The missing literary link between Aphra Behn and Fanny Burney, like both these women Lady Mary Wortley Montagu suffered the disadvantages of her sex. But she was further hindered by her social status as aristocratic women in the 18th century were discouraged from drawing any public attention to themselves.
Born the eldest daughter of the first Duke of Kingston at the very start of William and Mary's reign, she lived to see her son-in-law serve as Prime Minister under George III. Given the mortality rates of the period (her brother died at the age of 21), this in itself was something of an achievement, but Lady Mary's posthumous fame rests primarily on her reputation as a proto-feminist.
In reality, as this exemplary - if rather long - biography shows, her life was a constant and unresolved tussle between the desire to conform to the requirements of her class and the need to break free of socially-imposed restraints. The latter sometimes won, as when she rejected suitors proposed by her family and eloped with the untitled commoner Edward Wortley Montagu.
But just as often, she allowed her spirit - and her talents - to be held in check. For this reason, it was only after her death that Lady Mary's wonderfully vivid letters, especially those covering the period when her husband was British ambassador to the Turkish court in Constantinople, were only widely disseminated after her death. Her diaries, which were probably even more lively, were destroyed in an act of filial piety by Lady Mary's daughter.
An early promoter of smallpox inoculation, the friend (and subsequently enemy) of Alexander Pope as well as other authors of the period, a brilliant conversationalist and a fearless, often solitary traveller, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was always a pioneer and for this alone deserves to be recalled.
Robert O Byrne is an Irish Times staff journalist.