 | The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu |  |
Bibliographical Note
Of Lady Mary's work the three Town Eclogues were the first to see light. Many things by her, such as the newspaper, and thought to be by her, such as various bits of poetry, appeared, always anonymously, in her lifetime. Dodsley included some of her verse in his collections; Horace Walpole disliked her but liked her verse and brought out an edition. The Embassy Letters appeared in 1763, a year after her death, with a preface written by Mary Astell long before, perhaps in 1724; a collected edition (poorly) edited by John Dallaway (5 vols) appeared in 1803.
Lady Mary's descendant Lord Wharncliffe revised the Works in 1835, but tried very hard to suppress any evidence of her true feelings for Algarotti. W. Moy Thomas (1861) tried to correct the vagaries of the Dallaway and Wharncliffe versions, but many of Dallaway's unhelpful emendations remained in the poems. As late as 1949 Thomas was referred to as the standard edition. Robert Halsband of Hunter College, New York became interested in the problem of incompleteness and poor editing of Lady Mary's works, and has made it his life's work to re-present her as fully as possible. He produced the standard biography in 1956, edited the complete letters, including many that never saw publication before, in 1965-7, brought out the facsimile of Pope's holograph transcription of the Town Eclogues in 1977, and at the same time joined forces with Isobel Grundy, the authority on Lady Mary's verse, to bring out Lady Mary's essays, all of her known verse, and a hitherto unknown play, Simplicity, all in one volume. The play has since been performed [1988], and was well received. With the exception of the Eclogues, which is a serially numbered rare book, these were all printed at Oxford and can be taken as the new standard edition. — B.
| The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu | |