SOURCE: "Condemned to Petticoats: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Feminist and Writer," in The Dress of Words: Essays on Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature in Honor of Richmond P. Bond, edited by Robert B. White, Jr., University of Kansas Libraries, 1978, pp. 35-52.

In the following excerpt Halsband investigates Montagu's feminism as it is displayed in her writings.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is sufficiently well known so that mention of her name need not be followed by the rhetorical question with which Time magazine headed its review of her Complete Letters—"Lady Who?" I have elsewhere touched on her stature as a lady of letters and on the general predicament of women writers in her time; ["Ladies of Letters in the Eighteenth Century," Stuart and Georgian Moments, 1972] her ideas and writings on feminism and her career as a miscellaneous writer deserve re-examination now because they are clarified and amplified...