This little spirit of rivalship o'ercome.
I read with transport, and with joy I greet
A genius so sublime, and so complete,
And gladly lay my laurels at her feet."
Lady Mary on her part wrote an "Ode to Friendship", addressed to Mrs. Mary Astell. She also sympathised with the latter's scheme for the establishment of a convent. She thought that a safe retreat might be preferable to a show of public life. Her friend Lady Stafford once said of her that her true vocation was a monastery, and we have Lady Mary's own evidence where, approving of a project of an English monastery in "Sir Charles Grandison", she confesses that it was one of the favourite schemes of her early youth to get herself elected lady-abbess. This intellectual propensity—for what appealed to her most in the scheme was the indefinite leisure to be devoted to studies—pervades all her writings, and throws further light upon her disinclination to the matrimonial state and her recluse habits.
Lady Mary's social career came to a sudden close when in 1739 her declining health made it advisable for her to leave England for the sunny skies of northern Italy, where she remained till the year before her death. To this period belong her chief contributions to the Woman Question, contained in her correspondence with her daughter the Countess of Bute, and giving her views of the position of women, elicited by certain remarks on the education of her little granddaughter. The circumstances under which this correspondence was carried on bear a close resemblance to Mme de Sévigné's when writing to her daughter Mme de Grignan her excellent advice regarding the education of little Pauline de Simiane. From what has already been said it may be readily concluded that the principal of Lady Mary's grievances against the existing system was not that women were not allowed their share of political and social power,—for she felt no difficulty in entrusting the male sex with those duties which would have kept her from her favourite pursuit—but rather that they should be purposely and systematically debarred from studies and kept in ignorance. But she was wise in avoiding all generalisation and recommending the consideration of each individual case by itself and for its own sake, since what might suit one woman might prove a source of misery to another.
When her own daughter had been young, the fact that she was likely to attract the highest offers had made it necessary that she should learn to live in the world, for which very few intellectual qualifications were then needed. But her granddaughter's chances of a brilliant match were considerably less, and so she ought to be taught how to be perfectly easy out of the world, in that retirement which Lady Mary herself preferred to the social state. Thus, a new element is added to the arguments in favour of liberal instruction, which is to be a pleasure rather than a task, with no more important background than the providing of a substitute for social intercourse to those whose circumstances prevent them from occupying a place in social circles. And it is clearly the mother's task to talk over with her daughter what the latter may have read, that she may not "mistake pert folly for wit and humour, or rhyme for poetry, which are the common errors of young people, and have a train of ill consequences."
The moral education which she recommends for her granddaughter is rather slight, and based chiefly on the negative principle—which we have also found in Fénelon and other French moralists—of keeping the mind occupied as a means of preventing idleness, which is the mother of mischief. Learning,—which modesty would have them carefully conceal, for ignorance is bold, and true knowledge reserved—will tend to make women less deceitful instead of more so, and as the same lessons will form the same characters, there is no reason to "place women in an inferior rank to men."
Lady Mary thus declared her belief in the equality of the sexes, but she has not enough of the social leaven in her to make any definite claim for her sex. She is rather an isolated specimen of womanhood, serving as a proof of the capacities of some exceptional women, than a fighter for female rights. Her intellectual and literary powers were of a critical and satirical rather than a creative nature. That she was among the very first women to possess the critical faculty in an eminent degree, appears from the clever criticism of contemporary fiction with which her correspondence abounds, and which makes her the forerunner of her husband's relative of Bluestocking fame. She was sufficiently independent in her judgment to disagree with the general opinion of Richardson's novels, without being able to remain uninfluenced by his pathos. "I heartily despise him, and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner." This merely because of the parallel some of the heroine's circumstances afforded to those of her own youth, for neither Miss Howe nor even Clarissa herself found favour in her eyes. She was one of the very few readers of Richardson who saw the faultiness of the moral of both Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, considering them "to be two books that will do more general mischief than the works of Lord Rochester." Her sound common sense made her heartily despise any excess of that sensibility which Richardson's works fostered. Her verdict of Sir Charles Grandison was even more crushing. "His conduct (towards Clementina) puts me in mind of some ladies I have known who could never find out a man to be in love with them, let him do or say what he would, till he made a direct attempt, and then they were so surprised, I warrant you! nor do I approve Sir Charles's offered compromise (as he calls it). There must be a great indifference to religion on both sides, to make so strict a union as marriage tolerable between people of such distinct persuasions. He seems to think women have no souls, by agreeing so easily that his daughters should be educated in bigotry and idolatry."
In her love of learning, and more still in her keen literary judgment Lady Mary foreshadowed the coming of the Bluestockings, whom her total lack of sociability would have forever prevented her from joining.