SOURCE: “Wise, Foolish, Enchanting Lady Mary,” in The New Criterion, Vol. 13, No. 5, January 1995, pp. 8-17.

[In the essay below, Epstein offers a survey of Montagu's life and career.]

Once, and but once, his heedless youth was bit,
And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.

—Alexander Pope

“A passionate man,” said Stendhal, “is seldom witty.” Building on that aphorism, one might go on to say that a witty man is rarely handsome. A beautiful woman who, along with being witty, is also commonsensical is rarest of all. They do, however, turn up, perhaps every century or two. Such a woman was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She lived (1689-1762) in a cold and hard age, where beauty helped immensely, wit was a useful weapon, common sense a necessity, and only passion an embarrassment.

Lady Mary was born with every advantage, real and artificial, and a number of true disadvantages. One distinct advantage was that she was an aristocrat, the daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, Marquis of Dorchester, afterwards Duke of Kingston. Her secure place among the well-born was a fact she never forgot, nor was she above using it against her social, if not intellectual, inferiors. Of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, with both of whom she had had a falling out, she remarked that they were “entitled by their birth and fortune to be only a couple of link-boys”—that is, boys hired to carry torches to light the way for others.

In later years, writing to her daughter, Lady Bute, whose husband was prime minister under George II, she noted that English writers, being generally low-born themselves, attempt to “represent people of quality as the vilest and silliest part of the nation.” In her own experience, she added, “the greatest examples I have known of honour and integrity has been amongst those of the highest birth and fortunes.” Gardening with Italian peasants, chatting with innkeepers, befriending women in Turkish harems, Lady Mary could be charmingly old shoe, but she always kept nearby a high horse for mounting when it pleased her to do so.

As for disadvantages, the full consequences of the chief one to befall her, the loss of her mother when Lady Mary was only four years old, shall never be known. It shall never be known because she only once, in a youthful autobiography, wrote of it. Availing herself of the third-person and more than a little romantic melodrama—she was a reader of bad novels her life long—she wrote: “Her first misfortune happened in a time of life when she could not be sensible of it, though she was sufficiently so in the course of it; I mean the death of a noble Mother, whose virtue and good sense might have supported and instructed her youth.” She goes on to say that this support and instruction was left to “the care of a young Father, who, tho' naturally an honest man, was abandoned to his pleasures, and (like most of those of his quality) did not think himself obliged to be very attentive to his children's education.”

The other disadvantage, Lady Mary herself would have maintained, was to have been brought up a woman in the age of Queen Anne. In one of her more famous mots, she wrote that “my only consolation for being of that gender, has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.” In fact, she not only made the best of having been dealt this card, but, on occasion, turned it into a trump.

The eldest of four children, alternately pampered and neglected by her father, raised by a superstitious governness, Lady Mary, at an early age, presided at her father's table, which meant, among other things, being put in charge of carving various joints of meat, the task assigned to the woman of the house. She also had the run of her father's rather impressive library, of which she made good use. She began to write poetry, and, at thirteen, she repaired to her father's library, where, with the aid of a dictionary and a grammar, she began to teach herself Latin, which she did well enough to undertake translations of Ovid and, some years later, Epictetus's Enchiridion, which she showed to Bishop Burnet, who is said to have been much impressed. Of her intellectual attainments, Robert Halsband, Lady Mary's biographer and editor, writes: “She tended to be a blue-stocking proud of her erudition, though she later regarded a reputation of learning as a misfortune in a woman.”

Lady Mary's father was a Whig, which she herself remained all her life, and a member of the Kit-Cat Club, that London gathering place for artists, intellectuals, and aristocrats interested in politics and culture, and among his friends were Addison, Steele, and Congreve. All accounts of Lady Mary include the story of her father nominating his then not yet eight-year-old daughter as the candidate for the Club's annual beauty, to be toasted by all the members, holding that she was more beautiful than anyone else nominated that year. To make good his claim, he had the child brought to the Club, all the members agreed on her beauty, and she was declared winner and passed from lap to lap, roundly praised, and toasted straightaway.

Recounting this story, her granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, reports in her “Introductory Anecdotes” to her own son's nineteenth-century edition of Lady Mary's letters: “Pleasure, she said, was too poor a word to express her sensations; they amounted to ecstasy: never again, throughout her whole future life, did she pass so happy a day.” Lady Mary's father afterwards commissioned a painting of her, so that the painting itself could regularly be toasted, which it was. This was but the first of many occasions on which she would play the happy role of cynosure. Although she would in later years refer to herself in her letters as a mere “spectatress,” lime was the light she bathed in most happily.

Few people can have contained within themselves more contradictory qualities than Lady Mary. She was detached and highly observant, yet loved, indeed craved, attention; she was cynical yet romantic, informal yet snobbish. “Lady Mary is one of the most extraordinary shining characters in the world,” wrote the English anecdotist Joseph Spence, after meeting her in Rome; “but she shines like a comet; she is all irregular and always wandering. She is the most wise, the most imprudent; loveliest, disagreeablest; best natured, cruellest woman in the world.”

In describing her conduct during her courtship by Edward Montagu Wortley, Leslie Stephen, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, remarks that she showed “masculine sense rather than tenderness.” Lady Mary may have been that entity for which many men are said secretly to yearn but perhaps none has ever discovered: someone with a masculine mind and a feminine body. The largely epistolary courtship between Lady Mary and Wortley was carried on, from her standpoint, as a great seduction of common sense, difficult as that may be to imagine. Her father disapproved the marriage, principally because Wortley would not agree to his insistence on an arrangement whereby all his estates would be entailed to his and Lady Mary's first-born son. Lord Dorchester, as he then was, ordered his daughter to marry another man, a gentleman with the wonderfully Wodehousian moniker of Clotworthy Skeffington. Engaged to Skeffington though she formally was, she nonetheless kept up negotiations with Wortley. (Wortley's father, though named Montagu, agreed to call himself by his richer wife's family name of Wortley, a practice his son tended off and on to continue.)

“I never speak but what I mean,” Lady Mary wrote to him, “and when I say I love, 'tis for ever.” Wortley, from all accounts a rather humorless man and from his portraits a very handsome one, was obviously smitten. “I know how to make a man of sense happy,” she wrote to him, “but then that man must resolve to contribute something toward it himself.” She told Wortley that she didn't quite believe in his love. She threatened to cut off correspondence with him. When she picked it up again, she informed him that her ideal of marriage is to be found in friendship. “By friendship,” she wrote, “I mean an entire communication of thoughts, wishes, interests, and pleasures, being undivided; a mutual esteem, which naturally carries with it a pleasing sweetness of conversation, and terminates in the desire of making one or another happy.” Wortley, suffering jealousy and doubt, continued to waver. Lord Dorchester now really put the screws to Lady Mary about marrying Skeffington—a case, in the old-fashioned and most precise sense, of genuine peer pressure.

Finally, the deal was done. An elopement was planned; Lady Mary would be Wortley's, but without dowry. “I shall come to you,” she wrote in August of 1712, “with only a night-gown and a petticoat and that is all you will get with me.” Toward the close of the same letter, she adds: “'Tis something odd for a woman that brings nothing to expect anything; but after the way of my education, I dare not pretend to live but in some degree suitable to it.” By which she meant that, though she may come to him a pauper, she didn't for a moment expect to live like one.

Lady Mary was twenty-three, Wortley thirty-four, when they married. In Lady Mary, Wortley got both more than he bargained for and less than she promised. Before their marriage, she had written to him: “I am determined to think as little of the rest of the world—men, women, acquaintance and relations—as if a deluge had swallowed them. I abandon all things that bear the name of pleasure but what is to be found in your company. I give up all my wishes, to be regulated by yours, and I resolve to have no other study but that of pleasing you.” Could Wortley have believed this? If he did, he was not only unimaginative but a fool. His wife was inveterately the most social of beings.

Wortley was a man of some worldliness. He had the interests of a gentleman of his time in amateur scholarship, which included a fair amount of learning in foreign and ancient languages. Joseph Addison was his close friend. He was not yet rich when he married, but, a man who looked after his business, he died leaving an estate of more than £800,000, along with an annual income of £17,000 from his lands—at that time, as the old joke has it, a lot of money.

Lady Mary was peremptory and, though otherwise splendidly imaginative, was unable to imagine herself wrong. At twenty-four she wrote out a correction of Cato, Addison's famous play, correcting it as if it were the work of child. Addison, mirabile dictu, not merely accepted but acted upon many of these corrections. Such a woman was not to be set aside like a trophy or a lap dog, which Wortley, early in his marriage, attempted to do, leaving his wife—soon his wife and infant son—stranded in the country while he sat in Parliament in London. This arrangement, she made plain to him, was intolerable and, under the barrage of constant criticism, he moved her to London.

Before she married, Lady Mary, who was determined not to be a spinster, shared a secret code with her friend Philippa Mundy, in which the two young women referred to marriage to a man one loved as Paradise, to a man one detested as Hell, and to a man one merely tolerated at Limbo. Lady Mary's marriage all too quickly slid from Paradise to Limbo, and what caused her and Wortley's marriage to become hollow is a matter of some controversy. Those who have written about Lady Mary's life, in deciding who was responsible for the dissipation of feeling between them, have cast votes on different sides.

Marrying a genius is probably always a mistake. Those of us who are not ourselves geniuses will feel a certain sympathy for Wortley. Leigh Hunt, writing more than a century after the fact, cited Wortley's inattentiveness for the breakdown of his marriage, yet nonetheless thought “the lady, in all respects, was too much for him,—had too much fondness (if he could but have responded to it), too much vivacity of all sorts, and even too much of his favorite ‘good sense.’” Joseph Walter Cove, another of Lady Mary's biographers, remarks that “husbands are not, as a rule, fond of being outshone by their wives,” as Wortley clearly was by his. Yet Wortley remained steadfast, even in the long years when he and his wife were separated, she living alone in Italy and in France. During this later period, Lady Mary wrote to her daughter of Wortley that she “knew him to be more capable of a generous action than any man I ever knew.”

The first of Wortley's generous actions was to give his wife, once she had moved with him to London, the widest possible berth in her own social trafficking. With her good looks, her intellectual ebullience, her eye for scandal and talent for spreading it, she took London in her early years the way Grant took Richmond—her social conquest, that is to say, was complete. Wortley, in the words of Robert Halsband, “conceded that since no one could match her intelligence, he would never contend with it.”

At the court of George I, the fifty-four-year-old Hanoverian king who spoke very little English, Lady Mary throve. Positioning herself in a way that she hoped would redound to her husband's political success, she became a friend of the Princess of Wales, who would one day be Queen Caroline; the king, a man with an eye for female beauty and charm, took note of the striking Lady Mary. She took rather different, cooler note of him, later describing him thus: “The king's character may be comprised in a very few words. In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead; and fortune, that made him a king, added nothing to his happiness, only prejudiced his honesty and shortened his days.” Lady Mary understood the uses and pleasures of power and thoroughly grasped that, then as now, imbeciles were frequently found in high places.

In London she not only kept up a regular social round amongst her own class, but also cultivated many of the capital's literary men: Congreve, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, the painter Charles Jervas, and, most fatefully, the brilliant little hunchback of Twickenham, Alexander Pope. She was quick-witted, perceptive and penetrating both, with a ready supply of that malice in which the age may be said to have specialized. Walter Bagehot is excellent on the social scene that Lady Mary found in London, at a time when aristocrats were undeterred in their behavior by the not-yet-invented social brake that today we call public opinion:

The aristocracy came to town from their remote estates—where they were uncontrolled by any opinion or by any equal society, and where the eccentricities and personalities of each character were known and fostered and exaggerated—to a London which was like a large county town, in which everybody of rank knew everybody of rank, where the eccentricities of each rural potentate came into collision with the eccentricities of other rural potentates, where the most minute allusions to the peculiarities and the career of the principal persons were instantly understood, where squibs were on every table, and where satire was in the air.

All this provided a perfect field of operations for Lady Mary, with her wit and lively sense of the grotesque: she once described the marriage between a rheumatic woman and a man who had the use of only one arm as “curious as that between 2 oysters, and as well worthy the serious enquiry of the naturalists.” She not only had the temperament necessary to satire, the reigning tone of the time, but showed a ready literary talent, being able to shape comic couplets, the chief form of the time, with such an effortless aplomb that her verse was often thought to have been composed by Pope, much to the latter's consternation. Of the Princess of Wales, who had befriended her, she wrote:

Ah! Princess, learn'd in all the courtly arts
To cheat our hopes, and yet to gain our hearts.

Such versifying was not published, at least not under her own name, especially by an aristocrat such as Lady Mary, in whom publication itself would have been construed as vulgar in the extreme. But it was passed round around to all the right—that is to say, the malicious-minded—people. Lady Mary was clearly among the right people—she was very much, as we should nowadays say, in the loop.

The interconnections, the intertwinings, among the social, the literary, and political in eighteenth-century England are a good part of what gives the period its brilliance and fascination. In what other period could a man such as Joseph Addison become an important secretary of state; or Edward Wortley Montagu find favor at court because he could communicate with his king in French; or Horace Walpole later hold a grudge against Lady Mary (he referred to her as “Moll Worthless”) because she was a long-time friend of the woman, Molly Skerrett, who became his father's mistress and thus the enemy of his mother. How delightfully intimate this world was, how perfectly vicious!

Life, for Lady Mary, was always to be taken as it was, not as one wished it might be. In her letters, she was amusing about the vanities and foibles—especially sexual foibles—of others, but rarely was she censorious. She had a clear sense of what it took to get on in a less-than-perfectly-just world. She urged the perhaps too passive Wortley to greater heights through impudence. “'Tis necessary for the common good for an honest man to endeavor to be powerful when he can be the one without losing the first more valuable title,” she wrote to her husband. Later, she added: “… as the world is and will be, 'tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it may be in one's power to do good, riches being another word for power, towards the obtaining of which the first necessary qualification is impudence, and (as Demosthenes said of pronunciation in oratory) the second is impudence, and the third, still impudence.” She reminded her husband that every man who early attained to high place had this quality. “A moderate merit with a large share of impudence is more probable to be advanced than the greatest qualification without it.”

In 1715, when she was twenty-six, Lady Mary was afflicted with small pox, which caused the loss of her eyebrows and left her skin pitted and pocked. Although she retained her large, almond-shaped eyes—without eyebrows, they took on a startled, staring quality—her slightly acquiline, slender nose that gave her face a permanent refinement, her small soft mouth with its full, slightly pouting lower lip, a great beauty was ruined by this arbitrary turn in her fortune. “I am,” she later wrote, “of the opinion that it is extremely silly to submit to ill-fortune. One should pluck up the spirit, and live upon cordials when one can have no other nourishment.” Yet, when she grew older, she claimed no longer to look into mirrors.

The following year, 1716, Wortley was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Turkey. Caught up in the most intricate diplomatic negotiations among Austria, France, Turkey, and England, Wortley, who expected his appointment to last no fewer than five years, was dismissed, at the insistence of Austria, whose diplomats thought him acting in the interest of Turkey, after little more than a year. But the trip proved the making of his wife's reputation. Her Turkish Embassy Letters along with her pioneering work in England on spreading the use of small-pox inoculation, which she had learned about in Constantinople, lifted her above being a mere clever woman to being a figure of permanent interest.

With an entourage of twenty servants in tow, Lady Mary, her husband, and child passed through Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Balkans—with a long stop in Adrianople, where the Sultan had arranged lodgings for the new English Ambassador and his family—before arriving in Constantinople. Under conditions of early-eighteenth-century travel, the trip took roughly eight months. Lady Mary had prepared herself for this adventure by attempting to learn Turkish; in Adrianople, she went about in Turkish costume as she would later do in Constantinople. Many later portraits show her in this same get-up.

In Turkey and in the countries she visited along the way, she revealed herself an excellent ethnographer, one of the participatory kind, falling in with local customs, broadly tolerant of other ways of living, and endlessly curious about the different cultures in which she found herself. “Thus you see, my dear” she wrote to an English friend, apropos of the ritual of taking a second husband—“one that bears the name, and another that performs the duties”—at certain German courts, “gallantry and good-breeding are as different, in different climates, as morality and religion. Who have the rightest notions of both, we shall never know till the day of judgment.” For a woman certain of her own judgment at home, she was splendidly broad-minded in foreign lands.

The prose pictures Lady Mary sent back from Turkey left a permanent impress on European culture: Ingres is said to have made use of her description of a Turkish harem for Le Bain Turc, his painting of 1862. The most carefully prepared of her literary productions, these letters were clearly composed with later, most probably post-humous, publication in mind. In their day, Smollett, Voltaire, Johnson, and Byron expressed admiration for them. Gibbon, upon finishing them, noted: “What fire, what ease, what knowledge of Europe and Asia!” Dr. Johnson is supposed to have said that Lady Mary's letters were the only book he ever read for pure pleasure.

A curious and lively mind, exercising itself in a careful style upon an exotic subject, retains an eternal interest. In her letters from Turkey, Lady Mary described the limitless power of the Turkish janissaries, who, in effect, held the Sultan and everyone else captive. She is splendid in her descriptions of Turkish women and their elaborately bedizened dress. “As to their morality or good conduct, I can say like Harlequin, ‘'Tis just as 'tis with you’; and the Turkish ladies don't commit one sin the less for not being Christians.” Like every good writer, she knows that the larger subject of the travel writer is human nature in a fresh context, but considered in a way that never scamps the delights of cogently observed particulars. She understands, too, that one of the benefits travel confers is that of providing silken thread for spinning endless fine distinctions. She herself, we learn from her letters, prefers Italian to French music, French to English acting, and English to French women.

While in Turkey Lady Mary learned about inoculation as a defense against small pox, a disease “so fatal and so general amongst us,” as she wrote to her friend Sarah Chiswell, and she claimed that she planned to allow her own son to undergo inoculation by Turkish methods. “I am patriot enough,” she wrote, “to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England.” When the time comes to make the attempt, she predicted, she is almost certain to be opposed by English doctors, who are unlikely to have sufficient virtue “to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind, but that distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it.”

Four years later, in 1721, when a small-pox epidemic struck England, all that Lady Mary had prophesied turned true. When a London physician attempted to explain, in a pamphlet, how inoculation worked, there was an unwillingness to believe him. Lady Mary, who had already had her son inoculated, now offered her second child, a daughter born in Turkey, to be inoculated as a matter of public record. The Princess of Wales, much impressed by this, determined to widen the tests for inoculation. General interest, and soon widespread participation, in inoculation followed, so that Lady Mary was able to write to her sister: “I suppose the … faithful historians give you regular accounts of the growth and spreading of the inoculation of the small-pox, which is become almost a general practice, attended with great success.”

Now returned to England, Lady Mary required an inoculation of another kind—that against scandal. Unfortunately, in the circles in which she traveled, none was available. She took up her turn in the elaborate dart game of insult that was the amusement of choice of the brightest figures of the age. She could cast as cold an eye as any among them. When Pope wrote some sentimental verses about two rustic lovers struck by lightning who were joined forever in eternity, Lady Mary set out, in a letter to Pope, rather a different script for their likely future; her version ends on the following lines:

A beaten wife and cuckhold swain
Had jointly cursed the marriage chain.
Now they are happy in their doom,
For Pope has wrote upon their tomb.

Life in England was far from smooth for Lady Mary. Her marriage seemed to turn permanently cold; Wortley, concentrating all his attention on business and sitting in Parliament, receded into the dim background. (She, from all reports, was technically faithful to him—that is, there is no evidence that she ever took a lover.) Her young sister died and so did her father, who, true to his word when she married against his wishes, left her nothing. Her young son began to show first signs of his lifelong delinquency by running off to sea at the age of thirteen: he would later scandalize her in various ways, and later in life became a Mohammedan. Her other sister, Lady Mar, after many signs of losing her grip, lapsed into insanity, and Lady Mary had to battle her brother-in-law for custody of her.

Earlier, acting on a tip from Pope, Lady Mary had given financial advice to a Frenchman named Rémond, who had powerfully flattered her, to invest in South Sea stock. At the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, he wanted his money back. He claimed she had duped him, and threatened to expose her to Wortley, who would not have been pleased. She was perfectly innocent, but in a society where scandal was the standard, truth was no fit defense. Besides, as Lady Mary was attracted by gossip, so quite as much did she attract it. This incident with Rémond would later be used against her by her enemies Horace Walpole and Alexander Pope.

Pope was not always her enemy. Quite the reverse. In his letters, he was rapturously in pursuit of her, so much so that she had delicately to defuse his epistolary passions by never answering them in kind. For a time, it appeared as if the two were in satirical cahoots. Not long after Lady Mary and Wortley returned from Constantinople, they acquired, along with their London place, a house in Twickenham, where Pope lived and where, as Peter Quenell writes in his life of Pope, “he had planned his gardens as a kind of decorative trap, a labyrinth of alleys and avenues in which he had hoped that Lady Mary might consent to lose her way.”

And then, in a complication of ways that has never been made clear, it all exploded. The various stories set out in explanation of the break run, at the most trivial level, to Pope's once loaning Lady Mary some sheets, which she returned to him unwashed; to, in one of his versions, his unwillingness to write a satire on someone at her and her friend Lord Hervey's insistence. Some held that he harbored resentment about her criticism of his poem about the lovers caught in the thunder storm. Her granddaughter reports Lady Mary recounting to her that Pope had declared his love to her, which “in spite of her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an immoderate fit of laughter; from which moment he became her implacable enemy.” (Unrequited love, to Pope, far from being a bore, was a license to kill.) Maynard Mack, Pope's excellent biographer, thinks this last story possible but unlikely. He thinks it more likely that Pope convinced himself that Lady Mary was somehow behind a number of public attacks on him, for he reported to Robert Walpole that she was blackening his own name as she one day would his.

Pope was not a good man to have as an enemy. His was the sharpest pen in England, and when he unsheathed it he intended not to wound but to kill. In the Dunciad as well as in other poems, Lady Mary appears as Sappho. In another of his poems, he refers to a “hapless Monsieur”—this would of course be Rémond—who

much complains at Paris
Of wrongs from Duchesses and Lady Maries.

Before he was done, Pope accused Lady Mary of being personally filthy, treacherous, having a venereal disease, and being a whore. In his “Imitation of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” he describes victims of Sappho, as “Poxed by her love, or libelled by her hate.” She fired a few good shots of her own across his bow, including the following from “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace”:

Then whilst with coward hand you stab a name,
And try at least t'assassinate our fame,
Like the first bold assassin's be thy lot,
Ne'er be thy guilt forgiven, or forgot;
But as thou hat'st, be hated by mankind,
And with the emblem of thy crooked mind
Mark's on thy back, like Cain by God's own hand,
Wander, like him, accursed through the land.

Along with Pope's enmity, came, rather like a package deal, that of Swift and Bolingbroke. It could not have been pleasant for Lady Mary to have been the public target of some of the meanest hit men in England. Her marriage was deadened if still legally intact. She had been put through Rémond's blackmail. Her son was a permanent disappointment, her daughter made a financially disappointing marriage that she could not know would later turn out to be a politically advantageous one. England must, in every way, have seemed stale to her.

In 1740, then, Lady Mary expatriated herself, to France and to Italy, where she would remain until the final year of her life. Some have argued that she made a deal with Wortley, who felt she was disgracing him, to live abroad at his expense. A more reasonable conjecture about her abrupt flight to Europe is offered by Bagehot, who speculated: “She turned abroad, not in pursuit of definite good, nor from fear of particular evil, but from a vague wish for some great change—from a wish to escape from a life which harassed the soul, but did not calm it; which awakened the intellect without answering its questions.”

Four years earlier Lady Mary had met and become infatuated with a young man named Count Francesco Algarotti. Part of her plan in departing England was to live in Italy with Algarotti. A man still in his twenties, a natural philosopher interested in Locke and Newton, who had put the latter's Optics in the form of a dialogue, Algarotti was a real piece of work. He was, as Robert Halsband quietly puts it, “a handsome man of great charm and androgynous tastes, capable of love affairs with either sex.” Frederick II, King of Prussia, with whom Algarotti settled in for a good spell, called him “the Swan of Padua” and recalled him, in his memoirs, as “a man of taste, of gentle mind, keen, shrewd, supple, but a great wheedler, and above all very selfish.” (One admires the diminution of virtue in that description.) Lady Mary was nearly twice Algarotti's age, and Robert Halsband doubts whether there was any element of sexual passion in her feelings for him. For him she was probably no more than, in the modern term used by gigolos, just another “old hide,” or wealthy women who might prove useful.

Although they exchanged many letters and both lived in Turin at the same time, Algarotti is significant chiefly in being the last disappointment in Lady Mary's life. She lived more than twenty-two years in self-imposed exile in Italy and France, and, no longer fortified by the illusion of hope, grew more and more impressive. She lived on an allowance of £1,200, generously supplied her by Wortley, sufficient to sustain a decent margin of luxury, with enough left over to make her an interesting target for various Italian confidence men and assorted hustlers. Living alone, occasionally visited by Englishmen abroad, she lived, as she once claimed to her sister she lived in England, endeavoring “to make the world as agreeable to me as I can, which is the true philosophy; that of despising it is of no use but to hasten wrinkles.”

Away from London and its school for scandal, Lady Mary became deeper in her isolation. Writing from Brescia, in Italy, she claims to be as much removed from the world as it is possible to be “this side of the grave, which is my own inclination.” At her villa outside Brescia, she writes to her daughter that “I enjoy every amusement that solitude can afford.” She cultivates her garden and her own mind, and, as she notes, “whoever will cultivate their own mind will find full employment.”

During this portion of her life, Lady Mary is living, in effect, in a monastery of her own devising, and thinks of herself as a “lay nun,” if not quite the abbess that in childhood she once imagined herself. In solitude, the world begins to fall into place for her. She comes to understand what is important—that a cook who makes a fine pudding and keeps a clean kitchen is as valuable as a genius; that a country doctor who trudges selflessly on his long rounds is a true hero. Abroad, she obtains that fine distance that goes by the name of perspective. To Lady Bute she writes: “I know now (and alas, have long known) all things in this world are almost equally trifling, and our most serious projects have scarce more foundation than those edifices that your little ones raise in cards.”

As she grows older, Lady Mary believes less and less in free will. Liberty, she holds, is chimerical, and, she avers toward the end of her life to her friend Sir James Steuart, “I am afraid we are little better than straws upon the water; we flatter ourselves that we swim when the current carries us along.” None of this, however, gets her in the least down. If we travail without anything like free will, so be it: “let us sing as cheerfully as we can in our impenetrable confinement and crack nuts with pleasure from the little store that is allowed us.”

In her sixties, her spirit seems to deepen without her wit or energy abating. She dispensed advice to her daughter on the education of her granddaughters, raised poultry, kept bees and silk worms, taught the Italians who lived nearby to make English puddings and custards, read works both serious and frivolous in her lush garden. “Those who can laugh and be diverted with absurdities are the wisest spectators, be it of writing, actions, or people,” she held. She also held—and there is no reason to disbelieve her—that “I now find by experience more sincere pleasure with my books and garden than all the flutter of a court could give me.”

In 1761, at the age of seventy-two, just after the death of Wortley, she decided to return to England. “I am dragging my ragged remnant of life to England,” she wrote. After an expatriation of nearly twenty-three years, she arrived in England in January 1762, was discovered to have cancer of the breast in March, and on August 21, lulled by hemlock, was swept off the board of life. “And so farewell,” writes Leigh Hunt in the final paragraph of his essay, “poor, flourishing, disappointed, reconciled, wise, foolish, enchanting Lady Mary!”

Lady Mary had a second life through posthumous publication. Knowing that her daughter, Lady Bute, and her son-in-law with their aristocratic horror of publication would not be in favor of any of her works seeing print, on her return to England Lady Mary left a copy of her letters from Turkey with a Reverend Benjamin Sowden in Rotterdam, “to be disposed of as he thinks proper.” She had to have known that he would have thought it proper to have them published, as he had already strongly suggested she do herself. The published letters were an instant success. “The publication of these letters,” wrote Smollett, “will be an immortal monument to the memory of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and will show, as long as the English language endures, the sprightliness of her wit, the solidity of her judgment, the elegance of her taste, and the excellence of her real character.” Although Lady Bute burned her mother's diary, she did not destroy her mother's other papers, and some forty years after Lady Mary's death a collection of her works, including the verse and the few essays she wrote under pseudonyms, was published. It added further luster to her reputation.

But it is Lady Mary's letters, chronicling fifty-four years of her life, that constitute her true achievement. When she read Madame de Sévigné's letters, she wrote to her sister, Lady Mar, that “very pretty they are, but I assert that mine will be fully as entertaining forty years hence. I advise you, then, to put none of them to the use of waste paper.” Excessive humility was never Lady Mary's long suit, but in this instance, I believe, she was correct. Her letters cut through empty formality and false sentiment, from neither of which Madame de Sévigné was wholly free, and reveal a splendid healthiness of mind pondering a world it never finds devoid of interest. Within her letters one discovers literary criticism, a mother lode of novelistic material, a brilliant eye for and witty response to human foible, and an almost complete absence of depression, even when, one might have thought, depression was well warranted.

Lady Mary's letters contain little of great events, not a vast amount about famous persons, and a paucity of personal confession. They are relentlessly interesting because, as a writer, dullness was simply not available to her. As T. S. Eliot said that the best method for being a critic is to be very intelligent, so the best method for writing letters that will retain eternal interest is never to be boring. Always on the intellectual qui vive, she was never for a moment bored by life, the reward for which was that she was incapable of writing boringly about it. This is why, despite her many faults, for all who enjoy the grand spectacle of a lively mind in perpetual motion, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu will always be a minor classic.