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.
Their move back to England was facilitated by a legacy of £5,000 from Anne's father.
Heath-Caldwell, J. J. “Letters, References and Notes (1780-1874), Relating to James Caldwell and Anne Marsh (Marsh-Caldwell)”. Ancestors and Relatives of JJ Heath-Caldwell.
1839-1842
They bought the estate the previous year for £13,000 (including standing timber worth £3,280). AM
sold the house, estate...
Violence
Teresia Constantia Phillips
Nine months after her mother died, TCP
, aged thirteen, was raped by Thomas Grimes, a nobleman who got her drunk and tied her up. He was not, as long assumed, the future Lord Chesterfield
Travel
George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron
He travelled through Switzerland to Italy, where he lived for years in Venice and in Genoa, besides shorter periods in other towns. In Venice he believed that the palazzo he lived in had been...
Travel
Ann Radcliffe
They arrived in Holland on 29 May, and travelled via Harwich, the Hague, Rotterdam, Delft, and Cologne to the valley of Adernach near the German border with Switzerland. They disliked...
Travel
Julia Pardoe
They arrived during an outbreak of cholera, but that did not diminish her enthusiasm for the country.
Unsigned, and Julia Pardoe. “Memoir of the Author”. The Court and Reign of Francis the First, King of France, R. Bentley and Son, p. xiii - xvi.
xiv
Biographers are fond of repeating the claim that Pardoe was more intimately acquainted with Turkish life than...
Travel
Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach
In Vienna, she said, the Emperor wished her to stay all winter, but she pressed on to St Petersburg (where she found another Empress to admire).
Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach,. Memoirs of the Margravine of Anspach. Henry Colburn.
1: 126-8, 132, 148-9
Her letters to her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sophia Hume
She cites both her experience with a child, and the way she owed the benefit of her own conversion to the affliction of having smallpox. But the ultimate argument against inoculation, she says, is that...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Melesina Trench
About the first twenty pages are occupied by MT
's early reminiscences, probably written not long after her first husband's death: she frankly recorded her emotional disturbance over that event.
Trench, Melesina. The Remains of the Late Mrs. Richard Trench. Editor Trench, Richard Chenevix, Parker and Bourn.
18
Later pages mix letters...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Flora Tristan
One chapter, entitled English Women, criticizes British social systems, and details the consequences women suffer because of the indissolubility of marriage.
Tristan, Flora. Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1840. Translators Palmer, Dennis and Giselle Pincetl, Charles River Books.
AS
's correspondence often deals with literary matters as well as with social matters and personalities. She writes with astonishing freedom to Hester Piozzi
about the latter's travel book Observations and Reflections: not only...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
2
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
For this anthology EF
gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare
and Milton
, as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton
and Helen Maria Williams
...
Timeline
1656: Abraham Cowley published Poems; this volume,...
Writing climate item
1656
Abraham Cowley
published Poems; this volume, which included his Pindaric Odes and Miscellanies, confirmed his stature as the leading poet of the day.
1686: Madame de Maintenon founded, in a nunnery...
Building item
1686
Madame de Maintenon
founded, in a nunnery at St Cyr near Paris, a school for impoverished noble girls. Closed with other convents at the Revolution, the institution re-opened in 1808 as a school for...
1 December 1699: John Pomfret published The Choice, a poem...
Writing climate item
1 December 1699
John Pomfret
published The Choice, a poem in praise of the good life; among many other poems sharing this title, or that of The Wish, Pomfret's became a long-lived favourite.
1 March 1711: Joseph Addison began to publish the Spec...
14 April 1713: Joseph Addison's influential classical tragedy,...
Writing climate item
14 April 1713
Joseph Addison
's influential classical tragedy, Cato, opened.
13 June 1716: After the early death of Mary Monck, her...
Women writers item
13 June 1716
After the early death of Mary Monck
, her grieving father, Robert, Viscount Molesworth
, published Marinda: Poems and Translations upon Several Occasions, which contains writing by her and others.
19 May 1720: A New Miscellany, edited by Anthony Hammond,...
November 1739: The anonymous, probably female Sophia published...
Women writers item
November 1739
The anonymous, probably female Sophia
published a pamphlet entitled Woman not Inferior to Man.
Texts
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, and Laetitia Pilkington. “Annotation”. The Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington.
Stuart, Lady Louisa, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu and Supplement to the Anecdotes”. Essays and Poems and Simplicity A Comedy, edited by Robert Halsband et al., Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 6-61.
Stuart, Lady Louisa, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M.W. Montagu”. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, first Baron Wharncliffe and James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, first Baron Wharncliffe, R. Bentley, 1837, pp. 1: 1 - 105.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Court Poems. Edmund Curll, 1716.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Editors Halsband, Robert and Isobel Grundy, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Murphy, Dervla et al. “Introduction”. Embassy to Constantinople, Century, 1988, pp. 7-37.
Desai, Anita, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “Introduction”. Turkish Embassy Letters, edited by Malcolm Jack and Malcolm Jack, University of Georgia Press, 1993, p. vii - xxxvii.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M— W—y M—e. T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1763.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M— W—y M—e. A. Homer and P. Milton, 1764.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M— W—y M—e. T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1767.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Original Letters from the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague, to Sir James & Lady Frances Steuart; also Memoirs and Anecdotes of those distinguished persons. Printed by Robert Donaldson, 1818.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “Preface”. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by W. Moy Thomas, Swan Sonnenschein, 1893, p. iii - viii.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Romance Writings. Editor Grundy, Isobel, Clarendon Press, 1996.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Six Town Eclogues. Printed for M. Cooper, 1747.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Halsband, Robert, Clarendon Press, 1967.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Dean’s Provocation for Writing the Lady’s Dressing-Room. A Poem. Printed for T. Cooper, 1734.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, first Baron Wharncliffe, Richard Bentley, 1836.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Thomas, W. Moy, Henry G. Bohn, 1861.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Thomas, W. Moy, Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Nonsense of Common-Sense. James Roberts (a pamphlet-seller rather than a publisher).
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Nonsense of Common-Sense, 1737-1738. Editor Halsband, Robert, Northwestern University Press, 1947.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Poetical Works of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e. Editor Reed, Isaac, Printed for J. Williams, 1768.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Verse of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. A Critical Edition. Editor Grundy, Isobel, Oxford University, 1971.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Dallaway, James, Richard Phillips, 1803.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, and John, Baron Hervey. Verses Address’d to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace. James Roberts.