Before she went to Constantinople and wrote the letters for which perhaps she is best known today, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu spent a year and a half in London. While her husband worked at his government job, eventually winning the post of Ambassador to the court of Turkey, Lady Mary shone in court society, continued her old friendship with Congreve and other literary men, and made the acquaintance of still others, including John Gay. She also continued writing. She had read voraciously and had written both prose and verse from the age of twelve. Some of her early writing is pastoral: in her first manuscript album she called herself "Strephon"; she wrote poems praising the country, and she imitated Virgil's tenth eclogue. In London, the pastoral was to reappear in her poetry in a different form.

John Gay, today best known as the author of The Beggar's Opera and the Fables, is credited with having written the first English "town eclogue," "Araminta" (1713). The genre is a curious one, part pastoral, part burlesque, sometimes imitating a classical model, sometimes not. It is clearly enough defined to be recognizable, yet loose enough to allow a variety of attitudes and forms. Adina Forsgren, in her two-volume study of Gay, describes the genre and its mixed nature in detail. Gay published five such poems, following "Araminta" with "The Toilette" and three more in his collected poems of 1720. Lady Mary wrote six, published for the first time as a group in 1747, but composed during her stay in London in 1715-1716 when she first met Gay. One of her eclogues is also called "The Toilette"; it is the "Friday" poem in the group of six that is arranged in a "week" like Gay's Shepherd's Week (1714). Clearly there are connections, although, with one exception, the relationships among the poems by the two poets are general rather than particular.

The exception is "The Toilette," in which the relationship is direct, even intimate—bewilderingly so. "The Toilette" was first published in 1716 by the unspeakable Edmund Curll, in (of course) an unauthorized edition. He suggested that Lady Mary might have written the poem, or Pope, or Gay. A much revised text, authorized, appeared in Gay's Poems on Several Occasions in 1720. But a manuscript album of Lady Mary's includes not only Curll's version of the poem but also a statement that she wrote every line of it herself. Pope thought it was "almost wholly Gay's"; Walpole republished it in 1747 as Lady Mary's, whose eclogues he preferred to Gay's. Robert Halsband surveys and analyzes the whole problem and concludes that Lady Mary could not seriously claim it as hers, but Isobel Grundy, in the Halsband/Grundy edition of Lady Mary's work, not only includes the poem in the earliest version but also says that Gay's version of 1720 "really amounts to a different poem." It could be the product of some sort of collaboration, with Gay and Lady Mary working together on the first version and Gay adapting and lengthening it for his 1720 version. We can never really know. And even if one could call up their ghosts and ask just who wrote what, they might not be able to answer. When two minds, working closely together, produce a poem or a novel or other literary work, ideas and words and phrases are somehow generated by the partnership in a manner that mysteriously defies individual attribution. Perhaps that is the explanation.

But no matter who wrote what, Gay clearly laid claim to the 1720 version, consisting of 106 lines, while Lady Mary laid claim to the 1716/1747 version, consisting of 78 lines. If she did not write all of it, she at least preferred it enough to call it her own. These claims represent an inextricable tangle of creative and critical activities: the generating of words and phrases and the revisions, omissions, and additions of words and phrases. The result of all this, as Grundy says, is indeed two quite different poems, which I shall call for convenience Lady Mary's poem and Gay's poem. What matters, at least for my purposes here, is not the technical question of attribution, but which poet laid claim to which version—that is, which poet took responsibility for which ideas and point of view. For this comparison I shall use Lady Mary's text as printed in Grundy and Halsband, and Gay's text as printed in Dearing and Beckwith, without considering the minutiae of variations from one edition to another of either poem. Nor shall I look at every verbal variant between the two basic texts; many are so slight as to be insignificant, and besides, it would be foolish to search for significance on a microscopic level when the whole question of authorship is so tangled. But major differences in content and organization, in omissions and inclusions, and even, occasionally, in single words, are worth examining in order to show how two different sensibilities, a woman's and a man's, perceived and felt about the same female character and the same urban scene.

Lady Mary's poem opens with ten lines describing Lydia, now thirty-five years old, deserted by the many lovers who had once crowded the street before her door; now she has nothing to do but look out her window or into her mirror. The body of the poem (ll. 11-68) is Lydia's lament for her lost youth, speculation about how she shall pass the time today, and fury at Damon, her faithless lover, who has deserted her for his own young wife, Cloe. Lydia heaps abuse on Cloe and on the institution of marriage until her maid appears, carrying her bandbox, and com pliments Lydia fulsomely on her appearance. Lydia then smiles and prepares to go to the playhouse (ll. 69-78).

Gay's poem opens with twenty-two lines describing the deserted Lydia, with much more detail about her dressing room, populated by "Shocks, monkeys and mockaws" (l. 9) who behave in a comically human fashion, and with observations about her hair and make-up. The fuller detail does not include a window as Lady Mary's poem does, however; Gay does not give us a Lydia who feels trapped. Again, the body of the poem is Lydia's lament (ll. 23-98), also more detailed but covering the same ground of regret for lost youth, distress about how to spend the time today, and jealousy of fifteen-year-old Chloe. This Chloe, however, is not Damon's wife but a rival mistress. Lydia speculates unhappily about the possible marriage and Chloe's probable behavior as a wife. She breaks down in passionate sobbing until the maid appears with bandbox and flattery. The upshot is the same—a smile and preparation for the playhouse (ll. 99-106)….

Gay's Lydia is foolish and pitiable, and Gay's sympathy for her takes away the bite of his satire; as Spacks says, "The satirist's energy disappears in … compassion." Lady Mary's Lydia is also foolish and pitiable, but she is something more—she is, … in some senses admirable as well. This quality complicates and strengthens the satire immeasurably. The world that dictates the values and behavior of such a potentially strong character is the more strongly condemned, and we regret the loss of her potentialities. We smile when Gay's Lydia stops raving and smiles. When Lady Mary's Lydia smiles, we do not….

The greater vigor of the central character and unambiguous though multipronged satire of [Montagu's] version of "The Toilette" are characteristic of her eclogues and of her attitudes in general, in both verse and prose.

To see Lady Mary's strength in prose, one can open her collected letters almost at random and find strong expression, no matter how complex the feeling she is discussing and no matter how often she changes her mind. She is particularly vigorous in her opinions of her own sex, opinions often far more purely condemnatory than those of Gay the gentle man. For instance, she praises her friend Philippa Mundy at the expense of most other women: "I wish Mr. M. may be sensible how happy he is in that uncommon thing (so rare that like the Phoenix its very existence is disputed), a Woman of Youth and Beauty without Coquetry. In this vile Town, the Universal follys of the fair, the ugly, in short, the whole sex that way ought to make all Husbands revere those Wives that have sense enough not to be led by the Croud, and Virtuous Courrage enough to stand the Laugh that will infallibly insult them with the name of Prudes." She addresses Philippa again: "I confesse, contrary to the Generallity of my Sex, I am of Opinion that both good and ill Husbands are of their Wives' makeing, for as Folly is the root of all matrimonial Quarrells, that distemper commonly runs highest of the Woman's side." Women, beware women! And foolish women are her target in all but one of her town eclogues.

Gay's town eclogues are discrete poems; Lady Mary's form a "week" from Monday through Saturday, like Gay's Shepherd's Week (1714). Written between February 1715 and July 1716, the order in which she finally arranged them is not that of composition, so it must have some rationale. It can be seen as an order of increasing complexity of satiric tone and increasing intensity of theme—the theme of loss, observed caustically in others at the beginning and drawing closer and closer to home toward the end. Neither the theme nor the organization is absolutely strict or all-pervasive; it would take a very convoluted argument indeed to force every detail, indeed every poem, into the pattern. And, of course, the theme of lost love is the standard stock-in-trade of the pastoral, urban or otherwise; Gay uses it often. Nevertheless, one can see a special treatment of that theme and a degree of coherence in Lady Mary's group of poems.

"Monday: Roxana; or The Drawing-room" is the most politically dangerous of the poems and the most personal argument ad feminam. Returning from court, oppressed by sorrows even more than her chairmen are by their "cruel load" (l. 5)—the lady is fat—Roxana laments the loss of an appointment in the Princess's household which she had expected to obtain. The satiric attack is at least two-pronged. Roxana the prude has engaged in immodest behavior, attending "filthy Plays" (l. 16) and the like, to win the favor of the Princess; the poem suggests that her prudery was hypocrisy in the first place and that her ambition, given her age (she has three grown daughters) and general unattractiveness, is foolish. The second and more dangerous prong is levelled at the Princess: if frivolous, even lewd, behavior is believed necessary to win her favor, her own standards are called into question, although Roxana hypocritically (or diplomatically) says that the Princess is miraculously virtuous in the midst of a corrupt court (l. 54). Court life in general, as well as Roxana and the Princess in particular, is satirized. Lady Mary has no sympathy for any of her objects in this poem. A personal tone gives it added bite: the young, slender, Whig Lady Mary obviously enjoyed getting her knife into the middle-aged, fat, Tory "Roxana," the Duchess of Roxburghe. Roxana's lost appointment stirred up no compassion. The verse pattern may occasionally echo Gay's "Araminta," but the tone certainly does not.

"Tuesday: St. James's Coffee-house: Silliander and Patch" is the odd poem out in the Week. It is a wonderfully funny bragging match between two gentlemen, Silliander (silly plus man [Greek: anēr, andros]) and Patch ("a paltry fellow": Johnson). They compare notes on the favors they have won from various unnamed but noble ladies—rings, shoe buckles, snuff boxes, and opportunities to view specific areas of flesh. Patch wins. Like Gay's "The Tea-table" and "Monday" in his Week, it is a parody of the pastoral singing contests in which shepherds praise the charms of their mistresses, and as such it expresses, as do all the town eclogues, a sense of the loss of rural innocence. The gentleman to whom it was addressed and the two gentlemen disguised as Silliander and Patch may have felt some loss of dignity. But the poem has no important link to the theme of loss in the rest of the group. It stands with Lady Mary's "Monday," however, as an example of satire that is relatively simple because it is entirely unsympathetic.

The tone begins to change with "Wednesday: The Tête à Tête," the one poem other than "Friday: The Toilette" in which Lady Mary uses Gay's trick of an ironic twist at the end to create satire. For eighty-two lines, the poem could be a truly rural pastoral. Dancinda laments the loss of her heart to Strephon, describing his courtship and complaining in classic style that she dare not yield to him because he would then despise her. The loving woman's eternal dilemma is expressed in conventional terms and yet with strength and passion. Real questions and real issues are raised: dare a woman confess that she loves? how can she conceal it? is love anything more than lust? how can she prove her love without losing the man who asks her to prove it? But then "She paus'd; and fix'd her Eyes upon her Fan" (l. 83), the first hint, apart from the context of the whole group of poems, that we are not in a pasture. Strephon confirms the town setting by taking a pinch of snuff in the next line, and all the lady's passionate argument is called into question. Her image of her own virtue is unequivocally destroyed when the maid knocks at the door and warns her of her husband's approach; Strephon "cursing slips down the back Stairs" (l. 92). The poem has other endings as well. Pope wanted Lady Mary to conclude, after the maid's knock, with Dancinda blaming Strephon for wasting time: "You have but listen'd when you should have kist!" Another ending, by Lady Mary, gives Strephon a speech in which he differentiates between lust and love, apparently successfully, because the lady allows him to "put out the Light, / And all that follow'd was Eternal Night." Lady Mary's first ending has the advantage of brevity, which makes the shock sharper. But all three serve the same purpose, the undercutting of the lady's lament. Yet one cannot forget that the lament raises real issues, real not only for an innocent shepherdess but also for any woman who loves in a social context that limits her sexual freedom.

This poem has a doubleness, but it is unlike Gay's doubleness, which Spacks calls "ambiguity." Gay's town eclogues arouse mixed feelings toward his characters—scorn blended with pity, contempt blended with tolerant amusement. Lady Mary's "Wednesday" creates two separate reactions: concern for the issues raised and then contempt for the lady raising them. The two levels are sharply distinguished. The issues are obviously important ones, and, being aware of the writer's sex, the reader takes them all the more seriously: here is the voice of authority and perhaps of experience. The ironic twist shows, in a flash, that the speaker is a hypocrite and either an adulteress or fast on the way to becoming one. The condemnation is unambiguous. Although she has been speaking of serious issues, she has not emerged as an individualized character, so she is easy to condemn. But the issues remain.

Concern and condemnation are not kept tidily apart in "Thursday: The Bassette Table: Smilinda, Cardelia." The satiric tone is growing more complex. The theme of loss is central: Cardelia has lost at cards and Smilinda has lost at love. The two ladies debate which loss is the greater, in pastoral singing-contest form. The terms of the two topics mix and cross: the faithless lover is a "sharper" and basset is a "passion." Both love and cards are games, as in The Rape of the Lock, and both are passions. The emphasis, however, falls upon the game, for Smilinda too plays cards and indeed lost her lover to her rival at the gaming table. Both the ladies are being satirized: one has trivialized love and the other inflated the importance of cards. They even seem to be boasting about their suffering, as each tries to top the other in detailing her pain. Both passions are uncontrollable: "I know the Bite, yet to my ruin run, / And see the Folly which I cannot shun," Cardelia laments (ll. 74-75). Cardelia loses her reason when she looks on the charms of basset (ll. 86-87), while Smilinda loses her prudence in the arms of her sharper (ll. 98-99). The lady who is to judge this contest is Betty Loveit. If this were Restoration comedy, one would expect the name to indicate simply sexual eagerness, as it does in Etherege's Man of Mode. But this Loveit "all the pains of Love and Play does know" (l. 23), having often tried both. And at the end of the poem, impatient for her tea, she awards prizes to both the contenders. The judge in Gay's "Monday" similarly declares a draw and expresses his boredom with the songs. That conclusion is purely comic, but there are satiric complexities in Loveit's judgment in Lady Mary's poem. It implies that love and cards are equally significant, or equally trivial; that both are games; that in the world of the town eclogue, all passions are the same, though perhaps the passion for tea is strongest. If we had expected love to be more important, as Loveit's name leads us to do and as our own priorities should, we find the poem's satire leveled at us because we do not understand the town.

The same strategy is part of the complexity of "Friday: The Toilette: Lydia," complicated … by the admiration we are made to feel for the emotional honesty and self-assertion of Lydia, until we find that she "raves."

"Satturday: The Small Pox: Flavia" brings the complexities to a climax. While Smilinda, the forsaken lover in "Thursday," might be modeled on Lady Mary herself, Flavia, lamenting the loss of her beauty to the ravages of smallpox, definitely is. Lady Mary, who was disfigured by the disease in 1715, said she expressed her own feelings in this poem. The value of beauty is the satiric center of the poem. In the marriage market, and in fashionable society in general, beauty was a precious commodity. Money could buy a husband when beauty was lacking, but with beauty, one had a wider field to choose from and needed rather less money. But beauty is ephemeral, especially in an age of primitive medicine and dentistry, and, like other things of the flesh, has no value for the orthodox moralist. That beauty confers power, indeed wealth, on a woman is thus evidence of the corruption of the world. Also, beauty has aesthetic value, which has nothing to do with morality and on which one cannot set a price. All this, along with the fact that the author was expressing her own feelings, creates a poem of great complexity and power.

Like "The Toilette," "The Small Pox" consists almost entirely of the protagonist's speech lamenting her loss. Flavia lies on her couch. "A Glass revers'd in her right hand she bore" (l. 3); the detail is emblematic, ceremonial, like the reversed arms of the escort in a military funeral. Flavia is now hors de combat. It is a small detail, but it sets the mock heroic tone of the poem, a tone that comes and goes throughout both Lady Mary's and Gay's town ecologues and that dominates this poem more than any other. Perhaps Lady Mary chose the mock heroic tone because the subject is beauty and its power, as in The Rape of the Lock. Certainly that tone works: its elevation and importance fit her own real feelings and the value that beauty had in her world, while its ironic gap shows the littleness of the topic from the moral point of view—the insignificance of ephemeral beauty and the wrongness of those who value it. The mock heroic poet can have it both ways.

Flavia laments, "How am I chang'd!" (l. 5), regretting the loss of her complexion "That promis'd Happyness for Years to come" (l. 8). She is already an object of satire, if she believes that beauty could last. She is morally wrong to think that it could confer happiness on its possessor. And yet, in some respects and to some extent, in this world, could it not? Flavia goes on to reveal how enchanted she used to be with her own image, as Belinda worshiped hers in The Rape of the Lock. She dwells sadly on former evidences of her power: gifts of opera tickets, cherries, china, and much attention:

Perhaps one should add this passage to the list of Pope's sources for the following lines in An Essay on Man:

Both poets are attacking pride. Pope's proud man lays claim to cosmic importance, while Flavia claims power equally vast, given the scope of her world, power to make various kinds of men contradict their own essential natures. Flavia, who is Lady Mary herself, the men, and their world are all objects of satire in these lines, and yet the grief, like some degree of the power, is real.

Next, Flavia glances around the room and exclaims over her portrait, now out of date, and her toilette, now useless. "Meaner Beauties" (l. 55) may now shine but only because they have no competition from her. The pride, the former self-worship, the boasting are all obvious. And yet, so is the sadness of her loss. Doctors had promised she would be well and beautiful again, but their oaths were false. In the last two verse paragraphs, Flavia counsels herself to "bid the World Adieu" (l. 84), since "Monarchs, and Beauties" (l. 85) are unpitied, even mocked, when they are deposed. The comparison shows her awareness that, in losing her beauty, she has lost her power. She will retire to an "obscure recess" (l. 89) from the parks, operas, and parties of the world, and hide her face "in shades" (l. 94). Real pastoral landscape is to be a retreat from the urban pastoral world, a morally superior retreat in which no false friend will pretend compassion (l. 91) and "Where Gentle streams will weep at [her] distress" (l. 90). And yet, this world, pathetic fallacy and all, is of course a fiction, a literary fiction. There is no place to hide.

Each of Lady Mary's town eclogues can stand alone as a skillfully wrought, interesting poem, sometimes complex and sometimes simple in satire, sometimes topical, sometimes autobiographical. Gay's town ecologues, with their different kind of appeal, are intended as single poems, but Lady Mary has put hers together in a series in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One's admiration for her artistic skill and control and for her penetrating vision of her social world grows as the series unfolds. That admiration reaches its peak when, at the end, she shows us herself, disfigured and in tears, making, as many poets have, good art out of grief.