Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter PDF Author: Cynthia J. Lowenthal
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This is is the first critical study of one of the most important women writers of the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), who produced a body of erudite and entertaining correspondence that spanned more than fifty years. Lady Mary's letters illuminate the difficulties encountered by a sensitive, intelligent, and gifted woman writer living through an era of significant cultural change. These letters display the tensions inherent in the competing demands of public and private life, revealing Lady Mary's own discomfort about the problems of authorship and authority in an age that held publication to be an improper activity for respectable women. Through the discourse of supposedly “private” letters, Lady Mary was able to find an avenue for her talents that brought her “public” stature without violating the imperatives of her position as a woman and an aristocrat. Cynthia Lowenthal argues persuasively that Lady Mary's letters, themselves central to the establishment of the familiar letter as an important eighteenthcentury genre, were self-consciously constructed as literary artifacts and crafted as part of a larger female epistolary tradition. Moreover, Lowenthal contends, the works of Lady Mary are essential to the feminist recuperation of women's writing precisely because she provided an aristocratic critique—a voice often ignored—of the class and gender codes of her day.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter PDF Author: Cynthia J. Lowenthal
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is is the first critical study of one of the most important women writers of the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), who produced a body of erudite and entertaining correspondence that spanned more than fifty years. Lady Mary's letters illuminate the difficulties encountered by a sensitive, intelligent, and gifted woman writer living through an era of significant cultural change. These letters display the tensions inherent in the competing demands of public and private life, revealing Lady Mary's own discomfort about the problems of authorship and authority in an age that held publication to be an improper activity for respectable women. Through the discourse of supposedly “private” letters, Lady Mary was able to find an avenue for her talents that brought her “public” stature without violating the imperatives of her position as a woman and an aristocrat. Cynthia Lowenthal argues persuasively that Lady Mary's letters, themselves central to the establishment of the familiar letter as an important eighteenthcentury genre, were self-consciously constructed as literary artifacts and crafted as part of a larger female epistolary tradition. Moreover, Lowenthal contends, the works of Lady Mary are essential to the feminist recuperation of women's writing precisely because she provided an aristocratic critique—a voice often ignored—of the class and gender codes of her day.

Letters

Letters PDF Author: Mary Wortley Montagu
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0375712860
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
Immensely learned, self-educated in an era when formal schooling was denied to women, Mary Wortley Montagu was an admired poet, a consistently scandalous doyenne of eighteenth-century London society, and, in a period when letter-writing had been elevated to an art form, one of the greatest letter writers in the English language. Her epistles, meant for both public and private consumption, are the product of a mind distinguished by its adventurousness, its indifference to convention, and its eagerness not only to acquire knowledge but to convey it with unmitigated style and grace. (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Turkish Embassy Letters

Turkish Embassy Letters PDF Author: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Publisher: Ravenio Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (15 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was the wife of British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, mainly remembered for her letters from Turkey and their insightful remarks on life in the Muslim Orient.

Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M-y W-y M-e

Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M-y W-y M-e PDF Author: Mary Wortley Montagu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description


The Letters of Lady M. W. Montagu, During the Embassy to Constantinople 1716-18

The Letters of Lady M. W. Montagu, During the Embassy to Constantinople 1716-18 PDF Author: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description


The Best Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The Best Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu PDF Author: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Publisher: Chicago : A.C. McClurg
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description


The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu PDF Author: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description


The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: 1708-1720

The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: 1708-1720 PDF Author: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
The second volume of Lady Mary's Complete Letters includes the brilliant series to her sister Lady Mar, now for the first time edited entirely from the original manuscripts; the long, varied series to Lady Pomfret, from England as well as the Continent; the dutiful letters, many previously unprinted, to her husband about her travels and about her children; and the series to Lady Oxford, annotated from Lady Oxford's own manuscripts. Of the new correspondences, the most significant are her letters to Francesco Algarotti, which reveal new aspects of her personality and of her art as a letter-writer, and me ample series (in French) to Madame Chiara Bragadin Michiel, a Venetian lady, which displays her graciousness sparked with flashes of wit.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu PDF Author: Isobel Grundy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198112891
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Book Description
This book is the first to look at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's achievement as a vital figure in the women's literary tradition. Robert Halsband's book on her life, the sixth this century and published in 1956, was the first to apply scholarly techniques to establishing the facts. The inaccurateaccounts given before Halsband testify to Lady Mary's compelling interest as a woman who wrote, travelled, campaigned publicly for medical advance, gossiped, and was involved in high-profile literary quarrels. Knowledge of her life has made considerable gains since Halsband, as understanding of theissues involved in trying to move between the roles of proper lady and woman writer has increased enormously. This life fruitfully exploits the tension between literary history and feminist reading. Isobel Grundy highlights Montagu's adolescent longing for literary fame, her growing understandingof the implications of this for gender and class imperatives, the frustrations and concessions involved in her collaborations with male writers, the punitive responses of society, the gaps at every stage of her life between her ascertainable circumstances and her construction of herself in lettersand other writings. The book situates those writings in relation to her own theorizing and her very wide reading in women's texts as well as men's. Finally, it looks at a range of contemporary and near-contemporary responses.

The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu

The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu PDF Author: Jo Willett
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526779390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
The first biography to look at the early feminist and radical Mary Wortley Montagu, who successfully introduced Britain to the inoculation against the smallpox virus. 300 years ago, in April 1721, a smallpox epidemic was raging in England. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu knew that she could save her 3-year-old daughter using the process of inoculation. She had witnessed this at first hand in Turkey, while she was living there as the wife of the British ambassador. She also knew that by inoculating - making her daughter the first person protected in the West - she would face opposition from doctors, politicians and clerics. Her courageous action eventually led to the eradication of smallpox and the prevention of millions of deaths. But Mary was more than a scientific campaigner. She mixed with the greatest politicians, writers, artists and thinkers of her day. She was also an important early feminist, writing powerfully and provocatively about the position of women. She was best friends with the poet Alexander Pope. They collaborated on a series of poems, which made her into a household name, an ‘It Girl.' But their friendship turned sour and he used his pen to vilify her publicly. Aristocratic by birth, Mary chose to elope with Edward Wortley Montagu, whom she knew she did not love, so as to avoid being forced into marrying someone else. In middle age, her marriage stale, she fell for someone young enough to be her son - and, unknown to her, bisexual. She set off on a new life with him abroad. When this relationship failed, she stayed on in Europe, narrowly escaping the coercive control of an Italian con man. After twenty-two years abroad, she returned home to London to die. The son-in-law she had dismissed as a young man had meanwhile become Prime Minister.