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. Halsband, RobertEditor , Clarendon Press, 1967.
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. Halsband, RobertEditor , Clarendon Press, 1967.
3: 173, 183
Photo of a full-length painting of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson recording her time in Turkey. She stands outdoors, with famous buildings of Constantinople (Istanbul) visible beyond. She is dressed in gold: a caftan whose deep V-neck and open skirt reveal a lace shift and long harem drawers. She also wears a gold cap which she calls a talpock on her dark hair, a blue cloak edged with ermine, pearl drop earrings, and pointed slippers. The presence of the young Black boy behind her is start

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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 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 W. H. Auden
Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a...
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 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. Halsband, Robert and Isobel GrundyEditors , Oxford University Press, 1993.
257-8
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Jonathan Swift
Swift helped and befriended a number of women writers. He was a patron of Mary Barber , Constantia Grierson , an unidentified Mrs Sican , Mary Davys , and Laetitia Pilkington , a colleague of...
Friends, Associates Mary Astell
Elizabeth Hutcheson (an associate of nonjuring devotional writer William Law , as was Hastings) later became MA 's executor. Her friendship with Lady Chudleigh was conducted largely by letter, since Chudleigh lived in Devon. Astell...
Friends, Associates Grisell Murray
At almost every stage of GM 's life, her family had the habit of spending part of their time at their London house, where she evidently moved in literary as well as fashionable circles. She...
Friends, Associates Judith Cowper Madan
The poems that Judith Cowper wrote as an unmarried young woman suggest that she moved easily both in court and in literary circles. She probably met the poet Alexander Pope in Jervas 's studio. Pope...
Friends, Associates Alexander Pope
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...

Timeline

18 March 1748
Robert Dodsley first offered for sale his influential Collection of Poems by Several Hands.
1750
The progressive Pope Benedict XIV appointed a woman, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-99), as professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna .
1752
A severe epidemic of smallpox resulted in 3,500 deaths in London, more than seventeen per cent of all recorded deaths this year.
Shuttleton, David. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660—1820. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
106
1754
The Royal College of Physicians made public their official approval of inoculation for smallpox, as introduced to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu thirty-three years before.
By 22 May 1755
George Colman and Bonnell Thornton edited and published an anthology entitled Poems by Eminent Ladies.
15 January 1759
The British Museum (including what had formerly been known as the King's Library ), established six years earlier, was first opened to the public.
13 September 1759
A British party under James Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham at Quebec and beat the French in battle there.
12 February 1767-5 June 1769
Hugh Kelly issued his periodicalThe Babler, opening with the usual bow towards the Tatler and Spectator.
April 1768
The first volume of The New Foundling Hospital for Wit was published: an influential poetry anthology linked to the political opposition.
January 1781-December 1782
The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties of British Poetry appeared, published by James Harrison in four half-yearly numbers; it is arguable whether or not it kept the first number's promise of generous selections of work...
14 May 1796
After some years of investigating the protection given by cowpox against smallpox, Edward Jenner carried out his first, experimental cowpox injection of a healthy young boy. His subject showed no reaction when later inoculated with...
July 1796
The explorer Mungo Park , abandoned and anxious on the banks of the Niger River in what is now Mali, was taken in, housed and fed by African village women, who composed and sang...
May 1829
A Ladies' Bazaar to benefit Spanish refugees, held at the Hanover Square Rooms in London, patron the Duke of Wellington , raised the remarkable sum of £2,000.
1861
A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...
1879
Walter Bagehot 's Literary Studies, a two-volume collection of his literary essays, was published posthumously with a memoir by Richard Holt Hutton .