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"Trash, Trumpery, and Idle Time": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and FictionIsobel Grundy Several different studies might be written under my subtitle. A full evaluation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as fiction-writer must await examination of her unpublished, unread romance writings. Another approach would involve enumeration and evaluation of the books she owned.1 In neither of these studies would the novel occupy the central position which it tends to assume in literary history. Montagu's writings span a rich diversity of fictional forms, but exclude the novel proper. In her library the new novel (to use a tautology) jostles for space with canonical works (her canon: non-fiction in Latin and several modern languages) and with often very obscure non-novelistic fiction in French and English. This essay will say something of her practice as a writer of fiction, and more about her acquisition of books, but it will focus on her criticism of the novels of the 1740s and 1750s. This project too demands an adjustment of critical viewpoint which repositions the canonical novelists into a less commanding position than we are used to. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was not a novelist, also does not feature in Indiana University Press's forthcoming anthology of women A version of this essay was given as the Wiles Memorial Lecture at McMaster University on 24 September 1992. 1 Robert Halsband says little about her romance writings in The Life ofLadyMary WortleyMontagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 253-54. Her books were catalogued in 1739, and the survivors again in 1928. Life, p. 180; Catalogue ofValuable Printed Books ... (London: Sotheby, 1928). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 4, July 1993 294 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION critics from the long eighteendi century. But her work—poems, letters, essays, plays, stories—shimmers with the play of a critical mind: social critique, gender critique, political and medical and literary critique. In answers and imitations, in mock forms of several kinds, she discusses critically the opinions, the assumptions, the genres and literary procedures of her contemporaries. She left just one formal critical essay, on the most famous play of her generation, Addison's Cato. Late in her career as a critic-at-large, as an omnivorous reader, and as a writer in half a dozen or more non-novelistic narrative forms, she encountered the new novel, and made trenchant comments on it. These comments express a highly individualistic, idiosyncratic mind. They also reflect the shock of contact between the bourgeois novel and two of the older traditions on which it crucially impinged: that of the aristocratic romance and that of classically oriented belles-lettres. Lady Mary consumed the new novel avidly, and (despite scathing judgments of some individual works) she stoutly defended the practice of novel-reading as such: not for its moral benefits, like almost every other contemporary defender of fiction, but for its value as pleasure. "No Entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting"; "there is no Remedy so easy as Books, which if they do not give chearfullness at least restore quiet to the most trouble'd Mind."2 She is a foremother of today's project of cultural criticism of popular fiction. Her criticism of novels, though it never takes any more formal shape than the ephemeral familiar letter, is worth serious notice. Though her response was in many ways old-fashioned, it offers today's critic a new perspective on the cultural field of eighteenth-century fiction (both nowcanonical and now-forgotten). Among the original audience of, say, Samuel Richardson or Henry or Sarah Fielding, Lady Mary was an anomaly. Though many novel-readers shared her gender, few shared her rank or her educational level; and each of those attributes was strangely compromised in her. Despite her rank and her husband's wealth, she was reading English novels in Italy as a literal and metaphorical social outsider; her education was something she had "stolen" for herself (her verb) in defiance of social norms, something she felt should be carefully concealed. Her response to novels exemplifies various kinds of snobbery, but never the intellectual snobbery of the reviewers who mediated the new novel to the better-educated end...

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