Mary Wortley Montagu

English writer

• Born: May 26, 1689
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: August 21, 1762
• Place of death: London, England

Montagu is best remembered for her epistolary literature—the letter as literature—and for her bold campaign to introduce the practice of smallpox inoculation into Europe.

Early Life

Mary Wortley Montagu was the eldest daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, the fifth earl and first duke of Kingston, and Lady Mary Fielding (a cousin of the novelist Henry Fielding), who died when her daughter was about four years old. From childhood, Mary exhibited high intelligence and a strong will. Primarily self-educated, as a young teen she taught herself Latin in her father’s library and wrote poetry under male and female pseudonyms, both practices strongly forbidden a proper young lady of her day. Her childhood included the attentions of such literary personages as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and William Congreve.

In 1712, she rejected a marriage arranged by her father, eloping instead with Edward Wortley Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament, after a two-year secret correspondence. They had two children, a daughter who was to become Lady Bute as the wife of John Stuart (prime minister under George III), and a son. While her husband remained at court, Mary wrote letters and poetry and cultivated friendships with such literary luminaries as Alexander Pope and John Gay. During this period, in 1715, she survived the dreaded smallpox; her face, however, was permanently disfigured and scarred. This experience influenced her decision later in life to take action to help eradicate the disease.

After the Whigs came to power in 1714, Montagu’s husband was appointed British ambassador to Turkey. In 1716, she journeyed across Europe with his embassy to Constantinople (now Istanbul), where she took up residence for two years. During this formidable journey she learned the Turkish language and customs, gave birth to a daughter, observed the practice of inoculation against smallpox, and—something absolutely forbidden male travelers—visited a Turkish harem.

Life’s Work

Mary Wortley Montagu’s earlier literary efforts included a set of six satirical “Town Eclogues” (1716) written in the style of the Roman poet Vergil, but it was the series of letters she wrote to friends and family during her Turkish adventure that established her literary reputation. They provided the primary source material for the fifty-two immensely popular Turkish Embassy Letters, written upon her return to England in 1718. The Turkish Embassy Letters, however, were not published until 1763, the year after her death. Mary Astell, a friend and popular feminist writer of the time, wrote the preface, and subsequent volumes featured Montagu’s poetry.

Dressed in the Turkish fashion, completely covered from head to foot, Montagu explored Constantinople’s markets, streets, and baths to see at first hand everyday life in the eighteenth century Turkish Empire. Instead of feeling restrained by Turkish dress, Montagu found that it invoked feelings of freedom because women could in effect experience more privacy and walk around with “entire liberty . . . without danger of discovery.” Montagu’s letters echo dissatisfaction at the constrained social role eighteenth century upper-class British women were expected to play: “Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire,” she wrote in a letter to a female friend. The Turkish Embassy Letters provide a playful, tongue-in-cheek account of her experiences, but on another level they were written to counteract much of the travel writing of contemporary men, many of whom tended to denigrate and exaggerate the differences between people. Montagu, herself in Turkish costume, tended to admire and identify with others and encourage tolerance.

Montagu also returned from Turkey deeply motivated to spread the concept of inoculation, the now-obsolete method of immunizing patients against smallpox by infecting them with a small amount of the virus. In one of the Turkish Embassy Letters written in 1717 to friend Sarah Chiswell, Montagu wrote, “I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England.” She described in the same letter how smallpox was in Turkey “entirely harmless” because of the process of ingrafting, the term used by the Turks for inoculation. Montagu emphasized that thousands underwent this procedure yearly but that no deaths were ever reported to have been caused by it.

Against the vehement British medical community’s advice, Montagu had her own two children inoculated. Sarcastically, she maintains that the British doctors refused to listen to information concerning this Eastern procedure because they might lose money. She wrote, “I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind.” Between 1721 and 1722, Montagu publicly campaigned to make this Eastern knowledge available to the European public. Indeed, her efforts constitute the first step toward smallpox eradication. The next step was taken by Edward Jenner, who used cowpox as an immunizing agent, in 1796.

Although she never considered herself a professional writer, in the 1720’s during her campaign against smallpox, Montagu composed satirical commentaries on marriage, divorce, and British social life in epistolary (letter) form. Her literary quarrels with her close friend Pope (who nicknamed her “Sappho,” after the Greek classic author of lyric verse, and who viciously attacked her in his 1728 The Dunciad) and Jonathan Swift are famous. The reasons for her falling out with Pope remain unclear, but she incensed the poet by collaborating with his enemy John Hervey in Verses Addressed to the Imitator of Horace (1733). In 1735, she translated the playSimplicity from the French of Marivaux. During 1737 and 1738, Montagu anonymously penned her own political journal, The Nonsense of Common Sense, in response to a series of attacks by the Tory journal Common Sense against Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s Whig government. In “Number Six,” her feminist voice is particularly vocal: “Amongst the most universal errors I reckon that of treating the weaker sex with contempt which has a very bad influence on their conduct.” In later life, she continued to write letters to her daughter, Lady Bute, in which she detailed the simplicity of her life on the Continent: “Perhaps I shall succeed better in describing my manner of life, which is as regular as that of any monastery.”

Although scholars still debate the reasons for the breakdown in the relationship between Montagu and her husband, it is clear that by the late 1730’s the marriage was merely one of convenience. In 1736, well into middle age, she fell deeply in love with the handsome bisexual Francesco Algarotti, an Italian writer much her junior. Pretending illness to her husband and friends, in 1739 she traveled to Italy to live with him. He, however, failed to join her. In 1742, she settled in Avignon, France, where she lived until 1746. She spent the next ten years in Italy and returned home to England only upon the death of her husband in 1761; she died there of cancer shortly thereafter.

Significance

Clearly, Mary Wortley Montagu followed her own counsel. Indeed, one scholar has referred to her as “the most colourful Englishwoman of her time and a brilliant and versatile writer.” A leading member of British society in a letter-writing century that also saw the works of Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, and William Cowper, she stood out for her eloquent epistolary style. “What fire, what ease, what knowledge of Europe and Asia!” historian Edward Gibbon remarked upon the publication of her Turkish letters. Voltaire praised her letters above those of Madame de Sévigné, the popular French seventeenth century letter writer.

Montagu’s poetry, published first by Walpole in 1747 and deeply admired in the London of her day, has continued to rise in popularity. Two of her most popular poems are “The Lover: A Ballad,” written during the 1720’s, and “The Reasons That Induced Dr. S to Write a Poem Called ’The Lady’s Dressing-Room,’” which she penned in retaliation for Swift’s satire on women’s vanity. As an author, Montagu is remembered chiefly for her letters, but she is also well regarded as an essayist, traveler, feminist, and historian. Yet despite her broad range of literary accomplishments, her pioneering efforts on behalf of smallpox inoculation in Europe may stand as her most important contribution.

Bibliography

Bohls, Elizabeth. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Scholarly work that traces the experiences of eighteenth and early nineteenth century women travelers. In addition to Montagu’s works, the journals, letters, travelogues, position papers, and novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley are explored to show how women actively participated in travel and exploration.

Carrell, Jennifer Lee. The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox. New York: Dutton, 2003. Describes the efforts of Montagu and Zabdiel Boylston, a Boston physician, to promote inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox. The two met and became friends when Boylston visited London in 1725.

Cove, Joseph Walter. The Admirable Lady Mary: The Life and Times of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1792). London: J. M. Dent, 1949. Covers the biographical background that invoked Montagu’s letters. Also discusses the historical, cultural, and social milieu to permit a deeper understanding and appreciation of her work. Bibliographical appendix included.

Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. New York: Clarendon Press, 1999. A detailed, 680-page account of Montagu’s life, with analysis of her poems, fiction, correspondence, and other writings.

Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. London: Oxford University Press, 1956. Highly readable biography. Provides background information on her life and on the historical, social, and literary context of her work. Illustrated. Makes mention of Montagu’s bold campaign against smallpox.

Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Examines Montagu’s letters to friends and relatives to show how the familiar letter acted as a method for women to express themselves, critically and aesthetically, during an era when female authors were dismissed. Includes bibliographical references and index.

MacMillan, Duncan. “Sex, Smallpox, and Seraglios: A Monument to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” In Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1994. Discusses the Turkish Embassy Letters and includes medical and historical references to smallpox and Montagu’s visit to the Turkish seraglio. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Edited by Robert Halsband. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965-1967. The authoritative first full edition of Montagu’s letters, including the Turkish Embassy Letters and the later letters written to her daughter, Lady Bute.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Edited by W. Thomas Moy. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Contains additions and corrections derived from the original manuscripts published by Lord Wharncliffe in 1837, including introductory anecdotes contributed by Lady Louisa Stuart, illustrative notes, and a memoir by the editor. Includes Montagu’s poem “The Lover.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Selected Letters. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. An assortment of Montagu’s letters that date from before her marriage; contains the Turkish letters, including the letter dealing with smallpox inoculation. Bibliographical references and an index.