SOURCE: “Female Heroism and Legal Discourse in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's ‘Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge] to Her Husband’,” in ELH, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, June 1997, pp. 10-22.

In this essay, Snyder maintains that in “Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge to Her Husband” Montagu defines an “alternative heroine” by “subtly manipulating the meanings of various forms of the legal term ‘submission’ until they characterize a speaker who possesses a powerful and authoritative, and thus traditionally masculine, capacity for judgment.”]

In the January 24, 1738 edition of her political journal The Nonsense of Common-Sense, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu insists that people of all ranks in society, and of both sexes, must be judged, and more importantly, must judge themselves, not according to their gender or social rank, but to their merit. For Lady Mary, this active self-reflection characterizes a new heroic ideal for both women and men. She qualifies the ideal for...