Books and the Woman: Postscript

Abstract

BOOKS AND THE WOMAN: POSTSCRIPT ISOBEL GRUNDY University of Alberta I n literary-historical detection one hardly expects a case to be closed. No matter how many usual and unusual suspects are rounded up, some wild card remains liable to surface without warning from the depths of the un­ plumbed past. In “Books and the Woman: An Eighteenth-Century Owner and Her Libraries” (ESC 20:1 [1994]: 1-22) I anticipated with hope rather than anxiety the emergence of further books bearing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s signature. I expected that such books would be among those she owned at the age of fifty, in 1739, but which were lost from her library some time before 1928, when her descendants had it catalogued. Lady Mary used oddly abbreviated signatures in most of her books, only rarely “MWM” or her three full names; nevertheless one might reasonably expect the eventual resurfacing of some of the 300-odd vanished books that she once owned. Since that article was printed there has been no shortage of new informa­ tion; but none of it slots comfortably into the gaps in knowledge that have already been charted. Instead it raises doubts or opens new lines of enquiry. In one of her very few unpublished and rediscovered letters, Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Wortley Montagu) gives a friend her first adult impres­ sions of West Dean near Salisbury, her late grandmother Pierrepont’s house, where she had lived between the ages of three and nine.1 This letter might seem to threaten my theory that the earliest nucleus of her library came from this grandmother. The twenty-one-year-old Lady Mary found the house, the furnishings, the parson, and the books all intolerably antiquated. The last comprised “the Famous History of Amadis de Gaul, and the book of Martyrs, with wooden Cuts” : that is, a fifteenth-century chivalric romance (based on even older materials), and John Foxe’s best-selling work on the sufferings of early Protestants, dating in its English version from 1563, with notori­ ously gruesome woodcuts. Could these be representative of Elizabeth Pier­ repont’s choice? The answer is probably no. She had once owned her grand­ daughter’s copy of Barclay’s Argents, but this sophisticated seventeenthcentury romance has little in common with Amadis. She had probably re­ jected that and Foxe as outmoded, long before Lady Mary did the same. My imperfect information about authorship has continued to grow. The “Che Zade” credited with writing a Histoire de la Sultane et des Visirs, 373 Contes Turcs (1708), in Lady Mary’s list of 1739, is the person usually known as Seyhzade or Sheikh Zadah; the translation has been ascribed to Fïançois Petis de la Croix, but the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue says it is by “King William and others.” Lady Mary’s anthology of philosophical writings by Locke, Leibnitz, and others, edited by Pierre Desmaiseaux in 1721, was originally the brainchild of the Abbé Antonio Conti, a friend and correspondent of hers. Desmaiseaux took it over from him,2 and it was likely because of Conti that Lady Mary owned a copy. Here, as so often, her intellectual interests prove to have been closely intertwined with her personal relations. The search for more books bearing her signature has turned up two widely separated volumes; but they are not losses from her list of 1739, where neither appears. The Tinker collection at Yale contains her copy of La Vie de Marianne by Marivaux, 1736-37, in eight parts, whose title-pages variously claim to have been printed at London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Avignon, and whose fly-leaves bear her “Ma.W.” The Arents collection in the New York Public Library has her copy of Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physitian Enlarged, in which, for once, she wrote her full name.3 Both these titles extend her total list, though not the number of authors on it. The potentially most significant but also most baffling discovery records an oddity of behaviour on the part of Lady Mary’s husband. He endorsed, that is supplied the title for, the rather rough but lengthy “Catalogue Lady Mary Wortleys books Packed up to...