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.
The commonplace-book throws light on Collier's other extant writings as well. A casual mention of what Sally calls the Turba proves definitively that at least one neologism in The Cry stemmed not from her but...
Dedications
Emily Frederick Clark
EFC
published by subscription a volume of Poems: Consisting Principally of Ballads, dedicated to Lady Lonsdale
(eldest grand-daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
).
Clark, Emily Frederick. Poems: Consisting Principally of Ballads. F. C. and J. Rivington.
prelims
Textual Production
Elizabeth Carter
EC
had promised Catherine Talbot
that she would undertake the project of making a scholarly translation of the Enchiridion by Epictetus
.
This work of ancient Greek stoic philosophy was something of a favourite with...
Family and Intimate relationships
Margaret Calderwood
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Burke
A quotation from Shakespeare
's The Tempest intruces an opening scene of storm and shipwreck on a lonely western coast. The only survivor, a six-month-old baby girl in a cradle, is rescued with a gold...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Beverley
The title-page further develops the ship image of the title into a full-blown allegory, a kind of commercialised version of the voyages to an island of love depicted by Madeleine de Scudéry
, Aphra Behn
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay
, she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Aphra Behn
Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Wortley Montagu)
wrote an imitation of A Voyage to the Island of Love at the age of about fourteen.
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Battier
HB
(if it is she) presents herself as a brand-new author: a Bardling! - bursting from her Shell!
Battier, Henrietta. The Mousiad. P. Byrne.
prelims
Her satire on the sexuality of a male ecclesiastic suggests works of several generations earlier by...
Textual Production
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Some of Barbauld's acutest social comment was linked with her pedagogy. Fashion, a Vision, probably written about 1792 for her first private paying pupil, and picking up some ideas from Wollstonecraft
's Vindication,...
An epilogue by Thomas Moore
sounds flippantly critical of Bluestockings (not the historical group of this name, but in the more general sense of intellectual women). A speaker appears wondering much what little knavish sprite...
