Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (baptized May 26, 1689, London, Eng.—died Aug. 21, 1762, London) was the most colourful Englishwoman of her time and a brilliant and versatile writer.

Her literary genius, like her personality, had many facets. She is principally remembered as a prolific letter writer in almost every epistolary style; she was also a distinguished minor poet, always competent, sometimes glittering and genuinely eloquent. She is further remembered as an essayist, feminist, traveler, and eccentric. Her beauty was marred by a severe attack of smallpox while she was still a young woman, and she later pioneered in England the practice of inoculation against the disease, having noticed the effectiveness of this precaution during a stay in Turkey.

The daughter of the 5th Earl of Kingston and Lady Mary Fielding (a cousin of the novelist Henry Fielding), she eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament, rather than accept a marriage that had been arranged by her father. In 1714 the Whigs came to power, and Edward Wortley Montagu was in 1716 appointed ambassador to Turkey, taking up residence with his wife in Constantinople (now Istanbul). After his recall in 1718, they bought a house in Twickenham, west of London. For reasons not wholly clear, Lady Mary’s relationship with her husband was by this time merely formal and impersonal.

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At Twickenham Lady Mary embarked upon a period of intense literary activity. She had earlier written a set of six “town eclogues” that were witty adaptations of the Roman poet Virgil. In these, she was helped by her friends John Gay and Alexander Pope (who later turned against her, satirizing her in The Dunciad and elsewhere, to which attacks Lady Mary replied with spirit, though she quickly abandoned poetic warfare). Among the works that she then composed was an anonymous and lively attack on the satirist Jonathan Swift (1734), a play, Simplicity (written c. 1735), adapted from the French of Pierre Marivaux, and a series of crisp essays dealing obliquely with politics and directly with feminism and the moral cynicism of her time.

In 1736 Lady Mary became infatuated with Francesco Algarotti, an Italian writer on the arts and sciences who had come to London to further his career, and she proposed that they live together in Italy. She set out in 1739, pretending to her husband and friends that she was traveling to the continent for reasons of health. Algarotti, however, did not join her, for he had been summoned to Berlin by Frederick II the Great, from whom he could expect greater rewards; and, when at length they met in Turin (1741), it proved a disagreeable experience. In 1742 she settled in the papal state of Avignon, France, where she lived until 1746. She then returned to Italy with the young Count Ugo Palazzi, with whom she lived for the next 10 years in the Venetian province of Brescia. Her letters from there to her daughter Mary, the Countess of Bute, contain descriptions of her essentially simple life. In 1756 she moved to Venice and, after her husband’s death in 1761, began planning her return to England. She set out in September of that year and was reunited with her daughter. Discontented in London, she would have returned to Italy; but she was seriously ill with cancer and died only seven months after her homecoming.

Lady Mary’s literary reputation chiefly rests on 52 superb Turkish embassy letters, which she wrote after her return as the ambassador’s wife in Constantinople, using her actual letters and journals as source material. The letters were published in 1763 from an unauthorized copy and were acclaimed throughout Europe. Later editions of her letters, sanctioned by her family, added selections from her personal letters together with most of her poetry. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vol. (ed. Robert Halsband, 1965–67), was the first full edition of Lady Mary’s letters.