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.
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.
Pope's relationships with women, particularly women who wrote, tended to be complicated and turbulent. They have been ably studied by scholar Valerie Rumbold
. Contrary to rumour, he apparently liked and respected Anne Finch
...
Friends, Associates
Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale
WMCN
's early and close relationship with her sister-in-law Mary, Countess of Traquair
, née Maxwell, suffered vicissitudes over the years through her poverty and her husband's shameless requests for money. In 1718 the Traquairs...
Friends, Associates
William Congreve
As a young man Congreve formed a friendship with the older and distinguished Dryden
. He later belonged to the Whig Kit-Cat Club
, and counted most of its members among his friends, while remaining...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Louisa Stuart
It gave LLS
some trouble as a child that her grandmother was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
: I am sure I heartily hated her name. Whatever I wanted to learn, everybody was up in arms...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Lord Hertford (whose titles after his mother's death included Baron de Percy) was then a well-known rake whose lifestyle included daily drinking bouts with cronies until late at night. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
depicted...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sarah Scott
Lady Barbara was a daughter of the rake and gambler George Montagu, Earl of Halifax
(and therefore a cousin of SS
's brother-in-law Edward Montagu and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's husband). On Halifax's...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Burnet
This marriage gave EB
a family of five stepchildren (bequeathed to her care by their own mother when she was close to death). They were three boys (all of whom went on to careers ranking...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ann Thicknesse
Philip Thicknesse was a somewhat shady character, one of the greatest self-publicists of the eighteenth century.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Philip Thicknesse
After travelling the world in various capacities he had eloped with an heiress in 1742...
MC
's brother, another James Steuart
, was educated at school and university and on the Grand Tour. He married Lady Frances Wemyss
in 1743, and two years later, because she was ill with smallpox...
Family and Intimate relationships
Judith Cowper Madan
Soon afterwards Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, appropriating her voice in Miss Cooper to —, makes the unmarried Judith Cowper express a tormented love for Lysander, who in this poem is uncaring and...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Irwin
Nearly a decade after his death Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
addressed to the widow an poetic argument against infidelity so jaunty as to suggest she did not think him a husband worth mourning.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Editors Halsband, Robert and Isobel Grundy, Oxford University Press.
257-8
Family and Intimate relationships
Susan Tweedsmuir
Through her mother ST
was descended from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
. She was happy to claim Lady Mary as an ancestress, but did not pay her particularly close attention: she was mistaken in 1952...
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...
