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 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
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Louisa Stuart
Despite family discouragement of her literary interests, with reference to the awful example of her grandmother (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
), LLS
, at the age of nine, had plans for writing full-length works...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Pardoe
JP
compares her experience of Belgrade (then a part of the Ottoman Empire, now the capital of Serbia) to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
's observations from over a century before. While she echoes Montagu in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emma Parker
EP
says she has studied to avoid a dictatorial tone . . . considering herself rather as one of those [women] she is addressing.
Parker, Emma. Important Trifles. T. Egerton.
prelims
Feminist Companion Archive.
She writes as a strong-minded Christian, and makes use of...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edith Templeton
The epigraph alerts the reader to expect an unusually disillusioned example of the voyage-to-the-island-of-love genre (previously written by Aphra Behn
and the future Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
). This novel begins, as did the two...
Intertextuality and Influence
Madeleine de Scudéry
As a consequence of this work's success, MS
became popularly known as Sappho or the modern Sappho, particularly in connection with her salon.
McDougall, Dorothy. Madeleine de Scudéry. Benjamin Blom.
Aphra Behn
took from the Carte de tendre some of the topographical imagery of her verse-and-prose romance A Voyage to the Island of Love (which in turn was the model behind The Adventurer, written...
Intertextuality and Influence
Marie de Sévigné
These letters have been immensely popular since their first publication, in France, England, and elsewhere. Numerous male critics have written of their almost personal love for MS
. One of those impervious to her charm...
Intertextuality and Influence
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
The feelings of this Emma are all in extremes. During her early passion she quotes Frances Greville
on the pains of sensibility.
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,. Emma. T. Hookham.
1: 66
She and her father kneel alternately to each other when she...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
This work of pedagogy takes the form of an epistolary novel: a picture of contemporary culture, since its range of reference to other texts is wide. It assumes, like Rousseau
's Nouvelle Héloïse, the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Atkins
This novel keeps its good and bad characters carefully distinct. Olive ministers to the fallen Mary; Matthew, when he gets an opportunity, strangles his wife. In due course follows a court scene, and he is...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
The heroine of this novel is unhappy in her marriage (two small children) to an ebullient and overbearing young actor. She is stuck with his theatre company in its seven-month season in Hereford (the birthplace...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phebe Gibbes
In addition to its over-riding themes of colonialism and the marriage market, this novel, set in early British Calcutta (and incorporating a good deal of travel book material), is much concerned with literature and with...
