Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762) made herself a writer. Lady Mary has long been well-known as a `character' a letter writer, and a traveller, this revised paperback edition of her non-epistolary writings appears at a time when interest in her literary work is now widespread and serious. Lady Mary saw herself as `haunted by the Daemon of Poesie'. She wrote literary criticism of Addison and the only essay by a woman published in the Spectator, together with spirited verse replies to Pope and Swift and passionate love-poems which dispute the period's label `Age of Reason'. Her essays (some published anonymously in newspapers) and poems (many of which appeared with her secret connivance) deal with issues still alive and accessible today: love, marriage, prejudice against women writers, the medical breakthrough of smallpox innoculation. Her comedy, Simplicity, has been recently revived in productions around the U.K. Hard-hitting, eloquent and often funny, the work of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu will be essential reading for the growing number of scholars, students and general readers of women's writing.
| ISBN: | 9780198122883 |
| Publication date: | 19th August 1993 |
| Author: | Mary Wortley Montagu |
| Publisher: | Clarendon Press an imprint of Oxford University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 442 pages |
| Series: | Clarendon Paperbacks |
| Genres: |
Literary essays Gender studies: women and girls |