Essays and Poems and "Simplicity", a Comedy

by Montagu, Mary Wortley; Halsband, Robert; Grundy, Isobel

• ISBN13: 9780198122883
• ISBN10: 0198122888
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-10-21
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

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 herliterary 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'. Heressays (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 beenrecently 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.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Reprint
Introduction	p. 3
Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu	p. 6
Supplement to the Anecdotes	p. 55
[critique of Cato] Wrote at the Desire of Mr. Wortley, Suppress'd at the Desire of Mr. Adison	p. 62
Essay in the Spectator	p. 69
[a Letter from the Other World to a Lady from Her Former Husband]	p. 75
[autobiographical Romance: Fragment]	p. 77
[account of the Court of George I]	p. 82
A Plain Account of the Innoculating of the Small Pox by a Turkey Merchant	p. 95
A Letter to A[lexander] P[ope] in Answer to the Preface of His Letters	p. 98
An Expedient to Put a Stop to the Spreading Vice of Corruption	p. 100
The Nonsense of Common-Sense I737-8	p. 105
Caesar	p. 150
Carabosse	p. 153
[letter to Anna Maria Van Schurman]	p. 165
Introduction	p. 171
Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace	p. 265
The Reasons That Induced Dr S[wift] to Write a Poem Call'd the Lady's Dressing Room	p. 273
Dramatis Personæ	p. 317
Act 2	p. 336
Act 3	p. 360
	p. 381
	p. 383
General Index	p. 395
Index of First Lines	p. 410
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