Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656– 1710): Poet, Protofeminist and Patron

Abstract

‘She was a lady of great virtue as well as great understanding’, who, by ‘her own love of books, her great industry in the reading of them and her great capacity to improve herself by them enabled her to make a very considerable figure among the literati of her time’, wrote George Ballard in praise of Mary, Lady Chudleigh in Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752).1 Ballard’s adulation of Chudleigh, combined with the polemical nature of some of her poetry, was largely responsible for her lasting — albeit marginalized — standing in literary history From the mid-eighteenth century to the present day, her reputation has endured through a handful of anthologies and biographical dictionaries under various appellations, including an ‘Eminent Lady’, a ‘Female Worthy’ and, ultimately, in the late twentieth century a ‘First Feminist’.2 Whichever title one chooses, Chudleigh made a unique contribution to an early feminist movement that employed rational arguments on behalf of women’s intellectual and spiritual autonomy.