Background
Mary Montagu was born on May 15, 1689, in London, the eldest child of Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull by his first wife Mary Fielding.
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book
Life on the Golden Horn (Penguin Great Journeys)
(Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband o...)
Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband on what proved to be a wholly useless diplomatic mission to Constantinople, Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) left a vivid, informative, clever account of her adventures in the mysterious, sophisticated culture of Ottoman palaces, bathing places and courts which - even as her husband's career was falling apart - she could not have enjoyed more. "Great Journeys" allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.
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Romance Writings
(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was the most import...)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was the most important woman writer of the eighteenth century, and one of the most exciting and complex authors of either sex. This collection of narratives challenges existing accounts of the romance, the novel, and eighteenth-century women. Whether her heroine is a princess in love with a commoner, an orphan pursued by a royal duke, or uncharacteristically playing the role of victim, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's brilliance never flags.
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Turkish Embassy Letters
(The critical and biographical introduction tells of Lady ...)
The critical and biographical introduction tells of Lady Wortley Montagu's travels through Europe to Turkey in 1716, where her husband had been appointed Ambassador. Her lively letters offer insights into the paradoxical freedoms conferred on Muslim women by the veil, the value of experimental work by Turkish doctors on inoculation, and the beauty of Arab poetry and culture. The ability to study another culture according to its own values and to see herself through the eyes of others makes Lady Mary one of the most fascinating of early travel writers and commentators
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Letters (Everyman's Library)
( Immensely learned, self-educated in an era when form...)
Immensely learned, self-educated in an era when formal schooling was denied to women, Mary Wortley Montagu was an admired poet, a consistently scandalous doyenne of eighteenth-century London society, and, in a period when letter-writing had been elevated to an art form, one of the greatest letter writers in the English language. Her epistles, meant for both public and private consumption, are the product of a mind distinguished by its adventurousness, its indifference to convention, and its eagerness not only to acquire knowledge but to convey it with unmitigated style and grace. (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
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The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. 3 of 5: Including Her Correspondence, Poems, and Essays (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary ...)
Excerpt from The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. 3 of 5: Including Her Correspondence, Poems, and Essays Aaron Hill travelled to Constantinople at the age ?5f fifteen, and was received with kindness by his 'relative lord Paget, at that time our embassador to the Porte. He returned to England in 1703 in the finite, and soon afterward published his Account if Turkey, in folio, a very crude and juvenile per cormance. He lived, however, to write Zara and Merope, tragedies Which still keep their place on he English stage. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Essays and Poems and "Simplicity", a Comedy (Clarendon Paperbacks)
(A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu...)
A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
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Selected Letters (Penguin Classics)
(A revised selection of Lady Montagu's letters. Besides pr...)
A revised selection of Lady Montagu's letters. Besides presenting a vivid picture of manners in a picturesque age, they contain a unique series of impressions from foreign courts seldom visited and nowhere else so intimately described. Lady Mary was the wife of a popular ambassador and, wielding the charm of a strong personality, was enabled to see and hear many things of which the ordinary traveler, or resident abroad, knew-and knows-little or nothing. Originally written, for the most part, to her sisters, her daughter, or to very intimate friends, her Letters are unusually detailed and frank. She was a keen observer, not superior to the love of gossip with a quick eye for the telling features of a story or situation, and an easy, effective style. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Mary Wortley Montagu
Edit ProfileEducation
Montagu began her education in her father's home. The family's land-holdings were extensive, including Thoresby Hall and Holme Pierrepont Hall in Nottinghamshire, and a house in West Dean in Wiltshire. To supplement the instruction of a despised governess, Lady Mary used the library in Thoresby Hall to "steal" her education, teaching herself Latin, a language reserved for men at the time.
Career
By 1705, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Mary Pierrepont had written two albums filled with poetry, a brief epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance modelled after Aphra Behn's Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684).
She eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament, rather than accept a marriage that had been arranged by her father.
In 1714 the Whigs came to power, and Edward Wortley Montagu was elected to Parliament and, in the winter of 1716, with Lady Mary only recently recovered from a case of smallpox that had left her beautiful face permanently scarred, he was assigned to the task of ending hostilities between Turkey and Austria. After his recall in 1718, they bought a house in Twickenham, west of London.
At Twickenham Lady Mary embarked upon a period of intense literary activity. She had earlier written a set of six "town eclogues" that were witty adaptations of the Roman poet Virgil. In these, she was helped by her friends John Gay and Alexander Pope (who later turned against her, satirizing her in The Dunciad and elsewhere, to which attacks Lady Mary replied with spirit, though she quickly abandoned poetic warfare). Among the works that she then composed was an anonymous and lively attack on the satirist Jonathan Swift (1734), a play, Simplicity (written c. 1735), adapted from the French of Pierre Marivaux, and a series of crisp essays dealing obliquely with politics and directly with feminism and the moral cynicism of her time.
In 1736 Lady Mary became infatuated with Francesco Algarotti, an Italian writer on the arts and sciences who had come to London to further his career, and she proposed that they live together in Italy. She set out in 1739, pretending to her husband and friends that she was traveling to the continent for reasons of health. Algarotti, however, did not join her, for he had been summoned to Berlin by Frederick II the Great, from whom he could expect greater rewards; and, when at length they met in Turin (1741), it proved a disagreeable experience. In 1742 she settled in the papal state of Avignon, France, where she lived until 1746. She then returned to Italy with the young Count Ugo Palazzi, with whom she lived for the next 10 years in the Venetian province of Brescia. Her letters from there to her daughter Mary, the Countess of Bute, contain descriptions of her essentially simple life. In 1756 she moved to Venice and, after Edward Wortley Montagu’s death in 1761, began planning her return to England. Discontented in London, she would have returned to Italy; but she was seriously ill with cancer and died on August 21, 1762, only seven months after her homecoming.
Achievements
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The aristocrat and writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is remembered particularly for her letters from Turkey, an early example of a secular work by a Western woman about the Muslim Orient.
Aside from her writing, Lady Mary is also known for introducing and advocating for smallpox inoculation to Britain after her return from Turkey.
Works
book
-
Life on the Golden Horn (Penguin Great Journeys)
(Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband o...)
-
Letters (Everyman's Library)
( Immensely learned, self-educated in an era when form...)
-
Turkish Embassy Letters
(The critical and biographical introduction tells of Lady ...)
-
Romance Writings
(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was the most import...)
-
The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. 3 of 5: Including Her Correspondence, Poems, and Essays (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary ...)
-
Essays and Poems and "Simplicity", a Comedy (Clarendon Paperbacks)
(A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu...)
-
Selected Letters (Penguin Classics)
(A revised selection of Lady Montagu's letters. Besides pr...)
-
Life on the Golden Horn (Penguin Great Journeys)
Views
Quotations:
"I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds. "
"Prudent people are very happy; 'tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think. "
"Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be. "
Connections
On August 23, 1712, Lady Mary married Edward Wortley Montagu. The couple had two children.
- Father:
- Evelyn Pierrepont
- Mother:
- Mary Pierrepont (Feilding)
- Sister:
- Frances Pierrepont
- Sister:
- Evelyn Leveson-Gower (Pierrepont)
- half-sister:
- Caroline Pierrepont
- half-sister:
- Anne Pierrepont
- Daughter:
- Mary Stuart
- Son:
- Edward Wortley Montagu
- Brother:
- William Pierrepont
- husband:
- Edward Wortley-Montagu
- Friend:
- John Gay
Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull, was an English aristocrat.
Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute, 1st Baroness Mount Stuart, was the wife of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, who was Prime Minister of Great Britain between 1762 and 1763.
Edward Wortley Montagu was an English author and traveller.
Edward Wortley-Montagu was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
References
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Born
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Died
August 21, 1762 (aged 73) -
Nationality
English