Lady Mary Montagu
baptized May 26, 1689, London, Eng.
died Aug. 21, 1762, London
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.
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.
