Benefit Street, Brighton.

  It was her name that first drew me to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  In it the Christian, the Old English and the French  mixed together to encapsulate her families passage down through the years. And also just because I like the sounds it makes. As is the way with a name or a concept one has recently encountered, the name kept cropping up in different contexts ranging from the poetic to the scientific, to the medical; and as a feminist. She was being revealed as one of those brave, rebellious Early Modern women whom I was winkling out from under the dusty pall of almost unexplored dismissal.  Mary was born c1689 in the reign of William and Mary of Orange, so no doubt she was one of hundreds of baby girls all over England who were given that same name. From a young age she was resentful of  the expensive education to which her brothers had access but which was forbidden her because of her sex. However, she had complete access to her father's remarkable library an...

I have a somewhat proprietary view of Early Modern women. This stems from the turn of the century -  when there were only four other people in Australia who had discovered Margaret Cavendish; everyone still got marks for citing Ben Johnson as the writer of the first 'Country House'  poem; Jonathan Swift was credited with having introduced the fiction & satire genres; and reference books assured us that it was the dawn of the 20thC before any woman was invited to the Royal Society. So while I'm pleased that we've challenged history and found so much more truth in it than other generations have been able to; it still saddens me that so little of this information has seeped through as mainstream knowledge. Take, for an example, the mysterious, much speculated-about Amelia Lanyer - who was named before spelling became uniform; so I'm sticking with the first spelling of it I came across back in 2004. There are many academics whose only real interest in Amelia (am on ...