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.
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Textual Production
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The circumstances of misattribution are mysterious, but literary historian Michael F. Suarez
guesses that Dodsley and William Shenstone
deliberately printed this poem as Montagu
's in order to preserve the reputation of the real author...
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
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sophia Hume
She cites both her experience with a child, and the way she owed the benefit of her own conversion to the affliction of having smallpox. But the ultimate argument against inoculation, she says, is that...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Melesina Trench
About the first twenty pages are occupied by MT
's early reminiscences, probably written not long after her first husband's death: she frankly recorded her emotional disturbance over that event.
Trench, Melesina. The Remains of the Late Mrs. Richard Trench. Editor Trench, Richard Chenevix, Parker and Bourn.
18
Later pages mix letters...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Flora Tristan
One chapter, entitled English Women, criticizes British social systems, and details the consequences women suffer because of the indissolubility of marriage.
Tristan, Flora. Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1840. Translators Palmer, Dennis and Giselle Pincetl, Charles River Books.
AS
's correspondence often deals with literary matters as well as with social matters and personalities. She writes with astonishing freedom to Hester Piozzi
about the latter's travel book Observations and Reflections: not only...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
2
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
For this anthology EF
gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare
and Milton
, as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton
and Helen Maria Williams
...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay
, she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
