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 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, the medical breakthrough of smallpox innoculation. Her comedy, Simplicity, has been recently 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.