BIOGRAPHY

Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 680 p.

Scholarly biography of Montagu as a “writer and intellectual.” Grundy maintains that “Lady Mary's was a life of struggle in almost all its phases.”

CRITICISM

Allen, M. D. “The New Path: English Women Travelers in the Middle East.” Philological Papers 40 (1994): 1-5.

Examines the tradition of “the indomitable British lady traveler,” which the critic credits Montagu with starting.

Boer, Inge E. “Despotism from Under the Veil: Masculine and Feminine Readings of the Despot and the Harem.” Cultural Critique 32 (Winter 1995-96): 43-73.

Focuses on the Turkish Embassy Letters and their unique point of view from within the harem.

Bohls, Elizabeth A. “Aesthetics and Orientalism in Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters.” In Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818, pp. 23-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Analysis of the Turkish Embassy Letters in which Bohls declares: “Working at the same time as the men who founded modern aesthetic theory, Montagu launches an alternative tradition of aesthetic thought” in these letters.

Chaber, Lois A. “Transgressive Youth: Lady Mary, Jane Austen and the Juvenilia Press.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, No. 1 (October 1995): 81-8.

Considers the issue of female empowerment in Indamora to Lindamira, written by a teenaged Montagu.

Delplato, Joan. “An English ‘Feminist’ in the Turkish Harem: A Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” In Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts. Edited by Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch, pp. 163-178. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Discusses Montagu's opinions about the institution of the harem in connection to a famous portrait of the author.

Grundy, Isobel. “Books and the Woman: An Eighteenth-Century Owner and Her Libraries.” English Studies in Canada 20, No. 1 (March 1994) 1-22.

Examines the libraries Montagu accumulated throughout her lifetime and their cultural context.

———. “Books and the Woman: Postscript” English Studies in Canada 20, No. 4 (December 1994): 373-76.

Considers the impact on her previous article of new discoveries of letters by Montagu.

———. “Editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” In Editing Women: Papers Given at the Thirty-First Annual Conference on Editorial Problems. Edited by Ann M. Hutchison, pp. 55-78. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.

Examines the textual history of Montagu's writings.

Lerner, Laurence. “Subverting the Canon.” British Journal of Aesthetics 32, No. 4 (October 1992): 347-58.

Discusses Montagu as a female poet and considers her place in the canon.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “Female Rhetorics.” In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Shari Benstock, pp. 177-91. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Examines “the conflict between the desire for self-assertion and the need for self-suppression” in Montagu's correspondence.

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “Public Baths and Private Harems: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Origins of Ingres's Bain Turc.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 7, No. 1 (Spring 1994): 111-38.

Traces the connection between Montagu's writing and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting Le Bain Turc.

Additional coverage of Montagu's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 95, 101; Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 9; and Poetry Criticism, Vol. 16.