Letters Between Mothers and Daughters by Barbara Caine

Author:Barbara Caine [Caine, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138392571
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Tenderness, Tittle-tattle and Truth in Mother–Daughter Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart, Countess of Bute, and Lady Louisa Stuart

Diana G. Barnes

The correspondence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her daughter and granddaughter is one of the most extensive collections of English mother–daughter letters for the period. Through it one can see the nature of their political and social activity and their sense and construction of their own social identities and responsibilities. But what is most distinct about the Montagu–Bute–Stuart sequence is their reflection on what mother–daughter letters meant.

The letters exchanged between Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) and her daughter, Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart, Countess of Bute (1718–94), and Bute and her daughter (and Montagu’s granddaughter), Lady Louisa Stuart (1757–1851) provide a rich resource for considering how letters exchanged between mothers and daughters can foster a dialogue concerning the place of women in society.1 Montagu promoted mother–daughter letters as a forum for honest critical engagement, learned discussion of books and frank analysis of society otherwise unavailable to English women. In terms derived from Madame de Sévigné’s published letters to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, Montagu identified tenderness and tittle-tattle as the defining characteristics of mother–daughter letters. Rather than viewing the ‘triffling Life’ and discourse of women as trivial, she stressed that ‘Those that can laugh and are diverted with absurdities are the wisest Spectators’, implying that through light-hearted tattle she and her daughter affirmed their values and powers of reason.2 The strength of the collection is its cross-generational span, which allows us to identify the proto-feminist ethos in which Montagu sought to inculcate her daughter and granddaughters, and then trace Bute and Stuart’s reactions. In letters, as in their lives, Bute and Stuart’s overriding concerns were reputation and propriety, and they shied away from controversy at all costs. They maintained, however, some reference to shared reading, analysed their milieu and employed the wry tone Montagu advocated to signal their preparedness to probe beneath the surface of the social world they described.

Quantitatively the Montagu–Bute–Stuart epistolary corpus is tipped in Montagu’s favour. One hundred and twenty-nine of Montagu’s letters to Bute written over sixteen years from 1746 to 1762 survive, but none of Bute’s replies. There are also around a dozen letters exchanged between Bute and Stuart during July and August 1783, and 1788.3 The archive takes this shape for reasons of personality, chance and intervention. Montagu was the most prolific of the three, and the archive accurately reflects this. The absence of Bute’s letters to Montagu is explained by the fact that living abroad, Montagu did not automatically file her incoming letters in a munitions room with other household papers as Bute probably did at her family homes in London or the Isle of Bute. The paucity of Bute–Stuart letters is understandable as they lived together and had little need to write. Although there is significantly more information about Montagu’s attitude towards mother–daughter letters than the others’, something of Bute’s concerns and interests is captured in Montagu’s replies, and Bute and Stuart’s brief exchange testifies to a daily intimacy.

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