sounds flippantly critical of Bluestockings (not the historical group of this name, but in the more general sense of intellectual women). A speaker appears wondering much what little knavish sprite...
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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
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Mary Seymour Montague
It is likely though not absolutely certain that the author was really female. Her pseudonym suggests Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
(who had died nine years earlier, and whom this poem praises as the only woman...
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George Paston
Another eighteenth-century biography by GP
appeared: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
and Her Times.
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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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Elizabeth Justice
With sublime disregard for relevance, her elaborate title-page further promises a translation from Spanish, collected by the author of the Russian parts of the book, of an account of relics at Oviedo. Despite this...
