Isobel Grundy, ed.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Romance Writings
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. 276. $86.00
Reviewed by Frederick W. Price
Who will read, or consult to advantage, the nine short (average 21 pages), heterogeneous, uncompleted and, with one exception, previously unpublished prose fictions in English, French, and Italian which, under the sobriquet of “romance writings,” Isobel Grundy has, from manuscripts in the Scottish Record Office, Sheffield, Stafford, and Sydney, printed, edited, and contextualized for Clarendon?
These impeccably edited fragments will provide additional bearings for anyone interested in the narrative foundations of either the romance or the realistic novel. At the front of the queue, of course, will be students of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), to see, for example, the enigmatically autobiographical “Italian Memoir” (25 pp.). Following closely will be other specialists in the mid-eighteent century, including, as the dust jacket says, students of “literary movements, cross-cultural relations, [and] gender ideologies.” As the edition’s subtitle implies, the collection focuses on “the romance.” This long-lived binary opposite to realistic narrative on the spectrum of fiction-which, with self-protecting and/or self-deprecating irony, Montagu herself said “should be wrote for the use of old women”-presents less the world as it appears than ideas about the world as we would like it to be or as we fear it might be. In the eighteenth century, of course, the perceived triumph of the novel over the romance was less secure, especially in the French interpretive community within which Montagu so often worked. From her early letters of Indamora to Lindamira (15 pp.) onward, these pieces give us views down the road not taken, or the road not obviously taken, by Anglo-American literary culture. The editor continually and helpfully points out Montagu’s relations to writers from both traditions.
These manuscripts will also be useful to anyone interested in the process of literary composition. Precisely because these narratives proceeded from a highly informed and intelligent sensibility, and yet are incomplete, uncorrected, or unrevised, they afford examples of the innumerable and imperceptible stages of the penultimate. All contain emendations, second thoughts, and blanks for filling in later. “The Sultan’s Tale” begins and ends in the middle of a sentence.
Students of description and expression will find that Montagu’s narrators and characters speak that conventional moral lingua franca of the passions and physiognomy common to travelers of both the high road of realism and the side roads of the romance. The “person” with “Hair a Light Brown soft as her virgin heart,” whose “Complexion, unsully’d by Art ...was Lively,” and with eyes whose “glances pierced to the very Soul,” from Louisa’s second “Court Tale” (39 pp.), was a familiar traveler on them all.
This collection also has a useful place on the map of orientalism. With Rasselas and Candide it reminds us that in the eighteenth century “the Other” was just as likely to criticize the West as to champion it. The Graeco-Roman-Turkish “Sultan’s Tale” is a particularly complex example. The narratives provide abundant occasions for linguistic triangulation; they show, for example, how an eighteenth-century Englishwoman wrote French, and they help to correct anyone tempted to imagine an ideal world where our betters wrote grammatically and punctuated with precision and whose spelling was straight out of Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum. The editor reminds us that Montagu, like Boswell, marked her sentences with commas as often as with full stops. She would have nobly obliged a printer or editor to polish or provide authorized punctuation, and to “correct” the spelling of “exstravagant Greif,” “Obligeing,” “oppertunitys,” “oppertunity,” and “Opertunity.” No one encountering Montagu’s repeated “Freindship” and “freind” will ever again respond in quite the same way to the ironies of Austen’s juvenile Love and Friendship.
The most obvious readership for this collection will be those interested in early women’s writing, although some might see tensions in an editorial agenda that in effect both emphasizes and dissolves gender differences.
On the one hand, the introduction and editorial method practices a differentiating “[f]eminist scholarship” that “move[s] on from rediscovery of lost texts from the past, to adequate contextualizing of such texts” (xxvi), including evidence, in these hitherto “under-read” texts, of “anger and resistance” (xxiv). These feminist elements forbear transformative happy endings, and allow an equivocal play upon virtue rewarded, often in a dark tone suggesting that although a woman’s beauty and strength of mind can shine out in a guilty and power-crazed world, it is often precisely a woman’s sense of honor and renunciation that precipitates her destruction.
On the other hand, the editor says that Montagu’s narrative complexity is typified precisely by “resistance to categorisation” (xxvi). Her “remoteness from the dominant tradition of fiction and her internal conflict between class pride and literary ambition, both of which she found equally necessary to her sense of self” (x) could equally describe the many-voiced and self-protecting ironies and ambitions of Swift, Voltaire, and other writers of the period; and her infectious and playfully ironic flitting from genre to genre, touching none she does not parody (xxii), could as much be ascribed to an androgynous “conflation of aristocratic hauteur, class pride and literary ambition” (ix) as to gender.