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.
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
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's Embassy Letters (composed 1716 -18, unpublished till 1763) this gains immensely by encompassing descriptions of Europe as well...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 Production
Lady Louisa Stuart
At seventy-nine, LLS
first became a deliberately published author, with her Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M.W. Montagu (also known as Introductory Anecdotes) for her grandmother
's Letters and Works.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “Preface”. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by W. Moy Thomas, Swan Sonnenschein, p. iii - viii.
iii
Rubenstein, Jill. “Women’s Biography as a Family Affair: Lady Louisa Stuart’s ’Biographical Anecdotes’ of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”. Prose Studies, Vol.
9
, No. 1, pp. 3-21.
17
Textual Production
Lucy Aikin
From 1803 she reviewed for her brother Arthur
's Annual Review, where one of her subjects was the travel letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
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:...
Textual Production
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The final, 6-volume edition of Robert Dodsley
's Collection of Poems by Several Hands appeared, including a poem by FSCH
which was falsely ascribed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, according to the latter.
Grundy, Isobel. “The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Reaction to the Printing of Her Poems”. The Book Collector, Vol.
1
, pp. 19-37.
35-6
Textual Production
Mary Astell
Only four days after she and Montagu had both written poems together on the death of a young bride
, MA
wrote the bulk of her verse and prose preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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...
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.
Textual Production
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The circumstances of misattribution are mysterious, but literary historian Michael F. Suarez
guesses that Dodsley and William Shenstone
deliberately printed this poem as Montagu
's in order to preserve the reputation of the real author...
Textual Production
Anita Desai
At Cambridge in 1991, AD
composed an introduction for an edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's Turkish Embassy Letters, which appeared from Pickering and Chatto
in 1993 and from Virago Press
in 1994.
Textual Production
Anne Francis
AF
explains in her preliminary discourse (dated 24 July 1781) that she began by making a prose translation. Then she endeavour[ed] to soften, with the flow of numbers, the rugged, inharmonious style of literal translation...
Textual Production
Mary Astell
MA
was an inveterate annotator of books; she had some volumes bound with blank pages added for her notes. Among occasional writings produced by her friendship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
were angry marginalia in...
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...
Textual Production
Mary Astell
Books with Astell's annotations survive among those from William Law
's charitable library in Northamptonshire Record Office
and among the survivors of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's collection in private, family hands. The Northamptonshire books...