Mary Monck, born Mary Molesworth about 1677 and dead in 1715, belongs to that important company of early modern women poets whose achievement was more substantial than their later reputation long allowed. She wrote at the meeting point of Restoration wit, Augustan order, religious meditation, private elegy, and the expanding culture of literary translation. Her surviving work is not vast, and its circumstances of pre…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Irish Poets, Love Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born Mary Pierrepont in May 1689 and dead on 21 August 1762, was one of the most formidable and variously gifted figures of the eighteenth century: poet, letter writer, satirist, aristocrat, traveller, political observer, mother, friend, adversary, and advocate for a medical practice that helped alter the history of public health. She lived in an age that praised female modesty while avidly…
“An infallible recipe for making a young man in love with you is to appear to him in a different dress every day.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Love Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness