Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

LadyMary Wortley Montagu (16891762) is an intriguing character. She was an aristocrat and a well-travelled woman of letters, a self-educated scholar concerned with women's education, a conservative political journalist and a medical pioneer who helped spearhead the smallpox inoculation campaign in Britain. This new edition of the 1977 collection of her writings, revised and with an excellent new preface by Isobel Grundy, is particularly topical in light of Grundy's forthcoming biography and the widespread growth of interest in the writing of 18th-century women in general. Many texts have been unavailable until recently and nonfiction, with few exceptions, has been even less accessible, so this edition of Montagu's poetry, essays and a play is most welcome. Enamoured as we currently are with finding the subversive or r a d h voices from the past, to immerse ourselves in the writing ofsomeone as comfortable with her privilege as Montagu may initially seem less than congenial. These pieces are politically conservative and emphatically situated within clearly defined 18th-century generic conventions. Given this double-axis of containment, Montagu's critical stance as a woman-a stance that helped her, as Grundy indicates, to transform thehnctions ofthevarious literary forms she practisedstands out in stark relief. Montagu's play, Simplicity, is emblematic of the difficulties in reading her now without grappling with our own received ideas about originality in art. Simplicity is a loose translation of Marivaux's Lc Jcu a% lirmour ct du hasard, about a quarter of which, according to the editors, is original. Many of her poems also use borrowed or conventional themes and must be read in the context of the dassical education of her dass; the interest for the critic lies in the uses to which these inherited literary discourses are put. Of her poems, Grundy remarks that they set out to explore multiple viewpoints rather than define a normative one; but complaint against men is a (ritmoti$Her writings could be termed a series ofexplorations that

Art · Comedy · Epistemology · Literature · Poetry · Simplicity · Irish and British Studies · Literature Analysis and Criticism · Philosophy · 18th century · English literature · English literature (collections)

• The Economics of Ethical Conversation

  Ros Ballaster•Eighteenth-Century Life•2011

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• Seeing and the Difference It Makes

  WENDY S WEISE•Women s Studies•2006

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• Cato in Tennessee

  Open Access•Misty G Anderson, Shinnerrie Jackson et al.•TDR/The Drama Review•2025

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• Recent scholarship on eighteenth‐century women's poetry

  Open Access•Kathleen Keown•Literature Compass•2021

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