SOURCE: “Instructing the ‘Empire of Beauty’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Politics of Female Rationality,” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4, November 1995, pp. 1-26.

In the following essay, Sherman investigates the apparent anti-feminism of such works by Montagu as “A Satyr.” According to the critic, Montagu's harsh rebukes of female behavior are meant to reform women and are consonant with her view “that women can be rational, and belong in a public sphere defined by rational debate.”

In her annotation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's “A Satyr,” Isobel Grundy remarks that “As an attack on women, it stands out oddly among her works” (Grundy and Halsband 210). Even in the gossipy brilliance of Montagu's celebrated letters, Cynthia Lowenthal finds a certain reticence, noting that Montagu “is often surprisingly slow to censure” her sex (117). Yet while such observations favor Montagu's decided feminism, there are occasions in her work, as in...