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, 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.
MD
's Accomplish'd Rake was reprinted by Francis Noble
, circulating-library owner, a specialist in popular fiction and in reprints.
Other names appeared in the imprint along with Noble's. This time exactly the copyright period...
Publishing
Sarah Fielding
The work was dedicated to Lady Pomfret
. Its 440 subscribers included many prominent people, reflecting the bluestockings' range of influence as well as SF
's local and family connections: Ralph Allen
, Lord Chesterfield
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, 1739, p. M / 135 / 3.
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in To Erinna on her (still unpublished) lines to him.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
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
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
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...
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...
Textual Features
Susanna Haswell Rowson
The title-page quotes Samuel Johnson
asserting that an author has nothing but his own merits to stand or fall on. The Birth of Genius, an irregular ode, offers advice to my son to love...
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun., 1781, 2 vols.
1: 79-80
She gives one epistle a kind of doggerel title: Advice to a Rev'rend Cleric, Near his grand climacteric, That...
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...
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...
Textual Features
Anna Williams
Besides AW
's own work, the volume included several pieces by Johnson, The Three Warnings by Hester Thrale
, and a poem beginning Friendship, peculiar gift of heaven, a copy of which had been...
Textual Features
Anna Mary Howitt
Opening in Nottingham in December 1830, this book relates the stories of two aspiring artists whose lives become entwined in various ways. Leonard Mordant is the offspring of an ill-assorted marriage between a talented but...
Textual Features
Emma Roberts
Like other books of travel to the east, as far back as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's Embassy Letters (composed 1716 -18, unpublished till 1763) this gains immensely by encompassing descriptions of Europe as well...