Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)
Author of Turkish Embassy Letters
About the Author
Lady Mary, as Montagu is known, was among the truly independent women of eighteenth-century England. During her lifetime she was much admired as a poet of stylish wit; afterward she was highly regarded as a correspondent of keen observation. While still a young woman, she eloped with Edward Wortley show more Montagu and, when he was appointed ambassador, accompanied him to Constantinople. On her return to England, she brought with her the vaccine for smallpox (she had meanwhile contracted the disease). She was the leading woman of letters of her day, and, while she quarreled in print with her friends Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, she returned their attacks with at least equal force. From 1739 until just before her death in 1762, she left England and her husband for Italy; from Brescia she wrote to her daughter letters so brimming with learning that Voltaire compared them favorably to those of Mme de Sevigne (see Vol. 2). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair Sex to a Perfect Equ (1975) 2 copies
Letters and Works, 2 vols. 2 copies
The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Including Her Correspondence, Poems, and Essays, vol. IV (1999) 2 copies
Şark Mektupları 1717-1718 1 copy
Court eclogs written in the year, 1716 : Alexander Pope's autograph manuscript of poems by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1977) 1 copy
The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Including Her Correspondence, Poems and Essays. Volume 5: L (2001) 1 copy
Associated Works
English Verse: Volume 3: The Eighteenth Century: Swift to Crabbe (Penguin English Verse) (1995) — Contributor — 11 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1689-05-15
- Date of death
- 1762-08-21
- Gender
- female
- Education
- at home
- Occupations
- poet
letter writer
playwright
aristocrat
essayist
translator (show all 7)
diarist - Relationships
- Stuart, Lady Louisa (granddaughter)
Pope, Alexander (friend)
Astell, Mary (friend)
Gay, John (friend) - Short biography
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, née Pierrepont, was born in London, a daughter of Evelyn and Mary Pierrepont. Her father became earl of Kingston the year after her birth. She was educated at home and taught herself Latin in her father's library. Her early influences were the classics, John Dryden, and French romances. In 1710, she translated the Enchiridion (Handbook) of the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus from Latin into English and sent a copy to Gilbert Brunet, Bishop of Salisbury, with a letter defending women's right to formal education. Despite her initial reluctance, in 1712, she married Edward Wortley Montagu, a lawyer, diplomat, and Member of Parliament. Her first published writing appeared in 1714 in Addison's Spectator, under the pseudonym Lady President. During this period she also became friends with a literary circle that included Alexander Pope and John Gay. She is chiefly known today for the letters she wrote while the couple were living in 1716-1718 in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), where her husband served as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Her writings are considered an extremely valuable historical resource, and the earliest secular work by a woman about the Muslim world. She also wrote volumes of poems, essays, a brief epistolary novel, and a play. Lady Mary kept a diary, but it was burned after her death by her daughter Mary, Lady Bute. Her surviving Letters and Works were published in 1837 with an introduction by her granddaughter Lady Louisa Stuart.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- London, England, UK
- Places of residence
- London, England, UK
Istanbul, Ottoman Turkey
Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Avignon, France
Brescia, Italy
Gottolengo - Place of death
- London, England, UK
Members
Reviews
The Turkish Embassy Letters is a gem. I think I learned of them through something that Michael Dirda wrote. The letters were written over two years, between 1716-1718 when Lady Mary was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey; they cover her trips to and from Turkey and the period she lived there. The original assignment should have been for five years, but her husband was recalled for being too sympathetic to the Turks in trying to mediate peace between the Turks and the Austrians. show more Lady Mary spends no time on politics, but rather turns a very discerning eye to Turkish society, architecture, life styles and mores, almost always to the benefit of the Turks in comparison to the British.
Lady Mary was an interesting person. She pretty well educated herself; was very well read by fourteen; and taught herself Latin so that she could read Ovid. She was very much of the aristocracy, and was engaged to the Honourable Clotworthy Skeffington (what a name!), whom she threw over to elope with Wortley. She and Wortely did marry, but it seems that the passion of the romance did not carry over to the marriage and they had a rather indifferent relationship. In one letter she upbraids him for never asking how his son is doing.
Anita Desai wrote the introduction to this edition of the Letters, and makes the point that it would be a mistake to see Lady Mary as a 20th-century career woman born too early into a restrictive society. She was a contradictory character, summed up by one acquaintance as, "one of the most extraordinary shining characters in the world; but she shines like a comet; she is all irregular and always wandering. She is the most wise, most imprudent; loveliest, disagreeablest; best natured, cruellest woman in the world".
She did, however, have an eye for detail, an adventurous spirit, and an ability to write. She could also be very forward-looking: in Turkey she learned of the practice of inoculation for smallpox, had her children inoculated, and argued for it when she returned to England. Her description of one of her friends would apply equally to herself: "She is very curious after the manners of other countries and has not that partiality for her own so common to little minds."
I find it interesting to reach back, almost 300 years, to read these letters and to see the echoes of human relations and concerns that are still with us today. Lady Mary, for instance, on fashion:
When one considers impartially the merit of a rich suit of clothes in most places, the respect and the smiles of favour it procures, not to speak of the envy and the signs that it occasions (which is very often the principal charm to the wearer), one is forced to confess that there is need of an uncommon understanding to resist the temptation of pleasing friends and mortifying rivals, and that it is natural to young people to fall into a folly which betrays them to that want of money which the source of a thousand basenesses.
Things have not changed a whole lot with school kids having to have $100 designer T-shirts for school!
It is also amusing to watch Lady Mary skirt around the accepted language of her day in trying to describe some aspects of Turkish life. For instance, a dance put on in her honour which was:
...very different from what I had seen before. Nothing could be more artful or more proper to raise certain ideas; the tunes so soft, the motions so languishing, accompanied with pauses and dying eyes, half falling back and the recovering themselves in so artful a manner that I am very positive the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth could not have looked upon them without thinking of something not to be spoke of.
A very enjoyable book. show less
Lady Mary was an interesting person. She pretty well educated herself; was very well read by fourteen; and taught herself Latin so that she could read Ovid. She was very much of the aristocracy, and was engaged to the Honourable Clotworthy Skeffington (what a name!), whom she threw over to elope with Wortley. She and Wortely did marry, but it seems that the passion of the romance did not carry over to the marriage and they had a rather indifferent relationship. In one letter she upbraids him for never asking how his son is doing.
Anita Desai wrote the introduction to this edition of the Letters, and makes the point that it would be a mistake to see Lady Mary as a 20th-century career woman born too early into a restrictive society. She was a contradictory character, summed up by one acquaintance as, "one of the most extraordinary shining characters in the world; but she shines like a comet; she is all irregular and always wandering. She is the most wise, most imprudent; loveliest, disagreeablest; best natured, cruellest woman in the world".
She did, however, have an eye for detail, an adventurous spirit, and an ability to write. She could also be very forward-looking: in Turkey she learned of the practice of inoculation for smallpox, had her children inoculated, and argued for it when she returned to England. Her description of one of her friends would apply equally to herself: "She is very curious after the manners of other countries and has not that partiality for her own so common to little minds."
I find it interesting to reach back, almost 300 years, to read these letters and to see the echoes of human relations and concerns that are still with us today. Lady Mary, for instance, on fashion:
When one considers impartially the merit of a rich suit of clothes in most places, the respect and the smiles of favour it procures, not to speak of the envy and the signs that it occasions (which is very often the principal charm to the wearer), one is forced to confess that there is need of an uncommon understanding to resist the temptation of pleasing friends and mortifying rivals, and that it is natural to young people to fall into a folly which betrays them to that want of money which the source of a thousand basenesses.
Things have not changed a whole lot with school kids having to have $100 designer T-shirts for school!
It is also amusing to watch Lady Mary skirt around the accepted language of her day in trying to describe some aspects of Turkish life. For instance, a dance put on in her honour which was:
...very different from what I had seen before. Nothing could be more artful or more proper to raise certain ideas; the tunes so soft, the motions so languishing, accompanied with pauses and dying eyes, half falling back and the recovering themselves in so artful a manner that I am very positive the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth could not have looked upon them without thinking of something not to be spoke of.
A very enjoyable book. show less
Letters from the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 1709-1762 2nd ed by Montagu Mary Wortley
Lady Mary's personal life was very complicated but her letters draw a veil over all that. She focusses on local colour, decorating details and other topics likely to interest her correspondents, latterly her married daughter. The letters from Constantinople are of course historically important. Otherwise they simply give us a picture of a remarkable woman. I am somewhat reminded of Mehitabel the cat. "Toujours gai, Archy, toujours gai."
Adventurous minx that she was, Lady Mary took off from England and spent a year in the Sultan's court with her husband, the new ambassador--or more accurately, she gallivanted around the whole Ottoman Empire while he was doing ambassador stuff. Lots to like here: her generous attitude toward the oriental Other, extending even to "they might actually be doing things a lot better than us in many ways" (inoculations; freedom of womanity--this has obviously changed, but it is certainly worth show more pointing out to the people who think there is something intrinsically anti-woman about Islam). Also her efforts with the language and poetry, the way she always gets in a dig at the Catholics, and her fulsome descriptions of the ladies she visits,their banquets and joie de vivre. I like all the classical tidbits as well. There is too much talk about clothes and childbearing and not enough about food and politics, but I can't expect everyone to be interested in exactly the things I am.
EDIT: Per my review of Irene, I am copypasting in a little bit of something I write for class that deals with Turkish Embassy Letters in greater detail than my review above.
*****
In aligning Lady Mary with Aaron Hill and David Jones, I just want to suggest that they all had an openness to Ottoman culture that isn’t present in all of their contemporaries. Lady Mary really belongs in a class of her own, both as a person, and in terms of the access and perspective that her being a woman made possible on her trip.
She would have been 28 when she arrived in Constantinople; significant events in her life up till that point included eloping with her husband, becoming a great hit in society when she moved to the city to join him, starting a poetic career as well as a career of relationships of various degrees of scandalousness with several notable men, including Alexander Pope (and one of the very interesting things in Turkish Embassy Letters that I think doesn’t have much to do with the “Oriental Other” is how her tone shifts from reader to reader—casual with her sister, contentious with the Abbe Conti, cagey and eager to impress with Pope). She had given birth to a son and had smallpox, which had somewhat marred her famous looks.
Her letters were first published after her death in 1762 as Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, to persons of distinction, men of letters, &c., in different parts of Europe. Which contain, among other curious relations, accounts of the policy and manners of the Turks, drawn from sources that have been inaccessible to other travelers. Marketed on the basis of this “access,” they were a literary phenomenon. Lady Mary herself was well aware that access was her selling point; she reflects on it in her early letter about the hamam or “bagnio,” noting that “’tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places” (60).
The bagnio scene also introduces two related recurrent themes of Lady Mary’s. The first is the divide between what freedoms are permitted to women in Turkey and in England. (This seems like a good place to note here that for the most part Lady Mary only discusses the people she comes into contact with—mostly upper-class women and their slaves.) In Lady Mary’s analysis, Turkish women, in their circumscribed world, have great freedom compared to Englishwomen—freedom from the male gaze and unwanted male attention, as she makes explicit on page 71 with her discussion of the ferace and veil, saying: “’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street.” But also freedom from the injunction to productive activity, be that work or the social life of a society lady in London. She repeatedly paints Turkey as a Lotus Land, concluding (142) that with a “sensual declaration” that she would rather be “a rich effendi with all his ignorance than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.”
The second major theme introduced in the bagnio is the corporeality or bodilyness of the Turks, and especially the Turkish women. Lady Mary’s observation that “if it was the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed” (59), besides being hilarious, effaces the Turk’s pretension to civilized behaviour in a European context where civilization is still predicated on the disciplining and secreting of the body—as foregrounded by the Turkish women’s assumption that Lady Mary’s complicated undergarments must be put on her by her husband to control her. Ultimately Turkish women underwrite their freedoms with their bodies, as Lady Mary discusses on page 107, by remaining pregnant all the time—in sharp contrast to the Catholic sacralizing of virginity, as she needles Abbe Conti about.
There is a wistfulness in Lady Mary’s presentation of the unbound Turkish female body that not only recalls her own strictures as an English lady and her attempts to escape them with adventures, eccentricities or affairs. She romanticizes the lot of Turkish women in a way that seems to shade into spurious exoticism, as with her discussion of anonymous assignations between ladies and their lovers at Jewish shops on page 71—an activity that cannot have been as routine as she describes it. Lady Mary’s focus on women’s sexuality in her letters, combined with her bohemian lifestyle, caused her to be maligned in her later years as sexually insatiable and a lesbian—Pope attacked her viciously in print as “Sappho” after a falling out between them. Later women travel writers in the Ottoman Empire were at pains to distance themselves from Lady Mary’s sensuality—one, Julia Pardoe, in 1839 wrote, “I saw none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady Mary Montagu. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate and fastidious in their ideas of propriety.”
Lady Mary does have her own ideas of English propriety, expressing only guarded approval of Turkish food, music, and poetry. Her Whiggishness seems fully compatible with engaging in slavery apologetics, although on a kind of anti-hypocrisy ticket, saying women “are bought and sold as publicly and infamously in all our Christian great cities” (130). Still, her enthusiasm for all things Turkish (including smallpox inoculations), is muted or at least modulated by her perpetuation of the Othering stereotypes of torpor, sensuality, brutality (as in her descripton of the mutilated minister on p. 66), and exoticism (shading into commodity fetishism, as in her descriptions of the Turkish ladies outfits on e.g. 90).
What is not evident in Lady Mary’s letters is any concern with the heretical Turk. On p. 62, and again, she compares the religion of the Turkish effendis to respectable Whiggish deism, and the “Zeidi, Kudi, Jabari, etc,” sects to “the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist.” The only place we get a feeling that a foreign element is trespassing on sacred ground is when she enters the Aegean Sea and gets angry contemplating the impossibility of visiting Sappho on Lesbos in the Morning and Homer on Chios in the afternoon. It’s unclear what relationship this nostalgia for the lost Classical world is intended to have with Lady Mary’s admiration for Ottoman culture, or her description on p. 109of Greek priests as “the greatest scoundrels in the universe,” but it is a thread that is extended in a more polemical way in Irene. show less
EDIT: Per my review of Irene, I am copypasting in a little bit of something I write for class that deals with Turkish Embassy Letters in greater detail than my review above.
*****
In aligning Lady Mary with Aaron Hill and David Jones, I just want to suggest that they all had an openness to Ottoman culture that isn’t present in all of their contemporaries. Lady Mary really belongs in a class of her own, both as a person, and in terms of the access and perspective that her being a woman made possible on her trip.
She would have been 28 when she arrived in Constantinople; significant events in her life up till that point included eloping with her husband, becoming a great hit in society when she moved to the city to join him, starting a poetic career as well as a career of relationships of various degrees of scandalousness with several notable men, including Alexander Pope (and one of the very interesting things in Turkish Embassy Letters that I think doesn’t have much to do with the “Oriental Other” is how her tone shifts from reader to reader—casual with her sister, contentious with the Abbe Conti, cagey and eager to impress with Pope). She had given birth to a son and had smallpox, which had somewhat marred her famous looks.
Her letters were first published after her death in 1762 as Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, to persons of distinction, men of letters, &c., in different parts of Europe. Which contain, among other curious relations, accounts of the policy and manners of the Turks, drawn from sources that have been inaccessible to other travelers. Marketed on the basis of this “access,” they were a literary phenomenon. Lady Mary herself was well aware that access was her selling point; she reflects on it in her early letter about the hamam or “bagnio,” noting that “’tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places” (60).
The bagnio scene also introduces two related recurrent themes of Lady Mary’s. The first is the divide between what freedoms are permitted to women in Turkey and in England. (This seems like a good place to note here that for the most part Lady Mary only discusses the people she comes into contact with—mostly upper-class women and their slaves.) In Lady Mary’s analysis, Turkish women, in their circumscribed world, have great freedom compared to Englishwomen—freedom from the male gaze and unwanted male attention, as she makes explicit on page 71 with her discussion of the ferace and veil, saying: “’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street.” But also freedom from the injunction to productive activity, be that work or the social life of a society lady in London. She repeatedly paints Turkey as a Lotus Land, concluding (142) that with a “sensual declaration” that she would rather be “a rich effendi with all his ignorance than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.”
The second major theme introduced in the bagnio is the corporeality or bodilyness of the Turks, and especially the Turkish women. Lady Mary’s observation that “if it was the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed” (59), besides being hilarious, effaces the Turk’s pretension to civilized behaviour in a European context where civilization is still predicated on the disciplining and secreting of the body—as foregrounded by the Turkish women’s assumption that Lady Mary’s complicated undergarments must be put on her by her husband to control her. Ultimately Turkish women underwrite their freedoms with their bodies, as Lady Mary discusses on page 107, by remaining pregnant all the time—in sharp contrast to the Catholic sacralizing of virginity, as she needles Abbe Conti about.
There is a wistfulness in Lady Mary’s presentation of the unbound Turkish female body that not only recalls her own strictures as an English lady and her attempts to escape them with adventures, eccentricities or affairs. She romanticizes the lot of Turkish women in a way that seems to shade into spurious exoticism, as with her discussion of anonymous assignations between ladies and their lovers at Jewish shops on page 71—an activity that cannot have been as routine as she describes it. Lady Mary’s focus on women’s sexuality in her letters, combined with her bohemian lifestyle, caused her to be maligned in her later years as sexually insatiable and a lesbian—Pope attacked her viciously in print as “Sappho” after a falling out between them. Later women travel writers in the Ottoman Empire were at pains to distance themselves from Lady Mary’s sensuality—one, Julia Pardoe, in 1839 wrote, “I saw none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady Mary Montagu. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate and fastidious in their ideas of propriety.”
Lady Mary does have her own ideas of English propriety, expressing only guarded approval of Turkish food, music, and poetry. Her Whiggishness seems fully compatible with engaging in slavery apologetics, although on a kind of anti-hypocrisy ticket, saying women “are bought and sold as publicly and infamously in all our Christian great cities” (130). Still, her enthusiasm for all things Turkish (including smallpox inoculations), is muted or at least modulated by her perpetuation of the Othering stereotypes of torpor, sensuality, brutality (as in her descripton of the mutilated minister on p. 66), and exoticism (shading into commodity fetishism, as in her descriptions of the Turkish ladies outfits on e.g. 90).
What is not evident in Lady Mary’s letters is any concern with the heretical Turk. On p. 62, and again, she compares the religion of the Turkish effendis to respectable Whiggish deism, and the “Zeidi, Kudi, Jabari, etc,” sects to “the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist.” The only place we get a feeling that a foreign element is trespassing on sacred ground is when she enters the Aegean Sea and gets angry contemplating the impossibility of visiting Sappho on Lesbos in the Morning and Homer on Chios in the afternoon. It’s unclear what relationship this nostalgia for the lost Classical world is intended to have with Lady Mary’s admiration for Ottoman culture, or her description on p. 109of Greek priests as “the greatest scoundrels in the universe,” but it is a thread that is extended in a more polemical way in Irene. show less
I just love this book - one of my treasures. Lady M, an indefatigable 18th century "lady traveller' (in the days when The Grand Tour was pretty much an upper class male pursuit), lived in Constantinople with her husband, the British Ambassador to the Sultan's court. This is a collection of letters she wrote, but it is much more. It provides an utterly unique insight into a culture long gone, but it reads with contemporary insight. That she was a woman enables a different perspective on show more things such as the Harem (which she visited) and Turkish baths. Being a woman didn;t stop our intrepid explorer from dressing as a man to get a look inside Aya Sofya!
Includes an introductory essay by Dervla Murphy, herself a great traveller.
Highly recommended. show less
Includes an introductory essay by Dervla Murphy, herself a great traveller.
Highly recommended. show less
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