A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) made herself a writer. Although she was long well-known as a `character', letter writer, and traveller, this revised paperback edition of her 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, and the medical breakthrough of smallpox innoculation. Her comedy, Simplicity, has been recently revived in productions around the UK. 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.