Baptized: 26 May 1689

Died: 21 August 1762

Nationality: English

Movements: Augustan, Bell-Lettres

Genres: Letters, poetry, essays

 

Her works:

The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu edited by her great-grandson Lord Wharncliffe, with notes and a memoir by A. Moy Thomas (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861) (Vol. II here.)

The Nonsense of Common-Sense, a political periodical edited by Montagu from 1737-1738 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1947)

Six Town Eclogues. With some other Poems. By the Rt. Hon. L.M.W. (London: M. Cooper, 1747).

Biographical Notices:

“Lady Mary Wortley Montagu” in Women of Fashion and Representative Women in Letters and Society by W.H. Davenport Adams.

It is said that, one evening, in 1697, when present with lords, rakes, and wits, at a symposium of the celebrated Kit-Kat Club, the beauties of the season having been freely toasted, the Earl of Kingston rose and proposed, as prettier than any of them, his daughter, Lady Mary. … And thereupon he sent orders home to have her finely dressed, and brought to him at the tavern. She was received, on her arrival, with admiring acclamations, and her claim being unanimously confirmed, her health was heartily drank by all, and her name, according to custom, engraved upon a drinking-glass. The child-beauty was by no means indifferent to the homage thus rendered. “Pleasure,” she wrote, later in life, “was too poor a word to express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout my life did I pass so happy an evening.”
…
Lady Mary’s education, whatever we may think of it in these days of university examinations, was far superior to that of most of the ladies of the time. Probably, she owed little of it to her instructors. She would seem to have had a passionate love of books, which the large library at Thoresby enabled her to gratify. She studied Greek and Latin; and obtained such an insight into the latter that she was able to make a very fair translation of a Latin version of the ‘Enchiridion’ of Epictetus.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times by George Paston (London: Methuen & Co., 1907)

Mr. Wortley sent Lady Mary a love-letter (with the new number of the Tatler), to which we have her reply. In the spring or early summer of 1710 he made proposals to Lord Dorchester [Lady Mary’s father] for his daughter’s hand. Negotiations were entered into, for the suitor was quite an eligible parti, but his lordship fell out with his future son-in-law about the settlements, and, in the language of the period, “the treaty was broke.” Thereupon a secret correspondence was begun between the lovers, which continued down to the time of their runaway marriage in August 1712. … Over a hundred love-letters—or “wrangle letters,” as they might more accurately be termed—are preserved at Sandon. Of these only sixteen have hitherto been published. THe whole correspondence is so extraordinary, and throws so strong a light upon the characters of the lovers, as well as, incidentally, upon the manners and customs of the period, that it has seemed desirable to relate the story of the next two years almost entirely through the medium of these “human documents.”
…
Lady Mary has been described by most of her biographers and critics as a woman of cold, hard character, with an intellect that had been developed at the expense of her emotions. But her early love-letters give the impression that they were written by a warm-hearted, high-spirited girl, who was continually being chilled and wounded by the ungraciousness of the man upon whom she had bestowed her affection.

“Lady Mary Wortley Montagu” in Memoirs of The Literary Ladies of England by Mrs. Elwood (London: Henry Colburn, 1843)

Lady Mary, from her rank, her wit, and her beauty, must have produced a considerable sensation at the court of George I., and it appears that she everywhere met with that admiration which was her due. She was intimate with most of the leading wits of the day, and a fatal celebrity is attached to her friendship with Pope, from the quarrel which subsequently induced them to traduce each other. This rupture, however, did not take place till some time after her return from Constantinople, from the adulatory style of his letters, and from the following verses which Lady Mary communicated to her sister in 1720, but which he subsequently endeavored to suppress, it is evident he felt a stronger attachment to her than he should have entertained for a married woman.

“Ah, friend, ’tis true—this truth you lovers know—
In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow;
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens:
Joy lives not here, to happier scenes it flies,
And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.”

“Lady Mary Wortley Montagu” in Women of Beauty and Heroism: From Semiramis to Eugenie, a Portrait Gallery by Frank Boott Goodrich. (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859)

Critical Notices:

“Mary Wortley Montagu” in Chamber’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature, Vol. II.

She united as few men or women have done solid sense and learning to wit, fancy, and lively powers of description; in letter-writing she has very few equals, and scarcely a superior.

Review of The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (The Quarterly Review, Volume 186)

In all this, except the good sense and the absence of vices, Lady Mary is very like her contemporaries. But she is a great deal beside, which they never thought of being. She is the friend of Addison, the fried, and of course also the enemy, of Pope; she is the woman who had the courage to introduce the system of inoculation to her countrymen, and the practical kindliness to teach Italian peasants the art of making butter; who received the gift of a house from one foreign city, and refused the offer of a statue from another; above all, for us to-day, she is the bright, good-humoured, charming personality, interested in everything, and carrying our interest along with her own, born, as she says, with a passion for learning … And she is something else too, without which we should never have known anything about her at all: she is the writer of letters so easy, so bright, so intelligent, in the fullest and best sense, that it has been possible, if not for truth, at least for patriotic prejudice, to speak of them in the same breath with those of Madame de Sévigné.

“Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. An Account of Her Life and Writings,” by Leigh Hunt, from Men, Women, and Books (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1847)

A colorful recapitulation of what’s been said elsewhere by the entertaining Hunt, though with more granular textual analysis.