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.
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 Production
Lady Louisa Stuart
At seventy-nine, LLS
first became a deliberately published author, with her Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M.W. Montagu (also known as Introductory Anecdotes) for her grandmother
's Letters and Works.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “Preface”. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by W. Moy Thomas, Swan Sonnenschein, p. iii - viii.
iii
Rubenstein, Jill. “Women’s Biography as a Family Affair: Lady Louisa Stuart’s ’Biographical Anecdotes’ of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”. Prose Studies, Vol.
9
, No. 1, pp. 3-21.
17
Textual Production
Lucy Aikin
From 1803 she reviewed for her brother Arthur
's Annual Review, where one of her subjects was the travel letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
Textual Production
Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Textual Production
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The final, 6-volume edition of Robert Dodsley
's Collection of Poems by Several Hands appeared, including a poem by FSCH
which was falsely ascribed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, according to the latter.
Grundy, Isobel. “The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Reaction to the Printing of Her Poems”. The Book Collector, Vol.
1
, pp. 19-37.
35-6
Textual Features
Charlotte Forman
With probably pleasurable irony and in the tradition of Mary Astell
and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, this essay presents its author as a great admirer of the literary productions of the fair sex, which...
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...
Textual Features
Janet Little
She consistently takes a challenging stance in face of authority. Ironically (in view of Johnson's championing of women writers and Burns's snobbish attitude about herself) she uses Samuel Johnson
as a symbol of the tyrant-critic...
Textual Features
Anna Mary Howitt
Opening in Nottingham in December 1830, this book relates the stories of two aspiring artists whose lives become entwined in various ways. Leonard Mordant is the offspring of an ill-assorted marriage between a talented but...
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun.
1: 79-80
She gives one epistle a kind of doggerel title: Advice to a Rev'rend Cleric, Near his grand climacteric, That...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Though Theresa writes most of the letters in the book, the opening one, as often in women's epistolary novels at this date, is an exchange between men. Tomlins, however, does not attempt to capture a...
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...
