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.
BH
also pays much attention in her poems to other writers. Stanzas to the River Don footnotes Wortley Hall as a former home of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
Hofland, Barbara. Poems. Printed by J. Montgomery, and sold by Vernor and Hood.
6-11 and n
Ode to Apathy...
Literary responses
Eliza Haywood
This book's full title, with its reference to a Search after Happiness, sounds like a possible source for Sarah Fielding
's David Simple, whose hero is depicted in Search of a Real Friend...
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...
Literary responses
Eliza Haywood
In the Monthly Review, Ralph Griffiths
passed a judgement which was inflected against Betsy Thoughtless by issues of gender. He guessed that the author was female because of the novel's attention to matters of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Hands
EH
's pastorals include some touching love-stories, but they also regularly reverse the gender situations traditional to the genre. It is pairs of nymphs (not pairs of shepherds) who are alike ambitious to excel in...
Textual Production
Sarah Josepha Hale
SJH
edited both The Letters of Madame de Sévigné
, to Her Daughter and Friends and The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
Okker, Patricia. Our Sister Editors. University of Georgia Press, p. 264 pp.
231n31
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Griffith
He describes her with a line from Donne
's Second Anniversary. EG
's range of reference here includes Rousseau
, Milton
, Frances Greville
, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
. Characters discuss and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
2
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Grant
The finished work, published in 1808, begins with a sketch of the history of what became New York State, and continues to cover a good deal of political and historical matters. In the second volume...
Education
Elizabeth Grant
EG
refers to a number of texts that influenced her as a child. She learned to read by the age of three, taught by loving aunts, and remembered in particular Puss in Boots, Bluebeard...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phebe Gibbes
In addition to its over-riding themes of colonialism and the marriage market, this novel, set in early British Calcutta (and incorporating a good deal of travel book material), is much concerned with literature and with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
The feelings of this Emma are all in extremes. During her early passion she quotes Frances Greville
on the pains of sensibility.
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,. Emma. T. Hookham.
1: 66
She and her father kneel alternately to each other when she...
Education
George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron
Byron's voracious reading in childhood was probably fostered by an unhappy emotional life from which imaginative escape was welcome. His favourite books were then the Arabian Nights and travel books about the East, especially that...
Travel
George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron
He travelled through Switzerland to Italy, where he lived for years in Venice and in Genoa, besides shorter periods in other towns. In Venice he believed that the palazzo he lived in had been...
Occupation
George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron
In Venice he discovered surviving letters from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
to Francesco Algarotti
, and wrote to his publisher, John Murray
, about getting them into print. Murray, however, did not respond.
Winch, Alison. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Byronic Hero”. Pride and Prejudices: Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century.
