ABSTRACT
The letter, then, was a significant feature of day-to-day life, especially public life. Apart from the writers discussed in this chapter, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Johnson, Sterne and Garrick composed some of their most interesting work in the medium of correspondence. Among the letter-writers proper, the most immediately attractive is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). She was, to start with, a deeply interesting person. But it is just as important that she found personal correspondence an absorbing medium. The matter of Britain reached her belatedly, and as it were already processed. She writes like the accredited foreign correspondent of eighteenth-century England. By middle life Lady Mary had recognized that January and May could not he together for long. Her marriage was a failure but - surprisingly, as Lytton Strachey pointed out - 'a failure of the usual kind'.
