Everything about Lady Mary Wortley Montague totally explained
The
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (born
26 May 1689 in
Thoresby Hall, died
21 August 1762) was an
English aristocrat and writer. Montagu is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from Turkey, which have been described by Billie Melman as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient”.
Life
Lady Mary was a daughter of
Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. She formed a close friendship with
Mary Astell, a champion of
women's rights, and with Anne Wortley Montagu, granddaughter of the
1st Earl of Sandwich. With Anne, she carried on an animated correspondence. Anne's letters, however, were often copied from drafts written by her brother,
Edward Wortley Montagu, and after Anne's death in 1709 the correspondence between Edward and Lady Mary continued without an intermediary. Lady Mary's father, now
Marquess of Dorchester, rejected Wortley Montagu as a son-in-law because he refused to entail his estate on a possible heir. Negotiations were broken off, and when Lord Dorchester insisted on another marriage for his daughter, Edward and Mary eloped in 1712. The early years of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's married life were spent in seclusion in the country. Her husband became
Member of Parliament for Westminster in 1715, and shortly afterwards was made a
Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. When Lady Mary joined him in London her wit and beauty soon made her a prominent figure at court.
Early in 1716, Edward Wortley Montagu was appointed Ambassador at
Istanbul. Lady Mary accompanied him to
Vienna, and thence to
Adrianople and Istanbul. He was recalled in
1717, but they remained at Istanbul until 1718. The story of this voyage and of her observations of Eastern life is told in the
Turkish Embassy Letters, a series of lively letters full of graphic description;
Letters is often credited as being an inspiration for subsequent female traveller/writers, as well as for much
Orientalist art. Lady Mary returned to the West with knowledge of the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox, known as
variolation. In the 1790s,
Edward Jenner developed a safer method,
vaccination.
Before starting for the East she'd met
Alexander Pope, and during her absence he wrote her a series of extravagant letters, which appear to have been chiefly exercises in the art of writing gallant epistles. Very few letters passed between them after Lady Mary's return, and various reasons have been suggested for the subsequent estrangement and violent quarrel. The last of the Letters during the embassy to Istanbul is addressed to Pope and purports to be written from
Dover on
1 November 1718. It contains a parody on Pope's
Epitaph on the Lovers struck by Lightning. The manuscript collection of these letters was passed round a considerable circle, and Pope may have been offended at the circulation of this piece of satire. Jealousy of her friendship with
Lord Hervey has also been alleged, but
Lady Louisa Stuart says Pope had made Lady Mary a declaration of love, which she'd received with an outburst of laughter. In any case Lady Mary always professed complete innocence of all cause of offence in public. She is alluded to in the
Dunciad in a passage to which Pope affixed one of his insulting notes.
A Pop upon Pope was generally thought to be her work, and Pope thought she was part author of
One Epistle to Mr A. Pope (1730).
Pope attacked her again and again, but with especial virulence in a gross couplet in the Imitation of the
First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, as
Sappho. She asked a third person to remonstrate, and received the obvious answer that Pope couldn't have foreseen that she or anyone else would apply so base an insult to herself.
Verses addressed to an Imitator of Horace by a Lady (1733), a scurrilous reply to these attacks, is generally attributed to the joint efforts of Lady Mary and her sworn ally, Lord Hervey. She had a romantic correspondence with a Frenchman named Rémond, who addressed to her a series of excessively gallant letters before ever seeing her. She invested money for him in
South Sea stock at his desire, and as was expressly stated, at his own risk. The value fell to half the price, and he tried to extort the original sum as a debt by a threat of exposing the correspondence to her husband. She seems to have been really alarmed, not at the imputation of gallantry, but lest her husband should discover the extent of her own speculations. This disposes of the second half of Pope's line "Who starves a sister, or forswears a debt" (
Epilogue to the Satires, 113), and the first charge is quite devoid of foundation. She did in fact try to rescue her favourite sister, the countess of Mar, who was mentally deranged, from the custody of her brother-in-law,
Lord Grange, who had treated his own wife with notorious cruelty, and the slander originated with him.
In 1739 she left her husband and went abroad, and although they continued to write to each other in affectionate and respectful terms, they never met again. At
Florence in 1740 she visited
Horace Walpole, who cherished a great spite against her, and exaggerated her eccentricities into a revolting slovenliness (see
Letters, ed. Cunningham, i. 59). She lived at
Avignon, at
Brescia, and at
Lovere on the
Lago d'Iseo. She was disfigured by a painful skin disease, (smallpox), and her sufferings were so acute that she hints at the possibility of madness. She was struck with a terrible fit of sickness while visiting the countess Palazzo and her son, and perhaps her mental condition made restraint necessary. As Lady Mary was then in her sixty-third year, the scandalous interpretation put on the matter by Horace Walpole may safely be discarded.
Her husband spent his last years in hoarding money, and at his death in 1761 is said to have been a millionaire. His extreme parsimony is satirized in Pope's
Imitations of Horace (2nd satire of the 2nd book) in the portrait of Avidieu and his wife. Her daughter
Mary, Countess of Bute, whose
husband was now
Prime Minister, begged her to return to England. She came to London, and died in the year of her return, on
21 August 1762. Her son,
Edward, was also an author and traveller.
Scholarly editions of her works only appeared during the late 20th century.
She is mentioned in the
Doctor Who novel
Only Human by
Gareth Roberts as an example of why marrying for love is "overrated".
In 2003, Jennifer Lee Carrell published
The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox, which recounts the tale of Lady Mary's struggle to bring inoculation to London, drawing heavily on her diaries and personal correspondence.
Ottoman smallpox inoculation
When Lady Mary was in the Ottoman Empire, she discovered the local practice of inoculation against smallpox –
variolation. Unlike
Jenner's later
vaccination, which used cowpox, variolation used a small measure of smallpox itself. Lady Mary's own brother had died of the disease, and her own famous beauty had been marred by a bout with the disease, prior to her visit to Turkey. She was eager to spare her children similar suffering, and had them inoculated while in Turkey. On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure, but encountered a great deal of resistance from the medical establishment both because it was an "Oriental" process and because of her gender. However, the British royal family had their own children inoculated.
Literary place
Lady Mary avoided publication during her lifetime, partly to avoid the personal attacks that inevitably followed, and much of her work hasn't survived. However, her letters from Turkey were clearly intended for circulation among members of her own social circle, and she revised them extensively after her return.
Montagu's Turkish letters were to prove an inspiration to later generations of European women travellers to the Orient. In particular, Montagu staked a claim to the particular authority of women's writing, due to their ability to access private homes and female-only spaces where men were not permitted. The title of her published letters refers to "Sources that Have Been Inaccessible to Other Travellers". The letters themselves frequently draw attention to the fact that they present a different (and, Montagu asserts, more accurate) description than that provided by previous (male) travellers: "You will perhaps be surpriz'd at an Account so
different from what you've been entertaind with by the common Voyage-writers who are very fond of speaking of what they don't know." Montagu provides an intimate desciption of the women's bathhouse, in which she derides male descriptions of the bathhouse as a site for unnatural sexual practices, instead insisting that it was “the Women’s coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc”. However, Montagu's detailed descriptions of nude Oriental beauties provided inspiration for male artists such as Ingres, who restored the explicitly erotic content that Montagu had denied.
Montagu's Turkish letters were frequently cited by imperial women travellers, more than a century after her journey. Such writers cited Montagu's assertion that women travellers could gain an intimate view of Turkish life that wasn't available to their male counterparts. However, they also added corrections or elaborations to her observations. Julia Pardoe, in describing her own visit to a bathhouse, wrote "I should be unjust if I didn't declare that I saw none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady Mary Montagu. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate and fastidious in the ideas of propriety." Emmeline Lott, who wrote a book about her experience working as a governess for the son of Ishamel Pasha, claimed that Montagu's aristocratic rank meant that she'd seen only the most attractive elements of Oriental life: "...her handsome train, Lady Ambassadress as she was, swept but across the splendid carpeted floors of these noble Saloons of Audience, all of which had been, as is invariably the custom, well “swept and garnished” for her reception."
Her
Letters and Works were published in 1837. Wortley Montagu's octogenarian granddaughter
Lady Louisa Stuart contributed to this, anonymously, an introductory essay called
Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu, from which it was clear that Stuart was troubled by her grandmother's focus on sexual intrigues and didn't see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
Account of the Court of George I at his Accession as history.
In 1901, her letters were edited and published as
The Best Letters of Mary Wortley Montagu by
Octave Thanet.
Paintings
On a recent episode of the British TV show "
Antiques Roadshow", several paintings attributed to Lady Mary were brought in for valuation. Remarkable for their sensitive portrayals of royal courtiers of the Turkish empire, the paintings show lively and genuine artistic talent. The colours are still vibrant, and it's interesting to note that she was allowed to paint male members of the royal family. These valuable works are currently in the hands of a private owner, who plans to bequeath them to a museum.
Further Information
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