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.
This novel provides a satirical portrait of high society in early eighteenth-century England. It centres on Henrietta, Countess of Marchmont, an upper-class orphan enduring a loveless marriage and imperilled by her first visit to...
Textual Features
Mathilde Blind
MB
's other Byron introduction, to her selection of his letters and journals, positions the genre (with reference to human curiosity, and to the epistolary novel as well as to the letters of Sevigné
and...
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
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
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 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...
Textual Features
Dorothea Du Bois
After seven pages on grammar, she offers pattern letters: those in verse are in effect an anthology of epistolary poems by women, a patriotically generous selection of Irish writers (Mary Monck
, Mary Barber
Textual Features
Catherine Sinclair
In Lady Mary Pierrepoint the title character is a Protestant whose virago widowed mother-in-law (Lady Pierrepont) intends to disinherit her son Sir Cosmo (Mary's husband) and leave her lands to the Roman Catholic Church
...
Textual Features
Anna Seward
The series (completed in 1791) developed from AS
's strictures on John Weston
's contributions to a book entitled Records of the Woodmen of Arden. She compared Dryden
with Pope
to the advantage of...
Textual Features
Clara Reeve
Her Address to the Reader notes the recent increase in the number of women writers commanding critical respect, and observes that every woman publishing with success will inspire a couple of others to try. Most...
The sonnets are written in strict Milton
ic form. One of their favourite themes is love of nature and the countryside; one or two deal with Seward's love for Honora Sneyd
. In rendering Horace...
