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 A full evaluation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as fiction-writer must await examination of her unpublished, unread romance writings.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...