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
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/.
Subscribers to his posthumous poems included Pope , Lady Hertford , Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Laurence Eusden , Matthew Concanen , and Anthony Hammond
Literary responses Judith Cowper Madan
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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 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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Seymour Montague
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...
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
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...

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