SOURCE: “Scolding Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? The Problematics of Sisterhood in Feminist Criticism,” in Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood, edited by Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, New York University Press, 1994, pp. 44-61.

In the essay below, Looser evaluates Montagu's reputation as a progressive and a proto-feminist.

As with many women writers “found” by second-wave feminisms, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has been held up as an exemplary model of womanhood. Montagu is frequently taught alongside her eighteenth-century British “sisters,” Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom carved significant spaces outside of traditional feminine roles in their lives and writings. Montagu has not lacked a contemporary audience, her letters garnering space in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women as well as The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The ways we read Montagu, however, have become increasingly complicated as of...