SOURCE: An introduction in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1977, pp. 171-75.

The following excerpt appears as the introduction to a collection of Montagu's work titled Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Grundy, one of the editors of the collection, discusses the construction of Montagu's poetry canon and specifically the selections that she made for this volume.

Throughout her life Lady Mary liked to refer to herself as a poet, often with a touch of irony or self-deprecation. At fifteen or so she confessed to the folly of having 'trespass'd wickedly in Rhime', her confession taking the form of an eight-line poem. At sixty-nine she described herself as 'haunted … by the Dæmon of Poesie'.

Her contemporaries took her verse seriously. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, referred to her fame in a 'sessions of...