Essays and Poems and "Simplicity", a Comedy

Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762) made herself a writer. Lady Mary has long been well-known as a 'character' a letter writer, and a traveller, this revised paperback edition of her non-epistolary writings appears at a time when interest in herliterary 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'. Heressays (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, the medical breakthrough of smallpox innoculation. Her comedy, Simplicity, has beenrecently revived in productions around the U.K. 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.