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.
3: 173, 183
Photo of a full-length painting of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson recording her time in Turkey. She stands outdoors, with famous buildings of Constantinople (Istanbul) visible beyond. She is dressed in gold: a caftan whose deep V-neck and open skirt reveal a lace shift and long harem drawers. She also wears a gold cap which she calls a talpock on her dark hair, a blue cloak edged with ermine, pearl drop earrings, and pointed slippers. The presence of the young Black boy behind her is start

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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.
prelims
Feminist Companion Archive.
She writes as a strong-minded Christian, and makes use of...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Julia Pardoe
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...
Textual Features Ruth Padel
The poems here, addressing the circumstances of Darwin 's life, employ a scaffolding of his own words, forcefully shaped, against a background of many other voices (including that of an orangutan in a zoo). They...
Family and Intimate relationships Amelia Opie
AO accepted a proposal of marriage from a nobleman, Lord Herbert Stuart ; but she later broke off the engagement.
Stuart, the second son of the fourth Earl (later the first Marquess) of Bute, was...
Publishing Margaret Oliphant
MO published in Blackwoods her Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II, whose subjects include Queen Caroline (his wife) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
341
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Grisell Murray
At almost every stage of GM 's life, her family had the habit of spending part of their time at their London house, where she evidently moved in literary as well as fashionable circles. She...
Other Life Event Grisell Murray
This scandal was at once reported in the newspapers, with salacious jokes and verses.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Halsband, Robert, Clarendon Press.
2: 14n1
During the highly publicised court trials, Grisell claimed that Arthur had burst into her room with a pistol and...
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...
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 Production 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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Dervla Murphy
DM 's vivid narrative and her discriminating evaluation make this one of the liveliest, as well as the most accurate, of short accounts of Montagu .
Murphy, Dervla et al. “Introduction”. Embassy to Constantinople, Century, pp. 7-37.
7-37
Textual Production 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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