APEnglish–Los Al

I can see that Lady Mary gave us some headaches this Friday.  It was our first foray into the 18th century and, surprisingly, it’s even more difficult than the 19th.  Hawthorne is pretty easy compared some of her sentences.

And it was difficult because Lady Mary is so well-spoken, so clearly educated, so unabashedly upperclass that the way she presented herself seems to be utterly foreign.  Our world is characterized by a lack of hierarchy and of such thorough silliness that even presidential candidates appear on comedy and day time talk shows that have no other purpose than to chat away an hour.  Now, I have as much fun as the next Joe (insert job here, eg., the plumber, the cook, etc.), but Lady Mary would have thought that an egregious breach of decorum.

Well, all of her good old fashioned stuffiness aside, who was she?  She was a major figure in the world of letters of the early 18th century in England.  She found herself in a series of literary and pubilc quarrels with the camp of Alexander Pope, the most famous poet in England of the time.  She also travelled widely and was herself an example of the rational feminism of her time.  She wrote voluminously, but her letters were never published during her lifetime.  She also adventured across Europe, living abroad for the last 23 years of her life.  While on an earlier trip in Turkey, she was innoculated against the small-pox virus–an experimental treatment at the time.  She worked diligently to bring the practice to England and prevent the death and disfigurement that the disease leaves in its wake.  You see a portrait of her and read a full biography at Luminarium.

Some letters and poems are online at Renascence Editions, published electronically by the University of Oregon. You can download a complete version of her letters from Project Gutenburg. 

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