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, 1965–1967, 3 vols.
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, 1965–1967, 3 vols.
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
Winifred Maxwell Countess of Nithsdale
WMCN
's early and close relationship with her sister-in-law Mary, Countess of Traquair
, née Maxwell, suffered vicissitudes over the years through her poverty and her husband's shameless requests for money. In 1718 the Traquairs...
Friends, Associates
Joseph Addison
JA
's time at Charterhouse began, and his time at Oxford confirmed, his friendship with Richard Steele
, with whom his name was to become inextricably linked as a result of their shared periodical ventures...
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
Anne Burke
A quotation from Shakespeare
's The Tempest intruces an opening scene of storm and shipwreck on a lonely western coast. The only survivor, a six-month-old baby girl in a cradle, is rescued with a gold...
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
Emma Parker
EP
says she has studied to avoid a dictatorial tone . . . considering herself rather as one of those [women] she is addressing.
Parker, Emma. Important Trifles. T. Egerton, 1817.
prelims
qtd. in
Feminist Companion Archive.
She writes as a strong-minded Christian, and makes use of...
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
JP
compares her experience of Belgrade (then a part of the Ottoman Empire, now the capital of Serbia) to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's observations from over a century before. While she echoes Montagu in...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Georgiana Cavendish Duchess of Devonshire
The feelings of this Emma are all in extremes. During her early passion she quotes Frances Greville
on the pains of sensibility.
She and her father kneel alternately to each other when she...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Atkins
This novel keeps its good and bad characters carefully distinct. Olive ministers to the fallen Mary; Matthew, when he gets an opportunity, strangles his wife. In due course follows a court scene, and he is...
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
Margaret Drabble
The heroine of this novel is unhappy in her marriage (two small children) to an ebullient and overbearing young actor. She is stuck with his theatre company in its seven-month season in Hereford (the birthplace...
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.
Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything. Oxford University Press, 2003.
93, 107, 109
February 1906: Publisher J. M. Dent launched Everyman's...
