SOURCE: “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's ‘Italian Memoir’,” in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, Vol. 6, 1994, pp. 321-46.

In the essay below, Grundy contends that Montagu's unpublished Italian Memoir is “neither an inadequate fragment of autobiography nor a self-deluded venture into the role of romantic heroine, but an approach to issues of gender roles and gender tyranny, of silencing and disempowerment.”

As is well known, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu lived for ten years in the then remote lake country of Northern Italy. During this time, 1746-1756, she saw almost no English people, though she read a large number of English books. She sent her daughter, Lady Bute, a stream of letters, the reflections and distillations of a lifetime's thought and experience. These letters, among her most often quoted, present a self-construction as sage and moralist: a sixty-year-old female intellectual, content to be marginal because foreign, observant both of...