Life is too short for a long story. — Lady Mary Montagu
(image via Wikimedia Commons)
In 1705, then just a 16-year-old newlywed, an attack of smallpox destroyed Lady Mary Montagu’s legendary beauty. She survived the disease, but the experience forever scarred her — physically and emotionally.
Following the illness, Lady Mary and her politician husband drifted apart — him, into his courtly society of polite pleasantries; her, into a world of books and poetry and, later, travel writing. She spent tons of time alone, satirizing London society in a series of long poems (Alexander Pope thought they were hilarious, especially her skewering of Jonathan Swift) and planning epic travels around the word. When the King appointed her husband ambassador, Mary joined him on his excursions. Her travel letters described vivid scenes of people outside London and pages circulated amongst her women friends back home. Soon enough, Mary had an audience for her wit and insight.
While living in Turkey, Mary chronicled life within the Ottoman Empire in 52 letters of scenes and conversations as recorded from her own diaries. She wrote of all-female spaces in the Ottoman Empire and the conversations she overheard there. While some contemporaries dismissed her work as “trite observations,” scholars today regard her writing as some of the most important text written solely for a female audience.
Mary was particularly impressed by the local community’s attentiveness to smallpox. She wrote to a friend in 1717:
I am going to tell you a thing, that will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless … There is a set of old women, who make it their business to perform the operation, every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox.
When Mary returned to London in 1718, she brought with her the Turkish women’s practice of inoculation. Despite British doctors’ skepticism, she insisted that her own 3-year-old son be treated with this operation. In 1721, as another bout of smallpox raged through London, she publicly spoke of her intention to get her daughter inoculated in the same way. Visitors came to observe Mary and her children in recovery and soon, the princess asked for Mary’s advice on how to protect her own family from the vicious disease.
Following this visit from the princess, the royal family followed Lady Mary’s lead. As her children grew up without ever contracting the horrible disease that ravaged Lady Mary’s youthful beauty, inoculation became more popular in London, then throughout England — all thanks to Mary’s insistence.
Later in life, Lady Mary lived separately from her husband and entertained various affairs with other high-profile politicians. In 1736, she followed Francesco Algarotti, a lauded Italian writer, and lied to her family and friends about moving countries, claiming she liked living abroad “for her health.” Once that romance fizzled, Lady Mary took up with the much-younger Count Ugo Palazzi and lived with him in Venice. She told the truth only to her daughter, in a series of lengthy letters chronicling her 30 years traveling around Italy.
In 1761, her daughter convinced her elderly mother to return to London for a visit. The trip ultimately sickened Lady Mary, who died later that year at the age of 73.
Add to your library list:
Selected Letters (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)
Lady Mary Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Isobel Grundy)
The Turkish Embassy Letters (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)
Read more:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Britannica)
How a daring woman brought smallpox inoculation to Britain (TIME)
Rare letter by Mary Montagu, pioneering travel writer (The Guardian)
When Doris Lessing meets Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (The New York Times)
Prose and Poetry of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (The Gutenberg Project)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (The Poetry Foundation)
Lady Mary's daring cure (The Telegraph)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Academy of Poets)
Hear more:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (BBC Radio Women's Hour)