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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

CHRONOLOGY

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

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LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (born Pierrepont) wrote poems, essays, and translations of some note in her own day, of none in ours. She also wrote letters which can never die, letters less charming, indeed, than Madame de Sévigné’s because the writer was less charming, but full of light for the first half of the eighteenth century and also for Lady Mary herself. I do not refer so much to the celebrated letters from Constantinople, because those were probably arranged and edited for literary purposes, but to the general correspondence, which throbs and vibrates and sparkles like a live thing.

The writer knew quite well what she was doing. Speaking of Madame de Sévigné’s productions she says: “Mine will be full as entertaining forty years hence.” And, perhaps with a touch of jealousy not wholly uncharacteristic, she depreciates her French predecessor, “who only gives us, in a lively manner and fashionable phrases, mean sentiments, vulgar prejudices, and endless repetitions. Sometimes the tittle-tattle of a fine lady, sometimes the tittle-tattle of an old nurse, always tittle-tattle.” Those who find the divine tittle-tattle of “Notre Dame des Rochers” not only among the liveliest, but among the most human and even the wisest, things in literature, will not be the less ready to appreciate Lady Mary, who has her own tittle-tattle as well as her own wisdom and liveliness. How easy she is, how ready, and how graceful. Her letters, she says, are “written with rapidity and sent without reading over.” This may be true and may not. At any rate, they have, at their best, the freshness of first thoughts, the careless brilliancy of a high-bred, keen-witted woman, talking in her own parlor, indifferent to effect, yet naturally elegant, in her speech, as in her dress and motion.