Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, known in her lifetime as a wit and poet, has since been most admired for her letters: for their brilliant observation of life and customs in London, Turkey, and Europe; for their social satire, bans mots, acute and original opinions, and sinewy style. She fully exploited the potential of the epistolary genre, building a distinctive relationship with each of her correspondents within which to realize some aspects of the authorial self. The development of feminist positions and retrieval of women's writing are revealing her to be--in the letters and in a range of poetry and short prose pieces (many left unpublished and therefore hard to date)--an important figure in the female literary tradition.

Mary Pierrepont was born in fashionable Covent Garden, London. Her mother, Lady Mary Fielding, was the daughter of the third earl of Denbigh; her father, Evelyn Pierrepont, a youngest son...