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Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady, 1689-1762

MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY (1689-1672). Lady Mary has only become noteworthy as a published author in ages after her own, although she was recognised as a poet, essayist and patron by her contemporaries. As an aristocrat and a woman in the eighteenth century, she did not feel able to write openly for publication, nor did she have any financial need to do so, but writing was her principal occupation from her early years. Only too well aware of her status, she introduced her first album of juvenilia with the following:

I question not but here is very manny faults, but if any reasonable Person considers three things they wou'd forgive them.

1. I am a Woman

2. without any advantage of Education

3. all these was writ at the age of 14 (quoted in Halsband'sLife, 5).

This pithy statement demonstrates her wit, one of the qualities which was to define her as an adult. The other was beauty; when she was eight years old, her father toasted her at the Kit-Cat Club, an honour reserved only for 'beauties', and she was duly feted and admired by the club members. However, this particular combination of talents was to become a double-edged sword in later life.

Born in London (not at the family seat in Thoresby, Nottinghamshire) to Evelyn Pierrepont and Lady Mary Feilding, her childhood, with two sisters and a brother, was uneventful until the death of her mother in 1699. Lady Mary was largely resp! onsible for her own education, including the study of Latin, although her brother's tutor may have advised her. Two albums survive from 1704-1705 which show her embarking precociously on a poetic career, and also testing her skill at epistolary fiction with the short piece 'Indamora to Lindamira'. Her reading is likely to have consisted of Scudéry, Dryden, Katherine Philips, Cowley and even Aphra Behn.

Her feminist tendencies were forcefully expressed in a letter to Gilbert Burnet, with which she sent her translation of Epictetus, at the age of 21:

My Sex is usually forbid studys of this Nature, and Folly reckon'd so much our proper Sphere, we are sooner pardon'd any excesses of that, than the least pretentions to reading or good Sense. We are permitted no Books but such as tend to the weakening and Effeminateing the Mind, our Natural Deffects are every way indulg'd, and tis look'd upon as in a degree Criminal to improve our Reason, or fancy we have any. We are taught to place all our Art in adorning our Outward Forms, and permitted, without reproach, to carry that Custom even to Extravagancy, while our Minds are entirely neglected, and by disuse of Refflections, fill'd with nothing but the Triffling objects our Eyes are daily entertain'd with' (Letters, I, 44-45).

The young Mary enjoyed the fashionable pursuits of the London season and a wide circle of suitable friends. She lost the closest of these, Anne Wortley, to a sudden and unexplained death in 1710. However, the Wortleys were to figure large in her future. Lady Mary met Edward Wortley, Anne's elder brother, at a gathering in London and the attraction seems to have been mutual! . A version of the meeting exists as a fictionalised account which Lady Mary composed after 1715. In this, 'Sebastian' (Wortley) is charmed by the beauty of 'Laetitia' (Mary), but is still more struck by her witty conversation (Essays and Poems, 77-81). A protracted courtship is recorded in surviving correspondence between the couple. Legal and emotional difficulties conspired to keep them apart until they eloped in August 1712. Their son Edward was born the following year, swiftly followed by the death of Lady Mary's brother, William, from smallpox. The marriage did not flourish and Lady Mary's letters register her sense of emotional neglect.

1714 saw her first literary outing. Through Joseph Addison, an acquaintance of her husband, she had a piece published in the Spectator in June (Essays and Poems, 69-74). It was a letter purporting to be from the president of a widow's club who had overwhelmed six unfortunate husbands. The figure of Edward Waitfort, who persists in courting the professional widow through considerable adversity and numerous refusals, bears some resemblance to her own Wortley and is a rather unflattering caricature. However, the authorship of this piquant and entertaining letter remained a secret until the twentieth century.

In 1715 Lady Mary moved to London and quickly established herself within court society. She counted a young poet, Alexander Pope, among her new friends. Other literary and artistic acquaintances included William Congreve, John Gay, Charles Jervas and Geoffrey Kneller. Several attractive portraits of Lady Mary by both artists remain to us. Lady Mary's six Town Eclogues were composed during this period! (Essays and Poems, 182-204). She was a rising star when she was struck down with smallpox in 1715. She survived this horrible and frequently fatal illness but it deprived her of her complexion and her eyelashes. Since beauty was a prerequisite for social success, disfigurement caused by the disease was a major female concern. However, Lady Mary was too sensible to let the loss ruin her career; she had earlier written to Edward Wortley that 'had [I] all the personal charms that I want, a Face is too slight a foundation for happynesse' (Letters, I, 30). Some of this experience was distilled into Lady Mary's sixth Eclogue, 'Satturday; The Small Pox', where Flavia reveals the superficiality of an existence based on appearances. Turning from the 'frightfull Spectre' of her face in the looking-glass, she laments the loss of her 'Complexion' and 'radiant bloom/That promise'd Happyness for Years to come' (Essays and Poems, 201). The first Eclogue, 'Monday; Roxana or the Drawing Room', satirises court corruption, and Lady Mary fell out of favour with Princess Caroline when its authorship was exposed. The poems were published in 1716 with a prefatory statement which implicated Pope and Gay in their composition. This is likely to have been a device to protect Lady Mary's reputation, and scholars continue to consider them her own.

In April 1716, Wortley was appointed as ambassador to Constantinople and yet again Lady Mary's social progress was curtailed. However, she enjoyed her travels and her sojourn in the East was to prove fortuitous for her literary career. She recorded the sights and society of several European cities on her lengthy overland journey. The exoticism of Constantinople offered much material to her keen eye and busy pen, including experiences particular to herself as a European woman welcomed in! to the seraglio and entertained by Turkish sultanas. The life of Turkish women secluded from the voyeuristic gaze of men intrigued and attracted her; 'Upon the Whole,' she wrote, 'I look upon the Turkish Women as the only free people in the Empire' (Letters, I, 329). While recording this culture so other to her own and yet so appealing, she gave birth to a daughter and had her son inoculated against smallpox, discovering the Turkish methods of treating the disease to be more enlightened than English ones. When her husband's embassy was recalled in 1718, Wortley suffered political and financial loss from which his career never really recovered.

Lady Mary's return to London renewed her friendship with Pope, who had been in constant touch by letter during her absence. Like Pope, Lady Mary settled in Twickenham. Lady Stafford and Maria Skerret became close friends, as did the very differently influential Lord Hervey and Mary Astell. The 'Embassy Letters' were worked up from originals and Lady Mary's journals at this time into what Isobel Grundy has called 'a relaxed and racy [...] Enlightenment travel treatise' (Comet of the Enlightenment). Astell contributed a preface, and hoped some day to see the letters in print. Following a fresh outbreak of smallpox, Lady Mary became a staunch advocate of inoculation in the light of her success with her own children. She was implicated in the inoculation of the royal infants, but faced much criticism, both as a mother mistreating her children and as a woman interfering in a profession forbidden to her. She published her brief 'Plain Account of the Innoculating of the Small Pox' in the Flying-Post on 13 September 1722 'out of the compassion to the Numbers abus'd and deluded by true Knavery and Ignorance of Physicians' (Essays and Poems, 95), and deserves to be remembered as ! a medical innovator.

During the 1720's Lady Mary became patron to her young cousin, Henry Fielding, and corresponded and met with Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu. In 1728 she fell out with Pope in the most famous literary quarrel of the century, although the basis for the disagreement is as likely to have been personal as professional. Pope's early letters to her reveal his desire, and he wrote 'Eloisa and Abelard' for her. However, his letters also reveal that he could be prurient and offensive; it was said that Montagu eventually rejected him, and he exacted his revenge with public sexual insults. Whatever the cause, the results were devastating for Lady Mary's reputation. The first attack was 'The Capon's Tale' (1728), the second a veiled reference in the Dunciad. The worst assault came in The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (1733) where Lady Mary is portrayed as a 'furious Sappho' who 'P--x'[s] by her Love, or libell'[s] by her Hate'. The response from Lady Mary and Lord Hervey in collaboration was Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace. Pope referred to the 'dirty pair' again in 'To Ld Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley' and The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, and to Lady Mary alone as Flavia, (Sappho in later editions), in An Epistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of Women. Pope's image of Lady Mary has overshadowed her career until this century.

Around 1734 she wrote a play, 'Simplicity', influenced by Marivaux'sJeu de l'amour et du hasard! . Her version deals with issues of suitable marriage and love between the classes as well as parental authority. Topically, her son caused her great pain by his ungovernable behaviour and unsuitable marriage in 1730, and continued to cause her distress throughout her life. Further, her daughter, Mary, married John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, with considerable opposition from Wortley, in 1736. In the same year Lady Mary met Francesco Algarotti, and this association was to change the course of her life.

Algarotti was Italian, highly attractive and equally intelligent. He was working on an adaptation of Newton's Optics which became Newtonianismo per le dame, published in Milan in 1737 (later translated into English by Elizabeth Carter). Lady Mary was instantly charmed and within two weeks of their first meeting was writing passionate letters to him. She continued to write after he left the country, but he rarely answered. Increasingly frustrated at his silence and disillusioned with her life in England, finally she promised - or threatened - to follow him to the continent. Love did not inhibit her literary talents at this time since she produced nine editions of Nonsense of Common-Sense in response to the anti-Walpole journal, Common Sense. Amongst other things, Lady Mary discussed the wool trade, the liberty of the press, how women were implicated in the economic fate of the nation, and the advantages of political education for women.

In 1739 Lady Mary left England, not to return for two decades. She worked her way down to Italy, eventually achieving a short-lived and unrewarding reunion with Algarotti in 1741. In the meantime she kept up correspondence with the estranged Wortley and her daughter, Lady Bute. Administering advice from afar on the education of her grand-daughters, she recommended that they conceal any learning they might acquire; from bitter experience Lady Mary knew that learned women were not appreciated in the society she had left behind:

If your Daughters are inclin'd to Love reading, do not check their Inclination by hindering them of the diverting part of it. It is as necessary for the Amusement of Women as the Reputation of Men, but teach them not to expect or desire any Applause from it. Let their Brothers shine, and let them content themselves with making their Lives easier by it, which I experimentally know is more effectually done by Study than by any other way (Letters, II, 449-50).

In 1740, Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her mother that 'Lady Shadwell saw Lady Mary Wortley at Venice where she now resides and asked her what made her leave England, she told her the reason was people were grown so stupid she could not endure their company, all England was infected with dullness' (MO 4712, 22 July, Bulstrode, Bucks). Montagu also suggested that Lady Mary was avoiding her estranged husband. In 1761 the news reached her that Wortley was dead. Financial and familial chaos ensued and she decided to return to England. Before crossing the Channel, she left the two-volume manuscript of her 'Embassy Letters' with Reverend Sowden in Rotterdam, an act which ensured their publication. Suffering with cancer and lodged in a cramped house in London she did her best to put her affairs in order. She died on 21 August 1761. In 1763, Lady Mary's Letters...written during her travels in Europe (the 'Turkish Embassy Letters') finally appeared in print. Her readership was delighted, and Lady Mary's literary fame for future ages was assured.

Because Lady Mary mostly confined herself to expression in diary, letter and manuscript, much of her work as been unavailable to readers for two centuries, and still more has been lost. Her class and her gender contrived to keep her from a literary profession but in private she tackled many genres - poetry, political journalism, drama, epistolary and prose fiction. An edition of Works was published in 1803 and interest in her continued throughout the nineteenth century. R! oger Halsband and Isobel Grundy have been the most active Montagu scholars in the twentieth century and it is to them that we owe access to all of Lady Mary's known work. The Complete Letters appeared in 1965-7, including the 'Turkish Embassy Letters', Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy in 1977, and Romance Writings in 1996. This last important publication includes all of Lady Mary's prose fiction probably written during her solitary travels on the continent in the 1740's-50's. The most significant piece, 'Princess Docile', is a reflection on the difficulties facing an intellectual woman in the eighteenth century and is marked by what Grundy has called its 'wholly consistent ironic disillusion.' (Romance Writings, xxvi). Critiquing desirable feminine qualities and typical female education, Lady Mary describes how the princess is given the 'advantage' of a fairy gift of docility at birth, a gift which inhibits her life choices and leads ultimately to her downfall:

It should not be surprising that, dowered with that extreme Docility, she gave herself up entirely to the sentiments of her instructors. To obey in everything, and not to reason in anything, were the fundamental maxims of her Education (Romance Writings, 108-109).

The publication of Lady Mary's late fiction allows us to appreciate the full extent of her writing career. Two important biographies have appeared this century; Halsband'sLife (1956) and Grundy'sComet of the Enlightenment (1999).

Lady Mary's reputation has survived in spite of the intense vilification she suffered at the hands of Pope and she remains to us as an incisive social commentator. However, the sexual aspects of her work have been exploited in a more profitable way by feminist critiques, for exampleFelicity Nussbaum's 'Feminotopias' essay in Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth Century English Narratives (1995). Lady Mary's significance as a travel writer a! nd aesthetician has been discussed in Elizabeth Bohls'sWomen Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics (1995). Cynthia Lowenthal has focused on Lady Mary's contribution to the epistolary genre in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (1994). However, Lady Mary is so unique that she remains difficult to place within literary history. As Joseph Spence has put it: 'Lady Mary...shines like a comet...all irregular and always wandering...born with fine parts enough for twenty men' (quoted in Romance Writings, xi.

References:

MONTAGU, Lady Mary Wortley

The Complete Letters Vols I-III, ed Halsband, Oxford University Press, 1965-67.

Essay and Poems, ed Halsband/Grundy, Clarendon Press, 1977.

Romance Writings, ed Grundy, Clarendon Press, 1996.

GRUNDY, Isobel

Comet of the Enlightenment, Oxford University Press, 1999

HALSBAND, Robert

The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Clarendon Press, 1956.

Montagu Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Los Angeles, MO 4712.