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.
He describes her with a line from Donne
's Second Anniversary. EG
's range of reference here includes Rousseau
, Milton
, Frances Greville
, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
. Characters discuss and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Aphra Behn
Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Wortley Montagu)
wrote an imitation of A Voyage to the Island of Love at the age of about fourteen.
Intertextuality and Influence
Marie de Sévigné
These letters have been immensely popular since their first publication, in France, England, and elsewhere. Numerous male critics have written of their almost personal love for MS
. One of those impervious to her charm...
Intertextuality and Influence
Louisa Stuart Costello
These first two volumes were not well-received. The Athenæum reviewer suggested that the dust of the road is ill-exchanged by Miss Costello for the dust of the library.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
857 (1844): 287
The ensuing two volumes...
Intertextuality and Influence
Madeleine de Scudéry
As a consequence of this work's success, MS
became popularly known as Sappho or the modern Sappho, particularly in connection with her salon.
McDougall, Dorothy. Madeleine de Scudéry. Benjamin Blom, 1972.
vii, 89, 224, 226
The Grand Cyrus (often called by its...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Hands
EH
's pastorals include some touching love-stories, but they also regularly reverse the gender situations traditional to the genre. It is pairs of nymphs (not pairs of shepherds) who are alike ambitious to excel in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edith Templeton
The epigraph alerts the reader to expect an unusually disillusioned example of the voyage-to-the-island-of-love genre (previously written by Aphra Behn
and the future Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
). This novel begins, as did the two...
Intertextuality and Influence
Fanny Aikin Kortright
FAK
's literary allusions here are interesting. Thomas Hood
's The Song of the Shirt is cited more than once, though Kortright insists that the governess is worse off than the seamstress because she is...
Intertextuality and Influence
Madeleine de Scudéry
Aphra Behn
took from the Carte de tendre some of the topographical imagery of her verse-and-prose romance A Voyage to the Island of Love (which in turn was the model behind The Adventurer, written...
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
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
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
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