Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 1689-1762, English author, noted primarily for her highly descriptive letters. She was the daughter of the first duke of Kingston. In 1712 she married Edward Wortley Montagu, who became ambassador to Turkey in 1716. On her return to England in 1718 she worked to educate the public in the use of inoculation against smallpox. In 1739 she left her husband and went to live on the Continent. Her Town Eclogues (1747), which gives an entertaining picture of contemporary manners, was first published by Edmund Curll in a pirated edition in 1716. She is remembered for her quarrel with Pope, who had once been her ardent admirer and who attacked her viciously in his poetry. Horace Walpole disliked her also and depicted her as a greedy, heartless eccentric. However, recent studies have defended her as a brilliant woman struggling for emancipation. Her letters were first published in 1763.

Bibliography: See the complete letters (1965-67) and selections (1970), both ed. by R. Halsband, also biography by R. Halsband (1956).

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, née Pierre-pont (1689–1762), daughter of the fifth earl and first duke of Kingston, secretly married Edward Wortley Montagu in 1712, and accompanied him in 1716 when he went to Constantinople as ambassador. She wrote there her celebrated ‘Turkish Letters’ (1763), and introduced into England on her return in 1718 the practice of inoculation against smallpox, an illness from which she had suffered. For the next two decades she was a leading member of society, famed for her wit. In 1716 Curll piratically published some of her Town Eclogues and Court Poems. In 1737–8 she wrote an anonymous periodical, the Nonsense of Common-Sense, and in 1739 left England and her husband to live abroad for nearly 23 years in France and Italy; during this period she wrote many letters (mostly to her daughter, Lady Bute), for which she is principally remembered. She is also known for her quarrels with Pope.