Mary Wortley Montagu, The Genuine Copy of a Letter Written from Constantinople by an English Lady […], 2nd edn (London: James Roberts and Anne Dodd, 1719)

BEARDSWORTH/TEN(2)

A letter from a woman who lived an extraordinarily adventurous life – not always on her own terms, but certainly not for want of trying

Born into a family that rose high through the ranks of the English aristocracy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (c. 1689-1762) eloped with a man not favoured by her father in 1712. In the 1730s, she fell in love with an Italian count, for whom she left her family and England. When the desired relationship did not materialise, she moved around France and Italy for decades. In 1756, Lady Mary escaped Brescia (Italy) where she had been imprisoned by some of the city’s ‘most notorious […] upper-class bandits’, losing all her jewellery and title-deeds (Grundy). She returned to England only a few months before her death.

Early in her marriage, Lady Mary lived in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), where her husband was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1716 and 1718. The letter displayed here in its second edition is a reply to questions she was asked about Turkey. Concerning the place of women in Islam, she assured that ‘though commonly believ’d in our Parts of the World’ it is false that ‘Mahomet excludes Women from any Share in a future happy State’. Lady Mary explained that the value of a woman in the Islamic religion rested on her motherhood. While we may find this limiting today, she presented this belief very positively in her letter.

Upon her return to England, Lady Mary introduced the Ottoman practice of inoculation to smallpox. Interestingly, the reaction to this medical revolution in England was not unlike the one witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Hard-hitting and frequently slanderous media warfare broke out, abusing and defending the procedure in newspapers and pamphlets, and even from the pulpit. Lady Mary contributed a single, pseudonymous essay to this vituperative controversy’ (Grundy). This was an isolated scientific interest, however. Overall, Lady Mary pursued her literary interests with a focus on
poetry, essays, and letter writing. The most notable among her literary connections was that with Alexander Pope (1688-1744), although it eventually turned sour, and Pope later attacked her repeatedly in his writings (Grundy).