Samuel Pepys and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Personal prose is boring. I know that it's supposed to be boring, but it still bothers me. Pepys writes about very ordinary things, and he writes it all to himself but maybe with the hope that people would find it among all the papers he left to Magdalen, and read it again. So I read his 1666 diary, which is the one where London mostly recovers from the plague but then burns half down in September. In the midst of this, there's a lot of gossip and bitching—what rumor was circulating at court about Charles' favorite mistress's childhood masturbatory habits, how bad Sir William Penn's poop smelled in April, when he emptied his chamberpot while Sam and Elizabeth were hanging out on their roof next door and had to go in because of the smell, what the Queen's doctor said about the membranes of her aborted fetus's corpse (from the membranes, she was just as healthy as any other woman with a lot of babies). Elizabeth never had babies; Sam had a lot of mistresses, some of whom did have babies, although it's not clear whether the babies were his. (He would have written it in his diary, if he thought so.) He's worried about his testicles; Elizabeth is worried about her teeth. Their house doesn't burn down, but they lose some money. At the end of the year, though, they have more plate than they've ever had before.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did write for an audience—for her best friend and her husband and her sister and her daughter and her other friends, including Alexander Pope and women she'd grown up with and the man she fell in love with when she was fifty, and the exiled Jacobite who became her substitute child, along with his wife, for like a decade when they were all in Italy. She has the advantage over Pepys that she actually went places and saw stuff, too—made fun of the relics in a Catholic church in Austria, made fun of the preacher's hat at a Calvinist church in Holland, visited the late Sultan's favorite mistress outside Constantinople, flirted with lords in Venice, visited a lady's bath in Constantinople (if English ladies went around in public naked, she says, they'd make less fuss about faces—she'd had smallpox already at this point, and was a little sensitive about her face, I guess). When she got old, she retired to a country house she'd bought between Lake Iseo and Milan, where she read a lot of novels her daughter sent her. She liked Smollett, liked some H. Fielding, thought S. Fielding was stupid (the Fieldings were both her first cousins), and resented Richardson for being annoying and compelling at the same time. A lot of her letters are tedious as hell. They're interesting though for showing how she's a different subject for different audiences, which is something that very little of the epistolary fiction I've read has been interested in, I'm not sure why.