Eleanor Bowes

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...

LMWM and Mary Astell wrote, on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, polemical poems on the death of the fourteen-year-old bride Eleanor Bowes (née Verney ), denouncing the institution of marriage.

Only four days after she and Montagu had both written poems together on the death of a young bride , MA wrote the bulk of her verse and prose preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

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...