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.
This scandal was at once reported in the newspapers, with salacious jokes and verses.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Editor Halsband, Robert, Clarendon Press.
2: 14n1
During the highly publicised court trials, Grisell claimed that Arthur had burst into her room with a pistol and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Textual Features
Sarah Murray
In this volume the social restrictions on women's minds (which have often been silently in evidence in the earlier volumes) seem to come more into question, though they are never debunked. Maria reports that the...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Nihell
Like Elizabeth Cellier
, Nihell claims authority for women from ancient history. It was probably Eve, she says, not Adam, who delivered the first human babies. The mother of Socrates
was a midwife, and inoculation...
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
Margaret Oliphant
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.
341
Family and Intimate relationships
Amelia Opie
AO
accepted a proposal of marriage from a nobleman, Lord Herbert Stuart
; but she later broke off the engagement.
Stuart, the second son of the fourth Earl (later the first Marquess) of Bute, was...
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...
Travel
Julia Pardoe
They arrived during an outbreak of cholera, but that did not diminish her enthusiasm for the country.
Unsigned, and Julia Pardoe. “Memoir of the Author”. The Court and Reign of Francis the First, King of France, R. Bentley and Son, p. xiii - xvi.
xiv
Biographers are fond of repeating the claim that Pardoe was more intimately acquainted with Turkish life than...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Pardoe
JP
compares her experience of Belgrade (then a part of the Ottoman Empire, now the capital of Serbia) to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's observations from over a century before. While she echoes Montagu in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emma Parker
EP
says she has studied to avoid a dictatorial tone . . . considering herself rather as one of those [women] she is addressing.
Parker, Emma. Important Trifles. T. Egerton.
prelims
Feminist Companion Archive.
She writes as a strong-minded Christian, and makes use of...
Textual Production
George Paston
Another eighteenth-century biography by GP
appeared: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
and Her Times.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Violence
Teresia Constantia Phillips
Nine months after her mother died, TCP
, aged thirteen, was raped by Thomas Grimes, a nobleman who got her drunk and tied her up. He was not, as long assumed, the future Lord Chesterfield
Literary responses
Teresia Constantia Phillips
An outcry greeted the publication, and pamphlets of attack and defence followed. The Gentleman's Magazine printed two anonymous epistles addresssed to TCP
in August. After the second volume appeared, Henry Muilman
made an attempt to...
Literary responses
Laetitia Pilkington
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
wrote in her copy of the London reprint of LP
's Memoirs, as good Poetry as Pope
s [sic].
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, and Laetitia Pilkington. “Annotation”. The Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington.
