Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy ed. by Robert Halsband, Isobel Grundy and: Indamora to Lindamira ed. by Isobel Grundy

Abstract

Cockerell, with whom she had numerous humiliatingly public squabbles. Yet Millgate’s project here is not to debunk his authors as monsters; nor is it to add to the contumely so routinely heaped on the hapless Pen, Hallam, and Flo, whose testatory bunglings resulted in numerous disasters, not least the irrevocable dispersal of Browning’s and Hardy’s literary remains (to say nothing of the somewhat gruesome dispersal of Hardy’s physical ones) and the wholesale destruction of original documents against which the “autho­ rized” biographies might be checked. What strikes one instead about this book is Millgate’s unfailing generosity toward his subjects, his wonderfully humane compassion tempered with irony. We sympathize with his authors’ rages against the dying of the light, and with the burdens so conscientiously shouldered by their appointed executors; but we are kept equally alive to what Millgate terms “the always tragi-comic ironies of human mischancing” (205). Most of all, we are called to exercise a humanely author-centred ethic to which “contemporary death-of-the-author debates” are blessedly “irrele­ vant” (197). In deciding on the “final” text amidst such closing intrusions and confusions, “the editor, like the executor proper, seems called to act with responsible independence, allowing awareness of the author’s final in­ tentions ... to fall into place among a complex of felt obligations: to an envisaged readership, to theoretical positions conscientiously held, to the author’s reputation as it has developed through time, even to an aesthet­ ically or historically grounded choice between — ... — distinctive authorial versions” (198). Post-mortem exploiters take note. l o r r ie c l a r k / Trent University Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, eds., Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). xxvi, 412. $35.00 paper. Isobel Grundy, ed., with annotations by Susan Hillabold and illustrations by Juliet McMaster, Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Lady Mary Wortley Mon­ tagu), Indamora to Lindamira (Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1994). xiv, 37. One must applaud the appearance of this paperback version (updated and with a new “Preface” by Isobel Grundy) of the excellent Halsband-Grundy edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s writing. When the hardcover edi­ tion appeared in 1977, following upon Robert Halsband’s biography (1956) and edition of her letters (1965-67), it allowed Lady Mary renewed life as an author, rather than being merely a fascinating historical figure or the foot­ noted butt of Pope’s satire — more life, indeed, than she generally enjoyed 477 in her own century, given her reluctance as a woman and an aristocrat to publish. This had a special significance because it occurred during the early stages of the renewal of the English literary canon, particularly through its expansion to include more writing by women, a process it both reflected and encouraged. All this, of course, makes the appearance of this up-to-date and affordable (at $35.00 Canadian) version a matter of some importance. Lady Mary can now be read and taught as conveniently as the male contempo­ raries who were her friends and enemies. One striking quality of Lady Mary’s literary output is its variety. Her prose (edited by Robert Halsband) includes an impressive Spectator essay, an interesting critique of Addison’s Cato, an intelligent defense of the Turkish method of innoculation for smallpox (which she helped to introduce into En­ glish medical practice), and nine witty essays from The Nonsense of Common Sense, a weekly essay-journal that she pseudonymously edited in 1737-38. Simplicity, a Comedy, is a translation-adaptation of Marivaux’s Le Jeu de Vamour et du hasard (1730) that reveals considerable potential as a drama­ tist. It is polished and amusing, a comedy that surely might have been performed with success, though it was not staged and remained unpublished until it was edited by Halsband and included in the edition of 1977. Lady Mary’s poetry (edited by Isobel Grundy) is even more varied and in­ teresting. It runs the gamut from humorous aphorism to elegiac or romantic complaint, from well-turned translations-cum-adaptations of classical poems to sharply personal and political satire. At its best it has considerable in­ dividuality, a...