University of Virginia Library

Introduction

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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was born in 1689 in London; her father was Evelyn Pierrepont, Earl of Kingston, a Yorkshire gentleman. She was the eldest child. Her mother, Lady Mary Fielding, died after bearing her fourth child, when Mary was still quite young. The Earl enjoyed the company of women and was not much inclined to take an interest in the children. After they were grown and out of the house he married a woman younger than any of them.

The children were raised by their paternal grandmother in Yorkshire. At a very early age Mary took over her mother's duties in presiding at the Earl's table. This meant that she must carve the meat for all the guests, who were often numerous. This was arduous work and she learned to have dinner early so she could concentrate on it to her fathers' satisfaction.

Young Lady Mary was always fascinated by literature. Determining to learn to read Ovid in the original, she took a Latin grammar and dictionary from the family library and hid with them for several hours a day for two years. She thus became competent in Latin and her father, upon discovering this, was pleased enough to have her tutored in Italian; she also learned French, and, years later, Turkish.

Her own collection of books, later in life, consisted mostly of English drama, as far back as Gammer Gurton's Needle. She also particularly enjoyed novels, such as those of Fielding, who was her cousin, and whose work she helped establish.

It was Lady Mary's ability to quote Horace in the original that attracted the attention of Edward Wortley Montagu, who believed, unlike many others, that women should be literate and educated. Montagu had gone to Cambridge, then the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar in 1699. He traveled on the Continent in 1701-3, with Joseph Addison, a close friend. From 1705 on, Wortley Montagu spent most of his life in Parliament and was a noted speaker in the Whig cause.

Wortley Montagu corresponded with Mary for seven years before he really concluded to marry her in 1712. In the meantime, her father decided to marry her to a boorish lord who could offer more money than Montagu, and shipped her off to marry him. She determined to elope and had Wortley follow her coach and steal her from an inn in the middle of the night.

Wortley admired his wife's intellect and offered her services as a critic to Addison on his tragedy, Cato. She was shy about this but told Addison she was only doing it on the orders of her husband. Her essay praises Addison's characterization but savages his plot, and makes many pointed suggestions. He actually followed most of them, but asked that her essay never see the light of day. It was not published until this century.

In 1713 Lady Mary's first child, Edward Wortley Montagu, was born. She doted on him when he was small and worked hard at parenting, but he proved to be completely incorrigible. Edward periodically ran away from home, and eventually was placed on the Continent with a tutor who had to watch him night and day. If he escaped he forged his parents' signatures and ran up huge debts. He married several women, not all at the same time, but never bothered with divorce.

In 1714 Lady Mary wrote a Spectator, #573, for Addison, in the guise of a letter from Mrs. President of a club of widows. She describes her six dead husbands as worthless fellows who none of them rated a very long mourning. It is powerful feminist satire and a very good novella packed into four pages.

In that year, Queen Anne died and Wortley Montague's fortunes improved. He was a Lord of the Treasury under George I. It became possible for Lady Mary, who had been kept mostly in the country, to move to London. She was an instant hit in society and became a friend of Gay and Pope. Gay was at this time inventing a genre called Town Eclogue, adapting pastoral conventions to London doings, and had a half-finished example by him. He and Lady Mary completed differing versions of it, and she set out producing a whole set of them, one for each day except Sunday. These were much admired, and two of them, along with the one written with Gay, found their way into print. Curll, the publisher, had done this without permission, and Pope invited him to tea and administered an emetic in revenge, then published a poem detailing the effects. Lady Mary was not named in the volume, but was hinted at, and became known as something of a literary figure. Pope laboriously copied out the five that were Lady Mary's into a handsomely bound blank-book, which rests today in the New York Public Library.

In 1716 Wortley Montagu was appointed ambassador to Turkey. His family's long and dangerous journey over the Continent in dead of winter was considered something of an achievement at the time. Lady Mary enjoyed it all, and kept up a constant correspondence with friends in England, writing in a style that eventually established her permanent epistolary reputation. Constantinople was full of wonders which Lady Mary, unlike so many European wives, set out to explore and understand. She mastered the language, investigated mosques, and visited with the women of the harem, whom she came to admire. She discovered that the Turks inoculated for smallpox, and determined to bring the practice to England.

Alexander Pope corresponded with her during this time, and sent her a copy of his "Eloise to Abelard," and she finding a line from one of her Town Eclogues in it, wrote in the margin: mine!

Wortley was recalled due to a change in English relations with Turkey, and the family, with a new daughter (later the Countess of Bute), appeared in London in the fall of 1718. Pope had Lady Mary's picture painted by Godfrey Kneller, wrote some verses on it which are still printed in his works, and it hung in his best room for the rest of his life. The Wortley Montagus settled in his neighborhood at Twickenham, and he is said to have made an effort to declare his love openly to her in about the year 1722. She tried unsuccessfully to stifle an amused laugh, upon which he became her enemy forever after.

At the same time Lady Mary was struggling to interest the English medical establishment in inoculation. Their main objection seems to have been to being told by a woman what it was their business to know. She did succeed in defeating smallpox in England, but barely succeeded in being thanked for it, and her relations with high society worsened steadily, especially when Pope began attacking her honor (on the point of chastity) in verse.

Lady Mary became a great friend of Lord Hervey, who was satirized by Pope as Lord Fanny. She herself said the world was made up of "men, women, and Herveys." She worked closely with Hervey in composing replies to Pope, and in these poems is found some of her best lines. But it was like pouring oil on the flames. Anything Pope wrote was going to be read everywhere and for decades, if not centuries, and Lady Mary was helping to create a situation which endangered the career and social standing of her husband, a member of Parliament.

In 1737 she took a hand in helping her husband's party by bringing out, anonymously, a newspaper against the popular Opposition paper Common-Sense. Hers was called The Nonsense of Common-sense. It ran for at least nine numbers.

"Lewis Gibbs" (pseud., writing in 1949) suggests that, as Pope's malevolence continued unabated and included Wortley (as a cuckold and a dull miser), it was determined in family council that Lady Mary should go into exile and not return until after his death. Robert Halsband, who had access to more correspondence than Gibbs or anyone previously, says that, just as was rumored at the time Lady Mary actually had hopes of joining a lover, the handsome young Italian author Algarotti. Lord Hervey was also infatuated with Algarotti, and the two appear to have competed for his attention; neither in the end was successful. Lady Mary, who was forty-seven at this time, did go to the continent, did not manage to settle down with Algarotti or any other lover that we know of, and lived in France and Italy for twenty years without seeing her husband in all this time. He gave her a generous allowance and corresponded with her, especially about their troublesome son, and kept all her letters. He asked her to see Naples and describe it to him. He lived into his eighties, and shortly after his death Lady Mary returned to London, already dying of breast cancer. She died in August 1762, age 73.

Lady Mary's daughter had meanwhile married Lord Bute, who became George III's right hand man. It was important to Mary, Countess of Bute, to maintain the utmost propriety in eyes of the world, and the most probable source of any possible embarrassment was her mother. Lady Mary wrote a history of her times, and this could have made trouble, but as she assured her daughter, Each chapter was destroyed as soon as it was written. Lady Mary had also kept a journal all her life; this the Countess came into possession of, and kept it long suppressed, and then burned it. Only a short memoir of the court of George I survives of these materials; it is considered a valuable document by historians, and is a vivid example of Lady Mary's excellent prose.

When Lady Mary was about to return for the last time to England, she asked Rev. Sowden to keep for publication her Embassy Letters. When her family heard of this manuscript they offered five hundred pounds for it, and got it, but to their horror another copy had been made, and the work was published. It was an overnight sensation, and went into multiple editions. Dr. Samuel Johnson loved the letters, and Edward Gibbon said of them, "What fire, what ease, what knowledge of Europe and Asia." Lady Mary had triumphed over the strictures of a society in which publishing one's work was unseemly for a woman, especially one of high rank, and over the objections and stratagems of a family that subscribed to these strictures. She had secured perhaps the only thing she really ever wanted: lasting, and deserved, literary fame.
— Richard Bear