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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
To the uninitiated the name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu may arouse amusement or disbelief. Why so long and mouth-filling a name? Before her marriage she was Lady Mary Pierrepont; she owed her title to her father, who was a peer with the successive ranks of Earl, Marquess, and Duke. Her husband was Edward Wortley Montagu, Esquire; and while she remained Lady, he remained untitled. In her own day there were other peers' daughters named Lady Mary, but her intellectual brilliance and her connection with Alexander Pope and his circle gave her the dubious honor of being recognized in print as the Lady Mary.
1 A slightly revised version of a paper read at the Conference on 18th Century Letter-Writers held at Indiana University on 10–11 April 1964.
All the quotations from Lady Mary's letters are taken from the manuscripts, some of them previously unpublished, and are normalized. My forthcoming edition of her complete letters (Clarendon Press) will print the full texts in literal transcription.
