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.
The third epistle performs the conventional act of praising historical women: the monarchs Elizabeth I
and Catherine the Great
of Russia for their exercise of power, the French scholar Anne Dacier
, and eleven British...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter
(the most intellectually...
Textual Production
Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
Her mother, born Mary Gilbert
, from a gentry family in Hertfordshire, was her father's second wife, married more than twenty years after the death of his first. (That first wife, the beautiful, scholarly, fourteen-year-old...
Wealth and Poverty
Anne Marsh
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...
Literary responses
Delarivier Manley
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
commented on the flyleaf of her copy: true & well wrote.
Textual Features
Delarivier Manley
The New Atalantis is crammed with offensive personal attacks on individuals (women as well as men); most though not all of them pertain to the misuse of political or sexual power. Particularly notorious is the...
Literary responses
Delarivier Manley
A series of various keys attached to later editions fed curiosity about the originals of DM
's portraits, without actually giving very much away.
Manley, Delarivier. “Introduction”. New Atalantis, edited by Ros Ballaster, Pickering and Chatto, p. v - xxviii.
xv
Her work can claim some credit for the collapse of...
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...
Friends, Associates
Judith Cowper Madan
The poems that Judith Cowper wrote as an unmarried young woman suggest that she moved easily both in court and in literary circles. She probably met the poet Alexander Pope
in Jervas
's studio. Pope...
Family and Intimate relationships
Judith Cowper Madan
Soon afterwards Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, appropriating her voice in Miss Cooper to —, makes the unmarried Judith Cowper express a tormented love for Lysander, who in this poem is uncaring and...
Textual Production
Judith Cowper Madan
The Family Miscellany, collected and transcribed by JCM
's brother Ashley Cowper
, dated 1747 and now British Library
MS Add. 28,101, includes plenty of poems by Ashley himself and plenty more ascribed to...
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/.
JCM
reaped a good deal of praise during her lifetime, but most of it must have been of questionable value to her as a poet. Pope
's To Erinna is typical in casting her as...
Textual Features
Janet Little
She consistently takes a challenging stance in face of authority. Ironically (in view of Johnson's championing of women writers and Burns's snobbish attitude about herself) she uses Samuel Johnson
as a symbol of the tyrant-critic...
