Article: Women, aging, and gossip in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters of the 1720s.(Critical Essay)

Reflecting on her relationship to English court society in the 1720s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) professes her preference for remaining in the relative isolation of her house at Twickenham and remarks somewhat pessimistically in a 1725 letter that "I should not fail to amuse my selfe tolerably enough but for the Damn'd, damn'd Quality of growing older and older every day, and my present Joys are made imperfect by fears of the Future." (1) Questions about what aging might mean for upper-class women--ridicule and exclusion from the social interactions that matter--form a persistent theme in Montagu's letters, instigating a vacillating, but increasingly cheeky ...






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