Life
1677-1715 [The Hon. Mrs. Monk; var. Monck]; 2nd. dg. Robert Molesworth (Viscount of Molesworth) [q.v.];, taught herself Latin, Italian and Spanish ‘in the leisure hours of a young lady [...]’ (Molesworth); m. George Monk, living at at St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, with dgs. (Sarah Monck, d.1739) and another; and a son, Henry Stanley Monck (d.1745); her poems published posthum. by her father as Marinda, Poems and Translations Upon Several Occasions (1716); a poem to her husband written on her deathbed is incl. in Colman and Bonnell"s Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755). RR ODNB CAB RIA
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, p.437: Hon. Mary Monk: ‘Daughter of Lord Molesworth, and wife to George Monk, Esq. was celebrated for her poetical talents. She acquired, by dint of application, a perfect knowledge of the Latin, Italian, and Spanish languages, and from a study of the best authors, a decided taste for poetical composition. Her poems were not printed till after her decease, when they were published under the title of Marinda; Poems and Translations upon several Occasions (London 1716, 8vo.) A dedication to Caroline Princess of Wales, was prefixed to them by Lord Molesworth, the father of Mrs. Monk, who speaks of the poems as the productions “of the leisure hours of a young woman, who, in a remote country retirement, without other assistance than that of a good library, and without omitting the daily care due to a large family, not only acquired the several languages here made use of, but the good morals and principles contained in those books, so as to put them in practice, as well during her life and languishing sickness, as at the hour of her death; dying not only like a Christian, but a Roman lady, and becoming at once the grief and the comfort of her relations.” She died at Bath, in 1715. / On her death-bed she wrote some very affecting verses to her husband, which are not printed in her works, but may be found in vol. ii. of the Poems of Eminent Ladies and in Cibber’s Lives.’
Notes
Frances H. Gerard, Some Celebrated Irish Beauties of the Last Century [Vol. i], (1895), incls. Mary Molesworth; see also Marghanita Laski, Mrs Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs Hodgson [blue stockings] (London 1950).
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