Martha Fowke’s Tributes to Mary, Lady Chudleigh , 1711 and 1726

When the distinguished poet Mary, Lady Chudleigh, died after a long illness on 15 December 1710, her death seems to have passed almost unnoticed by both the general public and by other writers. Such absence of tribute seems ironic given Chudleigh’s own reputation not just as the author of the well-known The Ladies Defence and ‘To the Ladies’, but as a moving elegist who paid eloquent public tribute to the lives of other women. In her Poems on Several Occasions (1703) Chudleigh published three distinctive elegies under her own name, ‘On the Death of his Highness the Duke of Glocester’,‘On the Death of my Honoured Mother Mrs Lee: A Dialogue between Lucinda and Marissa’, and ‘On the Death of my dear Daughter Eliza Maria Chudleigh: A Dialogue Between Lucinda and Marissa’. Anne K Mellor has described Chudleigh as a superlative elegist, who in ‘three extraordinarily powerful and perceptive elegies … defines the conventions of the elegy as intuitive grief-work’. In her tribute to the Duke of Gloucester, who died aged eleven in 1700, Chudleigh unashamedly shows maternal grief as a far more powerful and obsessive emotion than paternal grieving, attributing to Anne an overwhelming sensation of drowning in despair at the loss of her last surviving son. Chudleigh herself lost several children in early infancy, including her son Richard. But the double blow of her daughter Eliza’s death aged around eight or nine, following the death of her own mother Mary Sydenham Lee the previous year, inspired her two deeply personal elegies, ‘On the Death of my Honoured Mother Mrs Lee’ and ‘On the Death of my dear Daughter Eliza Maria Chudleigh’. Like her elegy on the Duke of Gloucester, Chudleigh’s elegy to Eliza dwells painfully on the tension between hope and despair, the sense of helplessness as the mother watches her own child die. These two elegiac dialogues dramatize Chudleigh’s grieving process, and her struggle to reconcile her deep sense of loss with a state of stoic acceptance and Christian consolation.