This is is the first critical study of one of the most important women writers of the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), who pro

With the growth of efficient postal service in England and the stimulus of a growing tradition of informal prose among eighteenth-century men of leisure, the in

Whilst drawing to some extent on recent theoretical studies, this book restores Clarissa to its largely neglected eighteenth-century context.

Immensely learned, self-educated in an era when formal schooling was denied to women, Mary Wortley Montagu was an admired poet, a consistently scandalous doyenn