Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment by Isobel Grundy (review)

232 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 comings, are M.M. Goldsmith=s concern, as he weighs the validity of the arguments on both sides. Malcolm Jack views Mandeville=s thought through the lens of Samuel Johnson=s reactions to it. Although Johnson as a Christian and a moralist objected to aspects of Mandeville, in particular the narrow definition of vice, Jack shows how and why both writers share certain social and even psychological views. The two final essays take up major themes in Mandeville=s work that have been either ignored or inadequately covered in earlier criticism. Thomas Stumpf elegantly analyses the idea of the Golden Age, surveying an impressive array of classical and contemporary contexts that reveal the continuing appeal of the simple life to the great defender of luxury. From Virgil and Lucretius to Chaucer, Dryden, and Goldsmith, Stumpf=s presentation of the range of literary traditions that Mandeville used and allusively twisted is subtle and convincing. Finally, military matters are the subject of Irwin Primer=s essay on the backgrounds of Mandeville=s attitudes towards war. Focusing on the causes of war and the relationships between honour, Christianity, and war, Primer makes a strong case for the influence of Grotius on Mandeville=s martial thought. The focus of this collection on contexts for rather than the contents of Mandeville=s writings was adopted in part to evade continuing difficulties in trying to construct a consistent ideological stance from these works. Even as this approach enlarges the reader=s understanding of Mandeville=s early eighteenth-century milieu, the puzzle of the man himself and his views remains; >complex,= >contradictory,= >paradoxical,= >ambiguous,= and >elusive= are recurring adjectives throughout these essays. The writers in this collection have made valuable contributions to our understanding of Mandeville=s world. Future work might well heed Stumpf=s reminder that Mandeville >is a great literary figure,= and see what insights further analyses in literary directions might add. (MARTINE WATSON BROWNLEY) Isobel Grundy. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment Oxford University Press. xxiii, 680. ,30.00 Isobel Grundy prefaces her life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689B1762), letter writer, poet, essayist, and fiction writer, with two provocative epigraphs on the subjects of biography and scholarship. The first identifies that >old illusion= through which we observe and arrange those >little figures= of the past >in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant,= while they, by contrast, >thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked [and] sa[y] straight off whatever came into their heads= (Virginia Woolf, >I Am Christina Rossetti=). The second satirizes with elliptical brevity >Scolastic Works, spiders webs= (Montagu, CommonplaceBook ). These epigraphs serve as invigorating counterpoint to Grundy=s superb biography of this extraordinary adventurer in literature and life. It HUMANITIES 233 would be disappointing for readers, on the one hand, to discover that this biographer merely had not erred by condescension and reduction of the kind Woolf describes. It would be risky for the writer, on the other hand, to invoke Montagu=s interrogatory scepticism to preface a lesser biography than the one Grundy has written. What one does discover most satisfyingly is that these epigrammatic cross-examinations, which Grundy develops in a variety of ways throughout the life, serve as intellectual equivalents of the architectural principle of stress/counter-stress to create both a substantial (feeling of) life and continuous acknowledgment of what cannot be known or understood about this particular life or is unavoidably absent from this representation (including Montagu=s diary, destroyed by family members, and a large body of political and social commentary, love poetry, and fiction). Grundy tells an engagingly full and compelling story of a life into which she weaves an equally rich account of the problems of researching and representing that life. Robert Halsband, Montagu=s mid-twentieth-century scholarly biographer and one of the dedicatees of this life, observed in his Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1956) that any biography must take into account the subject=s current reputation. Montagu=s reputation, when Halsband wrote, was, so he remarks, >usually derived from the writings of Pope and Walpole , both of whom describe her most vividly as a...