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.
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
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
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...
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...
Textual Production
Judith Cowper Madan
The Family Miscellany, collected and transcribed by JCM
's brother Ashley Cowper
, dated 1747 and now British Library
MS Add. 28,101, includes plenty of poems by Ashley himself and plenty more ascribed to...
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,...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Justice
With sublime disregard for relevance, her elaborate title-page further promises a translation from Spanish, collected by the author of the Russian parts of the book, of an account of relics at Oviedo. Despite this...
Textual Production
Sarah Josepha Hale
SJH
edited both The Letters of Madame de Sévigné
, to Her Daughter and Friends and The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
Okker, Patricia. Our Sister Editors. University of Georgia Press, p. 264 pp.
231n31
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...
Textual Features
Eliza Haywood
Spedding rejects the dubious works: Vanelia; or, The Amours of the Great (a musical entertainment staged and printed in 1732) which mocks the Prince of Wales
whom EH
had flattered; and Mr. Taste. The Poetical...
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...
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
L. E. L.
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
Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
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...
Timeline
April 1879: James Murray—editor since 1 March of what...
Writing climate item
April 1879
James Murray
—editor since 1 March of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary—issued an Appeal for readers to supply illustrative quotations.
February 1906: Publisher J. M. Dent launched Everyman's...
