Abstract
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu avoided being known as an author in her own times, yet contemporaries were aware of her as a poet and letter-writer, and by the end of her life she was viewed as a celebrity. This chapter explores the complexities of celebrity and intimacy in her life and works through the public interiority of letter-writing and letter-reading; cross-currents of gender and class, and a biographical arrhythmia of visible circulation, travel and seclusion. In her letters she reproduced and disengaged from the performativity of public life, creating shared intimacies, articulating the power of stares as both subject and object in locations of courts, villages and closets, and making locality a means of reconciling public and private into public intimacy.
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Notes
- 1.
Donna Landry, “Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the Literature of Social Comment,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–1740, ed. Steven N. Zwicker and Donna Landry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 307–29, 317.
- 2.
Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” Biography 34, no. 1 (2011): 180–87; I adapt from 180.
- 3.
Joseph Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), 15–30 (16–17).
- 4.
See Richard Scholar, “The je-ne-sais-quoi: The Word and Its Pre-history, 1580–1680” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2003), 4 no. 2: 213.
- 5.
Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 40–59.
- 6.
Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 625–27.
- 7.
Isobel Grundy, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” ODNB.
- 8.
The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). All subsequent references are to this edition.
- 9.
According to Wikipedia, in 2011 Gottolengo had a population of 5368, a modest increase for the time span.
- 10.
Pope reworking Swift reworking Horace in Fable XXXV, “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse,” Fables of Aesop and Others (London, 1724), 67.
- 11.
Horticulture also provided metaphors for self-cultivation: see for example III: 25 to Lady Bute, 6 March 1753: “Vices and passions (which I am afraid are the natural product of the soil) demand perpetual weeding.”
- 12.
Roach, “Public Intimacy,” 16.
- 13.
Ibid., 16.
- 14.
Meredith Martin, “Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (2008): 357–84, 358. See also Martin’s Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine De Medici to Marie Antoinette (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2011). My thanks to Emma Newport for these references.
- 15.
See Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 79–113. For another description involving shining figures, see Anna Seward’s description of the dairy of the ladies of Llangollen: “Nor is the dairy-house, for one cow, the least curiously elegant object of this magic domain. A short steep declivity, shadowed over with tall shrubs, conducts us to the cool and clean repository. The white and shining utensils that contain the milk, and cream, and butter, are pure ‘as snows thrice bolted in the northern blast.’ In the midst, a little machine, answering the purpose of a churn, enables the ladies to manufacture half a pound of butter for their own breakfast …”, Anna Seward to the Revd Henry White of Lichfield, 7 September 1795, in E. V. Lucas, A Swan and Her Friends (London: Methuen, 1907), 269–70.
- 16.
Not in Halsband’s edition but present in The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1803, 5 vols., IV: 245; text from Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters (London: Everyman, 1992) given as 27 November 1753, 434.
- 17.
According to Halsband in III: 216 n. 2.
- 18.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon, Dorset, the Duke of Devonshire, &c, 2 vols. (London, 1721), II: 58.
- 19.
Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, Poems on Several Occasions. By the Earls of Roscommon, and Dorset, &c (London: Edmund Curll, 1714).
- 20.
The Works of Horace Translated into English Prose, As Near the Original as the Different Idioms of Latin and English Will Allow, 4th ed. 2 vols. (Satires, Book I) I: 15.
- 21.
Robert van Krieken, Celebrity Society (London: Routledge, 2012).
- 22.
Chris Rojek, Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and Its Consequences (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 133.
- 23.
Chris Rojek, “Niccolo Machiavelli, Cultural Intermediaries and the Category of Achieved Celebrity,” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 4 (2004): 455–68 (458).
- 24.
Ibid., 461.
- 25.
Grundy, Comet, 616.
- 26.
Ibid., quoting John Erskine Mar, aged 20.
- 27.
See Devoney Looser, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
- 28.
Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, eds., Correspondence of Thomas Gray, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), III: 727.
- 29.
Grundy, Comet, 612.
- 30.
Philip Thicknesse, A Narrative of What Passed Between General Sir Harry Erksine, and Philip Thicknesse, Esq., … (London, 1766), 8. See also Grundy, Comet, 622–23.
- 31.
Grundy, Comet, 622.
Works Cited
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———. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
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Looser, Devoney. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Lucas, E. V. A Swan and Her Friends. London: Methuen, 1907.
Martin, Meredith. “Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (2008): 357–84.
———. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine De Medici to Marie Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2011.
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———. Letters. London: Everyman, 1992.
Pope, Alexander. “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse.” Fables of Aesop and Others. London, 1724.
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Rojek, Chris. “Niccolo Machiavelli, Cultural Intermediaries and the Category of Achieved Celebrity.” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 4 (2004): 455–68.
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Scholar, Richard. “The je-ne-sais-quoi: The Word and Its Pre-history, 1580–1680.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2003.
Thicknesse, Philip. A Narrative of What Passed Between General Sir Harry Erksine, and Philip Thicknesse, Esq., … London: J. Williams and R. Davis, 1766.
van Krieken, Robert. Celebrity Society. London: Routledge, 2012.
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. The Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon, Dorset, the Duke of Devonshire, &c., 2 vols. London, 1721.
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Brant, C. (2018). “I Make a Very Shining Figure”: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Intimate Publicity of Authorship. In: Jones, E., Joule, V. (eds) Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_10
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