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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Comet of the Enlightenment
Isobel Grundy
703 pages
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numerous halftones, 2 maps
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234x156mm
978-0-19-818765-3
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Paperback
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22 March 2001
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This item is printed to order and supplied on a firm sale basis. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is one of the most important women writers between Aphra Behn and Jane Austen, and one of the period's most provocative and entertaining writers of either sex
- Lady Mary has a compelling interest as a woman who wrote, travelled, campaigned publicly for medical advance, gossiped, and was involved in high-profile literary quarrels. Montagu is a key figure in the emerging women's literary tradition
- This book highlights Montagu's adolescent longing for literary fame, her conflicted negotiations with manuscript culture and the new world of print, and the punitive responses of her society to her challenging public oeuvre
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 inaccurate accounts 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 the issues 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 understanding of 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 letters and 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.
Readership: Scholars, students (undergraduate and postgraduate), and general readers of eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture; women's studies, travel literature, and those with an interest in biography.
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Isobel Grundy, Henry Marshall Tory Professor, University of Alberta, Canada
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"This is an accomplished and scholarly biography of a compelling individual. It is also a literary life that throws much light on the Augustan world of letters. Furthermore, this study carries conviction in part because Isobel Grundy does not exaggerate the importance of her subject ... fine study ... a wealth of information and reflection, and a careful piecing-together of a fascinating life." - Jeremy Black, THES 25/2/00
Review(s) from previous edition
"This is an accomplished and scholarly biography of a compelling individual. It is also a literary life that throws much light on the Augustan world of letters. Furthermore, this study carries conviction in part because Isobel Grundy does not exaggerate the importance of her subject ... fine study ... a wealth of information and reflection, and a careful piecing-together of a fascinating life. - Jeremy Black, THES 25/2/00
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