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.
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...
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
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...
Residence
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
During the final months before separating from her husband, Rosina Lytton lived at Berrymead Priory at Acton west of London (the house from which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
had made an early, unsuccessful attempt to...
Reception
Judith Cowper Madan
Pope
complimented Judith Cowper (later Madan)
in To Erinna on her (still unpublished) lines to him. He praised her for not seeking, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, to emulate the sun's brightness, but for...
Reception
Marie-Catherine de Villedieu
This was one of three publications by MCV
which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
had in her library (besides a sequel to another Villedieu work).
“List of Lady Mary Wortley’s books packed up to be sent abroad”. Wharncliffe Muniments, Sheffield, p. M / 135 / 3.
Reception
Anne Irwin
AI
's Epistle to Pope was anthologized in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, in the 1770s. Mary Robinson
, praising it in 1799, thought it was written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
Reception
Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
Reception
Caroline Norton
She treated her own request as if it were just any appeal for patronage: I do not know if there be any precedent for appointing a female poet laureate even in a Queen's reign...
Publishing
Alexander Pope
He issued the final books of The Iliad of Homer in May 1720. The Odyssey of Homer (on which he had considerable help from collaborators) appeared in April 1725 and June 1726.
Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Editor Butt, John, Methuen; Yale University Press.
2: xiii-xiv
It...
Publishing
Judith Cowper Madan
Pattison died of smallpox in July this year, aged about twenty-one.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
MO
published in Blackwoods her Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II, whose subjects include Queen Caroline
(his wife) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
341
Publishing
Elizabeth Robins
ER
published her first short story, A Lucky Sixpence, anonymously in the New Review in January 1894. Other stories and articles followed, notably A Modern Woman Born 1689, a review-essay on the letters...
