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.
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.
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...
Textual Features
Eliza Haywood
Spedding rejects the dubious works: Vanelia; or, The Amours of the Great (a musical entertainment staged and printed in 1732) which mocks the Prince of Wales
whom EH
had flattered; and Mr. Taste. The Poetical...
Textual Features
L. E. L.
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...
Residence
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
During the final months before separating from her husband, Rosina Lytton lived at Berrymead Priory at Acton west of London (the house from which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
had made an early, unsuccessful attempt to...
Reception
Judith Cowper Madan
Pope
complimented Judith Cowper (later Madan)
in To Erinna on her (still unpublished) lines to him. He praised her for not seeking, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, to emulate the sun's brightness, but for...
Reception
Marie-Catherine de Villedieu
This was one of three publications by MCV
which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
had in her library (besides a sequel to another Villedieu work).
“List of Lady Mary Wortley’s books packed up to be sent abroad”. Wharncliffe Muniments, Sheffield, p. M / 135 / 3.
Reception
Anne Irwin
AI
's Epistle to Pope was anthologized in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, in the 1770s. Mary Robinson
, praising it in 1799, thought it was written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
Reception
Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
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...
Publishing
Charlotte Lennox
Lennox made the adaptation at Garrick
's suggestion, following an unsuccessful one by Robert Dodsley
decades earlier.
Carlile, Susan. Charlotte Lennox. An Independent Mind. University of Toronto Press.
259
An edition followed on 27 November. Lady Bute
(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's daughter) had politely...
Publishing
Alexander Pope
He issued the final books of The Iliad of Homer in May 1720. The Odyssey of Homer (on which he had considerable help from collaborators) appeared in April 1725 and June 1726.
Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Editor Butt, John, Methuen; Yale University Press.
2: xiii-xiv
It...
Publishing
Judith Cowper Madan
Pattison died of smallpox in July this year, aged about twenty-one.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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.
