SOURCE: “‘Trash, Trumpery, and Idle Time’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Fiction,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 5, No. 4, July 1993, pp. 293-310.

[In the following essay, Grundy examines Montagu's commentary on fiction—especially the new genre of the novel—throughout her poems, letters, essays, and other writings.]

Several different studies might be written under my subtitle. A full evaluation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as fiction-writer must await examination of her unpublished, unread romance writings. Another approach would involve enumeration and evaluation of the books she owned.¹ In neither of these studies would the novel occupy the central position which it tends to assume in literary history. Montagu's writings span a rich diversity of fictional forms, but exclude the novel proper. In her library the new novel (to use a tautology) jostles for space with canonical works (her canon: non-fiction in Latin and several modern languages) and with often very obscure non-novelistic fiction in French and English. This essay will say something of her practice as a writer of fiction, and more about her acquisition of books, but it will focus on her criticism of the novels of the 1740s and 1750s. This project too demands an adjustment of critical viewpoint which repositions the canonical novelists into a less commanding position than we are used to.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was not a novelist, also does not feature in Indiana University Press's forthcoming anthology of women critics from the long eighteenth century. But her work—poems, letters, essays, plays, stories—shimmers with the play of a critical mind: social critique, gender critique, political and medical and literary critique. In answers and imitations, in mock forms of several kinds, she discusses critically the opinions, the assumptions, the genres and literary procedures of her contemporaries. She left just one formal critical essay, on the most famous play of her generation, Addison's Cato. Late in her career as a critic-at-large, as an omnivorous reader, and as a writer in half a dozen or more non-novelistic narrative forms, she encountered the new novel, and made trenchant comments on it.

These comments express a highly individualistic, idiosyncratic mind. They also reflect the shock of contact between the bourgeois novel and two of the older traditions on which it crucially impinged: that of the aristocratic romance and that of classically oriented belles-lettres. Lady Mary consumed the new novel avidly, and (despite scathing judgments of some individual works) she stoutly defended the practice of novel-reading as such: not for its moral benefits, like almost every other contemporary defender of fiction, but for its value as pleasure. “No Entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting”; “there is no Remedy so easy as Books, which if they do not give chearfullness at least restore quiet to the most trouble'd Mind.”² She is a foremother of today's project of cultural criticism of popular fiction.

Her criticism of novels, though it never takes any more formal shape than the ephemeral familiar letter, is worth serious notice. Though her response was in many ways old-fashioned, it offers today's critic a new perspective on the cultural field of eighteenth-century fiction (both now-canonical and now-forgotten).

Among the original audience of, say, Samuel Richardson or Henry or Sarah Fielding, Lady Mary was an anomaly. Though many novel-readers shared her gender, few shared her rank or her educational level; and each of those attributes was strangely compromised in her. Despite her rank and her husband's wealth, she was reading English novels in Italy as a literal and metaphorical social outsider; her education was something she had “stolen” for herself (her verb) in defiance of social norms, something she felt should be carefully concealed. Her response to novels exemplifies various kinds of snobbery, but never the intellectual snobbery of the reviewers who mediated the new novel to the better-educated end of the book market.

This particular reader was shaped by very particular circumstances. She says she was born with a passion for learning.³ Fenced from the world by rank (inside a Palladian mansion, inside a deer-park), she withdrew by choice to the further enclosure of the paternal library for five or six hours a day, to work at stealing the Latin language “whilst everybody else thought I was reading nothing but novels and romances.”⁴ We are familiar with the later eighteenth-century prohibition of romance-reading to adolescent girls; at this earlier date the prohibition is reversed.⁵ It was not as romance reader but as student that Lady Mary challenged gender ideology.

One might expect her, in this transgression, to be training herself to the attitudes of the later reviewers with their paralysing condescension towards the notion of female reading, or reading as fantasy or escape. But the young Lady Mary Pierrepont did not substitute “dictionaries and grammars” for more typical female teenage reading. She devoured the French prose romances by Madeleine de Scudéry and Gauthier de La Calprenède (the romans de longue haleine), and plays including the recent “she-tragedies.” She seems to have shared this reading experience with her sister and friends. She brought the same intellectual energy to it as to her Latin: she kept lists of books read, and imitated these texts in writing.

Her surviving adolescent work includes, besides poetry, two substantial pieces of fiction, which reflect her first serious engagement with its styles and conventions. Each one emulates a published work. “The Adventurer” is a prose-and-verse romance modelled on Aphra Behn's “Voyage to the Island of Love.”⁶ “Indamora to Lindamira, her Life writ in 5 letters” replies to the epistolary Adventures of Lindamira, 1702. John Richetti thinks this the “best” of amatory fiction before Richardson; yet Lady Mary writes boldly, “I desire the reader would compare the two lives.”⁷

With immense verve and gusto these works effectively encompass two quite separate non-naturalistic genres. Both centre on the topic of full-blown romantic love, but they explore it from symmetrically opposed gender positions: “The Adventurer” has a male narrator although it is modelled on a text by a woman; “Indamora to Lindamira” has a female narrator although it replies to a text by (presumably) a man.

The Adventurer is named Strephon—Lady Mary's own name for herself in her earliest surviving literary manuscript.⁸ Here he relates his adventures in the Isle of Love: first with Calista, representative of True Love, who, however, does not requite his flame; then with Marrillia, representative of False Love, who jilts another for him, only to jilt him in turn; then with Ardelia and Helvidia, denizens of “the Wood of Coquetrish,”⁹ whom he loves both at once.

The mode is symbolic and visual-descriptive, recalling Renaissance poetry, painting, or masque. Lovers offer their vows at an altar “all inlaid with hearts” (p. 270). True Love is the “Ruines of a Famous Old Palace,” Marriage a castle inhabited by Discord, Strife and Uneasiness (p. 260). The viewpoint is firmly gendered male. Strephon, aged twenty, first falls in love in response to an erotic tableau: “A Careless Vail was cast upon her Breast / Which Little envy'd Zephyrs Kiss't” (p. 262).

After losing his true love he suffers highly-wrought despair for months, but then recovers with the aid of his personified elderly guide, “Awfull reason” (p. 268)—unlike Calista, who when rejected kills herself with the words, “Tell him how true I Lov'd” (p. 267). After losing his false love, Strephon cures himself by a long tirade against her crimes, and a resolve “to hate the fickle sex” (p. 274). Having achieved cynicism, he tries Coquetrish, which he enjoys until his two-timing is accidentally revealed. Then he takes the advice which Reason has been urging on him all along: he “banish'd Love my breast and the next Day Left the Isle” (p. 279). For him, there is a world elsewhere; closure means the end of love.

In the female-narrated text, closure means marriage for love, and happy-ever-after. This story begins closer to the real world than Strephon's allegorical island. But a wicked stepmother is soon introduced, who bears the blame for Indamora's first brush with patriarchal tyranny—an adventure which is strangled at birth by her status as conduct-book ideal. “I think nothing ought to make one Disobey a Father in so important an Affair,” she says (f. 6); and is only saved when her sister takes over the unwanted suitor.

Indamora remains just as flawless throughout the main action, an icon of true love. A second hated suitor favoured by her parents is killed in a duel by Cleonidas, the man she really favours. The sudden deaths of her father and stepmother remove the parental-pressure motif. Believing her beloved dead by shipwreck, she suffers a somewhat scaled-down version of Calista's pangs, but then marries, out of pity, a friend's nephew who worships her with courtly submission. She is happy, “tho' I Lov'd him not with all that Fondness I had done Cleonidas” (f. 10). Her big scene is still to come, when Cleonidas comes back as if from the dead. Emotion rises to intolerable heights; but Indamora behaves impeccably, and in due course the plot relents and her husband dies suddenly. “I greiv'd exsesively and staid my year” before decorously accepting her reward of happiness (f. 12).

By ingenious plotting, Indamora is offered first full-scale ironically star-crossed love, then the stasis of successful marriage, almost without transgression. She loves once only, where Strephon loved twice idealistically and twice cynically; yet she is more complicated than he, being a site of unrecognized feeling and of disavowed action. While others in her story fight or are shipwrecked or go into a convent or die, she maintains a not quite total passivity. About to be forcibly married to Lothario, she loses track of time while reading a romance, strolls out into the moonlit garden after midnight, and is amazed “to see Cleonidas Come from behind a marble mercury.” After his first duel she actually makes an assignation, and communicates her love by means of a flood of tears which is presented as a daring act of excess: “then It was my Dear Lindamira I was no longer mistress of my Actions” (f. 7). The text is a site of furious struggle between the imperatives of action and the code adhered to by Charlotte Lennox's Arabella.

Together, these two early fictions span the gender divide in love-experience.“The Adventurer” deals with male desire, that is desire acted upon, and “Indamora” with female desire, that is desire repressed and returning. They pre-date all claimants to parentage of the English novel except Behn. Neither makes more than the most distant nod in the direction of social realism; yet they offer perceptive, complicated, and accurate reflections of socially constructed behaviour. They, better than Lady Mary's juvenile reading, represent the point she sets out from in fiction.

Between composing these narratives, in her teens, and reading Henry Fielding and Richardson, in her fifties, she enlarged her fictional repertoires both in writing and reading. Her library includes novelists of the 1720s and 1730s such as Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and “Mary Hearne,” and part-fictional works by, for instance, Elizabeth Thomas and Richard Gwinnett.¹⁰ On first encountering the new forms of Delariviere Manley's scandal-fiction and Addison and Steele's periodical fiction, Montagu not only made perceptive critical comments,¹¹ but also emulated Manley in an “Account of the Court of George I,” and Addison in a riposte to one of his essays. In her Account she uses techniques of portrait and anecdote to fictionalize events in which she had herself played a part; in her Spectator essay (its sole contribution by a woman) she fuses character and narrative with a serial widow's account of playing the marriage system for her own ends.¹²

Both these works foreground the pursuit of power, to which they subordinate the pursuit of love. They eschew the discourse of morality, of praise and blame, which the Tatler and Spectator favour at all times, and especially for dealing with women. Their female characters enjoy a freedom of action and of comment inconceivable for Indamora. The widow especially, unabashedly pursuing her own desires, not only turns the tables on her would-be-exploiters, but criticizes, dismantles, and refashions the norms of misogynist fiction.

Montagu moved on to further fictional genres on the one hand (autobiographical romance, autobiographical fairy-tale, letter from the dead to the living, and beast fable, not to mention epistolary anecdote), and on the other hand to high-culture genres, those fostered by her solitary Latin studies rather than by her social romance-reading. Her only known formal critical essay, on Addison's Cato, reads like the work of a good graduate student. It documents its sources, theorizes its positions, and demonstrates knowledge of the current critical issues: unity of design, character-drawing, distinguishing idiolects, tragic high style, arousal of empathy, and moral tendency—public or national morality, that is.¹³

But even when drawing on her masculine education, Montagu pays attention to female issues in criticism. She praises Addison for balancing a heroine with “masculine” courage against the other conventionally timid one, and for providing (like the she-tragedies) “all the Pleasures of tendernesse.” She does the same thing later when exercising her critical skills in the role of patron: she assesses Henry Fielding's skill in drawing female character, and urges Edward Young to allow a more active role to his tragic heroine.¹⁴

She came to the novel as seasoned fiction-writer and critic, but without any adequate outlet for her opinions. Their very expression depended on a sympathetic individual addressee, and their survival on the vagaries of European war. She read Pamela (like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels) without leaving any strictly literary comment. Pamela apparently entered her life just as her taste in fiction began to provoke reproof. Lady Walpole (another highly educated woman) elided new novel and old romance as she wondered “how anybody can find any pleasure in reading the books which are Lady Mary's chief favourites!”¹⁵ Lord Hervey thought there was no entertainment fit for her in the books she had asked for, which were Richardson's epoch-making novel and Colley Cibber's Apology, as well as Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero, a prestigious work to which she had subscribed.¹⁶ These choices reflect a double Lady Mary: scholarly and escapist, perhaps masculine and feminine. It was the escapist, the feminine, which baffled Lady Walpole, Hervey, and the overwhelming consensus of recorded comment on early novels.

While Lady Mary was an anomaly among the cultivated and informed, the uninformed and uncultivated were at this moment going overboard en masse for Pamela. She later expressed her disdain for this craze; but we cannot know whether she recognized the novel's revolutionary quality in 1741. Hervey was not a promising audience to whom to address analysis of Richardson.

She became her own audience in writing headline comments in her books themselves: in Tom Jones “Ne plus ultra,” in Clarissa “miserable stuff,” in Sir Charles Grandison “mean Sentiments meanly express'd,” and so on.¹⁷ This is good fun, but hardly enough to interest scholars of the novel in Montagu-as-critic. That aspect of her rests on just a few years of her relationship with her daughter, Lady Bute. Lady Bute took over the job of book-supplier from two despisers of novels, Hervey first and then her father, Edward Wortley Montagu. Lady Mary had written on Cato at her husband's behest, and sent him off-the-cuff comments on, for instance, Virgil, and a critique of Lord Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King; but she maintained critical silence when he sent her Sarah Fielding's David Simple. She knew he would value her criticism of historical works, but not her criticism of novels.¹⁸

Having first asked Lady Bute for works on architecture and gardening, and other non-fiction, she repeatedly adds a more general plea for “any thing come out that you think would amuse me.”¹⁹ This request produced Tom Jones, which was hot off the press, and Joseph Andrews, presumably as background reading. It must reflect the unfamiliarity of the new province in literature that Lady Mary preferred Joseph Andrews at first, but Tom Jones on maturer reflection. Criticism, too, took time. She was just learning, after years of estrangement, to let herself go in letters to her daughter, especially about education for the granddaughters. Her first comment extends no further than recording the compliment she paid Henry Fielding, of being “fool enough to sit up all night reading” him (2:443-44).

Soon Lady Bute was submitting lists of possible books, and her mother was begging her to send them all (2:470). The next known delivery included Smollett's Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little, Charlotte Lennox's Harriot Stuart, Teresia Constantia Phillips's Apology for [her] Conduct, Edward Kimber's Joe Thompson, Richardson's Clarissa, Sarah Scott's Cornelia, and the anonymous Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl, The Lady's Drawing Room, Leonora: Or, Characters Drawn from Real Life, and Adventures of Mr. Loveill, Interspers'd with many Real Amours of the Modern Polite World—a nice mix of the now revered and the always disdained, with eight female protagonists to five males, one of whom is a dog. (I count two protagonists in Peregrine Pickle, since Lady Mary's comments fasten on the inset “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” which purports to be by its heroine, Lady Vane.)²⁰

They totalled twelve titles, or twenty-seven volumes, or almost four times the length of the longest, Clarissa. It took Lady Mary just under two weeks to go through the lot. “I believe you'l think I have made quick dispatch,” she wrote, “To say truth, I have read night and Day” (3:2-9). We need some critical exploration of the phenomenon of binge reading, as the next development from investigations like those by Janice Radway and others into consumption of romance by culturally deprived women.²¹ Romance as alternative reality: is it an opiate, making against resistance, or does it contribute to understanding and thus to a critique of women's predicaments? It is significant that fiction is consumed not only with pleasure but with ravenous appetite.

This consignment of 1752 produced Lady Mary's fullest outpouring of criticism; later ones tend to elicit briefer initial comment with second thoughts added. She continued to crave “new story Books,” and to order them in preference to translations or periodicals (3:89, 105, 146). But she reports no more binges, and her critiques become shorter, except when Richardson supplies an irresistable goad. From a parcel in 1754, the nonfiction works were read before the novels²² and received most critical comment, while the novels provoked only speculation as to authorship and identities, and a complaint of “General Want of Invention” (3:67-68). Both her reading and her criticism of novels can be seen as inhabiting a crevice in surrounding walls of disapproval.

Was Lady Mary, when she read novels like a starving person falling on food, feeding a diet deficiency in fantasy or in mediated actuality? Lady Bute's 1752 selection stresses the novel's kinship with non-fiction.²³ Con Phillips's Apology²⁴ (not a novel), claims to be fact; so does “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality”; so, if we believe their title-pages, do Clarissa and two of the anonymous works. Scholars agree that Roderick Random and Harriot Stuart draw on their authors' lives. Lady Bute advised her mother to begin with Peregrine Pickle, so she presumably foresaw that Lady Mary would be keen to read à clef. Lady Mary not only ignored Peregrine himself for his parasite, Lady Vane; she also pounced on allusion to real people in Pompey, Mr. Loveill, Harriot Stuart, and Joe Thompson, and on likeness to her own “Maiden Days” in Clarissa. In this, consistently with her reading of Manley forty years before, she fastened on an aspect of the “new” novel which it had directly inherited from the old.²⁵

The metaphor of the painted portrait stands behind much of her criticism: Lennox's characters “no more resembl[e] any thing in Human Nature than the wooden Cuts in the Seven Champions” (iii.8). Not only were woodcuts bywords for visual crudity; not only was The Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendome the obvious example of low-culture or popular (as opposed to courtly) romance; Henry Fielding, too, had poked fun at it in Joseph Andrews, book 1, chapter 1.

Joseph Andrews, one of the first novels that Lady Mary read, seems to have been much in her mind as she phrased her critical demand for verisimilitude. She contrasts Lennox's distortions with Coventry's “real and exact representation of Life as it is now acted in London, as it was in my time, and as it will be (I do not doubt) a Hundred years hence” (3:4). This recalls Fielding's lawyer who “is not only alive, but hath been so these four thousand years; and I hope G— will indulge his life as many yet to come.” Lady Mary thus aligns herself with Fielding's “not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.”²⁶ A true Augustan, she identifies superior abilities with the perception of human universals. Her critical requirement is for a narrative “at least probable, if not true”: a requirement which might be met in one manner by realistic fiction, or in other ways by the genres (familiar to her from writing as well as reading) of romance on the one hand and historical memoir on the other.²⁷

For her, the novel's chief handicap in attempting the probable is its desire to depict the ideal. Though Robert Halsband reads her as insisting “that the novel's function should be didactic,”²⁸ she differs fundamentally from Richardson or Samuel Johnson, who favour the didactic depiction of models to follow. Though she had drawn a model character in Indamora, her mature criticism tends rather towards Jane Austen's remark that “pictures of perfection … make me sick & wicked.”²⁹ She finds “Romance writers” usually unable to realize the virtuous exampla they aim at. From a “confus'd heap of admirable characters that never were, or can be, in Human Nature,” she “def[ies] the greatest chymist in morals to extract any Instruction” (3:4, 5). Her animus against Richardson centres on resistance to his several “model[s] of Perfection” (3:9).

She believes that reading can teach, that readers will be influenced to imitate or avoid the conduct they read of; but she expects warnings to operate more powerfully than patterns. Lady Vane's memoirs, if “rightly consider'd, would be more instructive to young Women than any Sermon I know” (3:2). This critical approach is consistent across genres and decades: it echoes the very sermon-comparison that she had applied to Etherege's The Man of Mode, when she thought its stage depiction of the “shame and sorrow” attending seduction would teach a useful lesson in prudence.³⁰ Sarah Fielding, by letting poverty engulf her characters at the end of David Simple, may teach the lesson of financial prudence, while her brother, by working financial miracles to rescue his heroes, may encourage fecklessness (3:66-67). Lady Mary is bracingly sceptical of lewd writing's tendency to corrupt, but she does believe that women may be tempted by tales of elopement, that Pamela will teach servant girls to lay snares for their masters, and that Anna Howe will encourage discourtesy and impudence (3:68, 9). Books do not contaminate, but may teach bad lessons.

Fondness for didacticism by means of the awful warning was one of Lady Mary's “old fashion'd way[s] of thinking” (3:35). Warnings were the staple of the robust popular fiction of her youth and before: of John Reynolds's The Triumph of God's Revenge against … Murther (first published in 1621), a copy of which she owned,³¹ Bunyan's Mr. Badman, or Manley's New Atalantis. Manley and Haywood regularly conclude their histories of seduction by hoping they will help others to avoid the like dangers.³² But they were out of fashion; a passage of Joseph Andrews (the same passage which Lady Mary had echoed when she related the individual to the species) dismisses “the modern novel and Atlantis writers” as unnatural, unhistorical, improbable.³³ Current opinion was moving fast towards the position that knowledge of (sexual) immorality was likely to encourage imitation, while only ignorance conferred protection. The shift in opinion reflects a shift in concept of what happens during the act of reading. It is a critically alert reader who learns what to avoid, a passively malleable reader who takes the imprint of the text.

A century and a half of sexual cover-up was descending on fiction, leaving no place for the opinions of this aristocrat who in 1709 had praised a French novel for “hit[ting] that difficult path between the gay and the severe, and [being] neither too loose nor affectedly Prude,” and who was willing in 1752 to look leniently on Sally Martin, the senior whore in Clarissa, because her “Crimes are owing at first to Seduction and afterwards to necessity” (1:16, 3:9).

Ambivalent over didacticism but adamant over verisimilitude, Lady Mary subordinates all other requirements to a second essential: that her reading should engage and delight her.³⁴ Her emphases on style and on humour are each related to the demand for pleasure. Style should be “clear and concise,” shunning alike the insipid and the florid. Where she finds humour lacking (as in Richardson), she often injects a note of ribald comedy with her response. She is an enthusiastic collaborator in her own pleasure. Not only will she sit up all night for books she admires: even something “absurd and ridiculous” interests her too much to be put down until she finishes it (3:4).³⁵

She finds no difficulty in justifying her pleasure in novels, even while admitting that it was often an excessive pleasure. Her social rank no doubt helped enable her to defend that unproductive, unpoliced investment of time which was becoming steadily less acceptable for women. She enjoys depreciating a canonical work such as Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King by unfavourable comparison with novels—with two, in fact: one as more entertaining and one as offering “a better body of Ethics” (3:88-89).³⁶ “I think God my Taste still continues for the Gay part of reading; wiser people may think it triffling, but it serves to sweeten Life to me, and is, at worst, better than the Generallity of Conversation” (2:473).³⁷ She believes that study, that best sweetener of life, cannot be divorced from reading for relaxation (2:449-50). “I … carefully cherish, my taste for reading. If relais of Eyes were to be hir'd like post horses, I would never admit any but silent Companions. They afford a constant variety of Entertainment, and is allmost the only one pleasing in the Enjoiment and inoffensive in the Consequence” (2:480). It is hard to think of any comparable contemporary defence of reading for sheer pleasure, unless by Samuel Johnson (in talk, not writing), and Johnson is readier than Lady Mary to relapse into didacticism.

Her defence of the pleasure principle is the more remarkable since she must have been well aware of the risk of misconstruction. Recognizing, no doubt, how easily her more conventional daughter might read her chequered career as a warning against female education, she avoids setting herself up as model: “I wish your Daughters to ressemble me in nothing but the Love of Reading” (3:144).³⁸ She minimizes her publications, denies her desire for fame, advises that a woman must carefully “conceal whatever Learning she attains” (3:22). But she stands by her defence of pleasure in reading. She even justifies the activity of criticism by appeal to pleasure:

I fancy you are now saying—'Tis a sad thing to grow old. What does may poor mama mean by troubling me with Criticisms on Books that no body but her selfe will ever read over?—You must alow something to my Solitude. I have a pleasure in writeing to my dear child, and not many subjects to write upon.

(3:9)

Her defences of reading and her advice on education run parallel, linked by a shared emphasis on contact with actuality. Lady Bute must “never attempt to govern [her daughters] (as most people do) by Deceit; if they find themselves cheated (even in Triffles) it will … make them neglect all … future admonitions.” This is a telling argument against didactic pictures of perfection, and for acquaintance with fictional vice and folly. More broadly, Lady Mary wants her granddaughters trained to understanding, not ignorance, to be brought up free from that blindness of prejudice which is “the certain effect of an ignorant Education” (2:449, 3:25).³⁹ She believes that “Ignorance is as much the Fountain of Vice as Idleness”; and by female idleness she means under-used minds, not hands. It is idleness stemming from ignorance that causes “many examples of Ladies whose ill conduct has been very notorious” (2:450, 3:26). And not only ladies: when her unsatisfactory son was nearly fifty she was glad to hear he found pleasure in books: “let him read what he will, t'will, at least, keep him out of harm's way.”⁴⁰

Knowledge of life is good; novels teach the knowledge of life. From “the Books you sent me” she discerns a new “Levelling Principle” at work in English society. The snobbery can be disregarded; the use of fiction as learning material is interesting: “Perhaps you will say I should not take my Ideas of the manners of the times from such triffling Authors, but it is more truly to be found amongst them than from any Historian. As they write meerly to get money, they allwaies fall into the notions that are most acceptable to the present Taste” (3:35-36). She does not draw the distinction that Pope and Johnson made between learning from books and learning from experience.⁴¹ Probably no woman would make it in their terms, which set books against a sphere of experience closed to women. But in principle (being, like them, a Lockean)⁴² she agrees. “True knowledge consists in knowing things, not words” (3:21). To guard against prejudice, it must be knowledge of life, although it should include history, geography and philosophy, and may include (as “Vehicles of Learning”) Latin and Greek (3:23, 21). A parent who fears the effect of “Poetry, Plays or Romances” must not prohibit them (and be disobeyed) but must “talk over what they read, and point to them … the Absurdity often conceal'd under fine expressions” (3:68). A critical reader is a reader safe from harm.

Into this ordered fictional cosmos (novels copy life, teach life, give pleasure) bursts the comet of Samuel Richardson. She finds fault with his verisimilitude, his style, his judgment of what is and what is not exemplary, and the moral effects of his work. The fact is that, like all too many reviewers, she demanded originality but was not necessarily grateful when she got it. The Cry, 1754, by Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding, is strikingly experimental, indeed unique, in concept and structure: Lady Mary thought its “Fable … the most absurd I ever saw,” although she admired its sentiments and its ethics (3:88).

On The Cry she was exercising critical judgment. The structure of Richardson's novels excludes such a secure critical base. Her comments on him have a note of outrage, almost of pain. Her former serene appreciation of “the Pleasures of tendernesse” gives way to a sense of having been manipulated: “the circumstances are so laid as to inspire tenderness.” She feels herself “such an old Fool as to weep over Clarissa Harlowe like any milk maid of sixteen over the Ballad of the Ladie's Fall”; “I heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner.”⁴³ She disparages Richardson, as she disparaged Lennox, by linking him with a crude text from low life; she also applies to herself-as-reader that self-disparagement which is otherwise so remarkably absent from her defence of novel-reading. She abuses his ignorance of high life, although two of his domestic situations remind her of her own family. She is tetchy about his female rebels, invoking one of Lord Halifax's most oppressive dicta against Charlotte Grandison, yet she equally resents his “Divine Clarissa” and “saint-like Dames” (3:96). She escapes him by digressing to Roman Catholic doctrine or personal reminiscence, but he pulls her back like an itch she cannot leave alone.

At her most open she muses, “This Richardson is a strange Fellow” (3:90). I suggest that her method of reading could not cope with him. Richardson's admirers let themselves be carried away. When Pamela got married they range the church bells; when Clarissa died, they drew down the blinds and took to their beds. Lady Mary is an extreme example of the resisting reader: her sceptical, analytical intelligence dissolved in tears even while Richardson's ideology of the pursuit of moral perfection stuck in her craw. She is an unwilling but impressive witness to his power.

Lady Mary's return in 1756 from rural Brescia to cosmopolitan Venice put her back in the social swing, and in reach of English newspapers. They enabled her to make more wholesale orders of novels than before; they also showed her, if she had not guessed it, the depth of orthodox disapproval of the novel. In this context she writes her most elaborate defence of women's reading.⁴⁴

I have some reproaches to make you. Daughter, Daughter, don't call names. You are allwaies abusing my Pleasures, which is what no mortal will bear. Trash, Lumber, sad stuff, are the Titles you give to my favorite Amusements. If I call'd a white staff a stick of Wood, a Gold key gilded Brass, and the Ensigns of Illustrious Orders colour'd strings, this may be Philosophycally true, but would be very ill receiv'd. We have all our Playthings; happy are they that can be contented with those they can obtain.

She repeats earlier arguments: the innocuousness of reading imaginary adventures, the rarity of books which rise above the ruck. Her final image is the most resonant:

Your youngest Son is, perhaps, at this very moment riding on a Poker with great Delight, not at all regretting that it is not a gold one, and much less wishing it an Arabian Horse, which he would not know how to manage; I am reading an Idle Tale, not expecting Wit or Truth in it, and am very glad it is not Metaphisics to puzzle my Judgment, or History to mislead my Opinion.

The use she makes of this analogy is restrained: “He fortifys his Health by Exercise, I calm my Cares by Oblivion.” Yet the reader of this passage may well choose to understand the reading old woman as stretching her faculties and learning, like a child at play, and can hardly avoid investing the act of reading with the imaginative force which transforms a poker into an Arab horse. Lady Mary's image captures on the one hand the skill and control involved in reading, and on the other the unruly power of the fictional text.

Notes

1. Robert Halsband says little about her romance writings in The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 253-54. Her books were catalogued in 1739, and the survivors again in 1928. Life, p. 180; Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books … (London: Sotheby, 1928).

2. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-67), 3:21, 144. References are to this edition.

3. Letters, 3:23.

4. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 1:303.

5. In Elizabeth Thomas, “On Sir J— S— saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode,” it is a woman's inquiry for a book “Beyond a novel or a play” that provokes alarm. See Roger Lonsdale, ed., Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, An Oxford Anthology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 50-51.

6. Poems Upon Several Occasions: With a Voyage to the Island of Love (London: R. Tonson and J. Tonson, 1684).

7. Harrowby MS 250, ff. 6-12; Harrowby MS 251, ff. 1-10, 16-23; Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 169. Not only was Lindamira reprinted up to 1734; it was rebuked in a didactic work in 1766. In The School: Being a Series a Letters, Between a Young Lady and Her Mother, a teacher is very sorry to hear a dissipated sixteen-year-old has read it, along with works by Eliza Haywood and Tobias Smollett (1:199). The School is by Sarah Mease, later Murray, whose name was printed “Maese” in volume 1.

8. “Poems Novells Letters Songs &c. Dedicated to the Fair Hands of the Beauteous Hermensilda by her Most Obedient Strephon”: Harrowby MS 250.

9. Isobel Grundy, “The Verse of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, A Critical Edition,” D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1971, p. 260. References are to this edition.

10. In her copy of Haywood, The Fruitless Enquiry, 1727, she wrote “pretty plan not ill executed,” in Manley, Rivella, 1714, “true & well wrote” (Catalogue, 1928, lot 516).

11. “Catalogue Lady Mary Wortleys books Packed up to be Sent Abroad July 1739” (Wharncliffe MS 135). Her comments are arguably kinder to Manley than to the Tatler, surprisingly, given that Manley was a Tory propagandist and Montagu a committed Whig, and that Steele and Addison were close friends of her husband (Letters, 1:18-19). Though she thought other writers might use Manley's recipe to improve on her achievement, Lady Mary was warmly sympathetic when Manley was imprisoned.

12. Essays and Poems and “Simplicity,” A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), pp. 82-94.

13. It is headed “Wrote at the desire of Mr Wortley, suppress'd at the desire of Mr Adison” (Essays and Poems, pp. 62-68).

14. Letters, 2:93n6; Halsband, Life, pp. 119-20. (Fielding repaid her with published acknowledgment, Young with a printed sneer, hinting that only her beauty lent weight to her opinions.)

15. Spence, Anecdotes, 2:1559.

16. This pairing suggests the linking of Richardson and Cibber in Joseph Andrews, but that was still unpublished. Hervey added J. Parry's The True Anti-Pamela to her order (presumably to feed her taste for scandal): see Terri Nickel in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22 (1992). Since this was not requested, and the life of Cicero was subscribed for, I assume that Pamela and Cibber are the butts of Hervey's contempt (Montagu, Letters, 2:241, 244-45).

17. Catalogue of … Books, 1928, p. 95. The Tom Jones comment comes from her granddaughter's testimony (Essays and Poems, p. 48).

18. Letters, 2:360, 465, 476, 3:69. Her interest in the Bolingbroke work (which Pope had set out to publish without its author's privity) would have been historical and anecdotal as well as literary. During her last year in Italy she perhaps found a male kindred spirit in fiction-reading: to Louis Devismes, a Grand Tour tutor, she wrote, “Should be glad of T[ristram] Shan[dy].” This comes from a summary; her letters to him do not survive (3:243).

19. Letters, 2:416, 421, 452, 463.

20. Women make up a rather smaller proportion of authors. It is hard to tell if Lady Mary was to any extent a partisan for writings by her own sex. She did not spare her derogatory comments on books by women; but she noted that Mathilde, 1661 (anonymous like most of its author's work), was indeed “bien ecritte et bien inventé par Mlle. de Scudery,” that Laetitia Pilkington wrote “as good Poetry as Popes,” and that Marie Catherine Hortense Desjardins was “plus delicat que Crebillon, plus amusant que Voltaire” (Catalogue, lot 506).

21. See Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Rachel Anderson, The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of Love (London and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974); Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982); Jean Radford, ed., The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

22. She had received Orrery's Remarks on … Swift, 1751 (3:56), Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History, 1752 (3:61), and the collected Rambler, as well as Henry Fielding's Amelia, “Sally” Fielding's additional volume to David Simple, Jane Collier's Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, and the anonymous Sir Charles Goodville and his Family and The Adventures of a Valet. Written by Himself (3:65-67).

23. See Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia, 1983).

24. An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. T.C. Phillips (1748-49). Teresia Constantia Phillips (1709-65) was known as Con Phillips.

25. She commented with warmth and indignation respectively on Edward Kimber's handling of the Duke of Montagu and Charlotte Lennox's of Lady Isabella Finch. Reading the New Atalantis had provoked her to immediate search for a “key” (Letters, 3:8, 9, 1:18).

26. Joseph Andrews, 1742, book 3, chap. 1. In this respect Lady Mary's criticism of the new novel forms a continuum with her perception, on her Eastern travels, that Theocritus was a realistic describer of the rural life of his day (Letters, 1:332).

27. Letters, 3:6, 18-19; Halsband, Life, pp. 253-54. She makes the “probable if not true” demand of the non-fictional Phillips's Apology.

28. Robert Halsband, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Philological Quarterly 45 (1966), 154.

29. To Fanny Knight, 23 March 1817: Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 486-87.

30. Essays and Poems, p. 130.

31. Wharncliffe MS 135.

32. Charlot, for instance, “dy'd a true Landmark: to warn all believing Virgins from shipwracking their Honour.” Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis (London: Morphew and Woodward, 1709), 2nd ed. 1.83; repr. in Dale Spender and Janet Todd, ed., Anthology of British Women Writers (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 174. Juliette Merritt notes this habit in Haywood (“Eliza Haywood: Women's Writing and the Language of Excess,” conference paper, “The Contemporary Eighteenth Century: New Readings,” McMaster University, 24 Sept. 1992).

33. The Author's Preface to Joseph Andrews dismisses the French romances, too, as barren of entertainment or instruction; bent on claiming a higher status than other fiction-writers, Fielding offered no support for any general validation of the genre.

34. These two demands are reflected in her favourite condemnations: “absurd” and “insipid.”

35. Halsband notes that having initially “flung … aside” Leonora after fifty pages, she must have gone back to it later, since she annotated volume ii, “worse than 'tother” (3:5 and n. 2).

36. Bolingbroke, ranked by Lady Mary below Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and John Hill, has now received the accolade of a Twayne monograph.

37. “The gay Part of reading” is also a phrase of Manley's (New Atlantis, 1:62: Spender and Todd, p. 165). “It was formerly a terrifying view to me that I should one day be an Old Woman; I now find that Nature has provided pleasures for every State” (Letters, 2:477).

38. She was used in the role of awful warning for the one who did so resemble her (Lady Louisa Stuart, Letters … to Miss Louisa Clinton, ed. The Hon. James A. Home, Second Series, 1903, pp. 21-22).

39. Surprisingly, she feels she was left with “silly prejudices” by her own education, made up of secret studies, religious indoctrination—and romance reading (3:36). This might be an argument for more realistic fiction.

40. Unpublished letter to her husband, 23 June 1760, owned by William Buist-Wells.

41. “Yes, you despise the man to Books confin'd, / Who from his study rails at human kind”; “Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, / And pause awhile from Letters to be wise” (Epistle to Cobham, lines 1-2; Vanity of Human Wishes, lines 157-58).

42. “Mr. Locke … has made the best dissection of the human mind of any author I have ever read” (Letters, 3:238).

43. Essays and Poems, p. 66; Letters, 3:8-9, 90.

44. Of the fifteen titles she first ordered from reviews, one had been called “beneath censure” and others treated with severity or contempt. She commented, “I do not doubt at least the greatest part of these are Trash, Lumber etc.; however, they will serve to pass away the Idle time” (3:125-26). Orthodox disapproval is well captured in P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, “Defoe and Francis Noble,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4:2 (1992), 301-13. Lady Mary's grandson the first Marquess of Bute deeply admired the letter on which this article closes (3:133-35); he was surprised and disappointed when no reviewer singled it out for comment (note by James Dallaway in his copy of her Works, 1803, owned by William Buist-Wells, 5:25).