Too clever for her own good

‘I am sorry to say that the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity,’ wrote Elizabeth Montagu in 1750, after looking over the memoirs of her contemporary, the witty Mrs Pilkington. Mrs Montagu, learned, respectable and rich, curled her lip at poor Laetitia Pilkington, who started writing for pure pleasure but was then forced to use her pen to keep afloat in a harsh world. She died soon after Mrs Montagu’s comment, and her reputation remained dubious. In the old DNB she was described as an adventuress. But in the 1920s Virginia Woolf devoted a brilliant essay to her, and her memoirs were edited by Iris Barry, who found ‘something heroic and indomitable in her silliness’ and saw that ‘in a queer, outlandish fashion she preserved the honour of womanhood’. The new DNB has made amends, and now Norma Clarke has written her biography. It is very welcome, and she charts her way with admirable clarity through the confusions of a life both bright and painful, and the horrifying early 18th-century world of quarrelling writers, patronage and corruption in which her subject struggled.

She was born in Ireland about 1709 to a mother with aristocratic connections and a father who made a reputation as a fashionable Dublin physician. From childhood Laetitia had a remarkable gift for memorising poetry and she was soon producing her own verses. In her teens she married Matthew Pilkington, a young clergyman with literary ambitions of his own, and they were taken up by Swift, then at the height of his fame. He found them both amusing, and she was clever enough to deal with his form of entertainment in which bullying abuse alternated with praise and petting.