Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Facts & Worksheets

• During her younger years, Latin as a language was reserved for men, but Mary was not afraid to learn it and used it by using a Latin dictionary and grammar book. Her efforts made her fluent in the use of Latin on par with most men of her age. A brief epistolary novel, a prose-and-verse romance based on Aphra Behn’s Voyage to the Isle of Love, and two novels titled Poems, Songs &c were composed by Mary by 1705 when she was fourteen or fifteen years old. Additionally, she corresponded with two bishops, Gilbert Burnet and Thomas Tenison, who added to the governess’s instruction.
• By 1710, Lady Mary had two potential suitors: Clotworthy Skeffington, Irish Viscount Massereene’s heir, and Edward Wortley Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament. Through Edward’s younger sister, Anne Wortley, Mary became acquaintances with Edward. In London, Anne and Mary visited one other’s residences and often met at social events. Mary’s first letter to Edward was written in March 1710, and the two exchanged letters until 1711. 
• When Mary’s father bought a home at Acton, it became more difficult for them to stay in touch. Mary contracted smallpox a few weeks after moving, and she instructed her maid to write Edward a letter informing him of her condition. Mary and Edward soon began to misunderstand one another, so Edward decided to visit her at Acton. They talked about their misunderstanding, and Edward later professed his love for Mary.
• Until the early summer of 1710, Edward in London and Lady Mary in Acton continued to correspond. However, Edward was soon in danger as a result of these letters. This letter, which was discovered by a servant at Mary’s home and delivered to her father, left him angry.
• Regarding an official proposal, Edward gave Mary’s father a call. Mary’s father demanded that Edward allot an estate on the first son born to him; Edward refused to do this, for this would require him a huge amount of money. Until the early summer of 1710, Edward and Mary continued to correspond. 
• However, Edward was soon in danger as a result of these letters. A letter, which was discovered by a servant at Mary’s home and delivered to her father, left the latter in anger. With this, Edward called her father to make an official proposal.  Edward, therefore, considered posting the marriage contract in the British publication The Tatler in an attempt to persuade Mary’s father. Mary’s father decided to sever her connection with Edward at the end of March 1711. Her father, Lord Dorchester, decided that same summer to find his daughter a husband other than Edward. 
• Mary was under pressure from her father to wed Clotworthy Skeffington. In his marriage contract, Skeffington stipulated that he would receive an allowance of £500 a year as pin-money and £1,200 a year if he died. However, she turned him down. Instead of agreeing to her father’s arranged marriage, she eloped with Edward. On 16 May 1713, she had a son, Edward Wortley Montagu, the younger, named after his father. The Whigs took control in 1714, and Edward was named ambassador to Turkey in 1716. They purchased a home in Twickenham, west of London, following his recall in 1718. By this point, Mary and her husband had a purely formal and impersonal relationship for unclear reasons.  
• Lady Mary began a period of strong literary effort at Twickenham. She had previously penned a collection of six humorous town eclogues that were parodies of Virgil, the Roman poet. Her friends, Alexander Pope and John Gay assisted her in these. She went on to write a play called Simplicity (1735), which was adapted from Pierre Marivaux’s, an anonymous and animated attack on the satirist Jonathan Swift, and a number of incisive essays that dealt directly with feminism and the moral cynicism of her era and indirectly with politics.

MONTAGU AND HER ADVOCACY ON SMALLPOX

• Europeans started experimenting with variolation or inoculation in the eighteenth century in an attempt to prevent smallpox rather than treat it. Most famously, Montagu broke with tradition by advocating for smallpox vaccination in Western medicine after seeing it in action while travelling and living in the Ottoman Empire. 
• In December 1715, at the age of twenty-six, Montagu contracted smallpox. Although Lady Mary recovered from smallpox in 1715, the disease left her with a deformed visage because her brother had previously died of it in 1713. She made friends and learnt about Turkish customs while visiting the women in their separate zenanas, a residence for Muslims and Hindus, in the Ottoman Empire. 
• Montagu observed the variolation, or smallpox vaccination, practice there in March of 1717, which she dubbed engrafting, and she wrote several letters home about it. Her Letter to a Friend, dated 1 April 1717, is the most well-known of these letters.