Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1689–1762)

Self-taught aristocrat of keen intelligence and sparkling wit, whose most enduring legacy can be found in her hundreds of surviving letters which incisively describe the mores of English high society, the mysteries of the East, and the life of an aristocratic exile in 18th-century Italy and France. Name variations: Mary Wortley-Montagu. Born Mary Pierrepont in London, England, in May 1689; died of breast cancer on August 21, 1762; eldest daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, earl of Kingston, and Lady Mary Pierrepont (daughter of William Fielding, earl of Denbigh); privately tutored and self taught; cousin by marriage to Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800); married Edward Wortley Montagu, in August 1712; children: Edward Wortley Montagu (1713–1776, an author and traveler); Mary, Countess of Bute (b. 1718).

Born into the English aristocracy (May 1689); showed a passion for learning in childhood and acquired considerable skill in languages, including Latin, though she had little formal instruction; pressured by her father to marry a man of suitable social status; instead, eloped to marry the man she loved, age 23 (1712); accompanied husband to a diplomatic posting in Turkey (1716), taking her young son and giving birth to her daughter before they returned to England (1718); fell deeply in love with a young Italian scholar (1736) and left England to be with him; spent the next 22 years on the Continent, returning to England eight months before she died (1762); letters and poetry published only after her death.

"I tremble for what we are doing. Are you sure you will love me forever? Shall we never repent? I fear, and I hope." These timorous yet resolute words were written by Lady Mary Pierrepont three days before her elopement with Edward Wortley Montagu. Their courtship had been a long and stormy one. Lady Mary was a lively and intelligent woman of striking beauty. Her father, the wealthy and socially prominent earl of Kingston, eager for a rich and titled match for his eldest daughter, refused to consider plain Mr. Edward Wortley Montagu. Mary and Edward secretly corresponded for three years, bickering for much of that time. Edward was easily made jealous and thought her flirtatious; Mary did her best to convince him that she was a serious and dependable woman, worthy of his love and trust. In August 1712, her father's plans to marry her off to another suitor forced Mary's hand. At her suggestion, the lovers eloped and were secretly married by special license.

The woman who was to win literary fame as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had little formal education. Her mother died when Mary was only four years old, her father was distant and preoccupied and Mary's upbringing was left to her grandmother, Elizabeth Pierrepont . Montagu later described her education as "one of the worst in the world." Her governess, who had been her mother's nurse, "took so much pains from my infancy to fill my head with superstitious tales and false notions, it was none of her fault that I am not at this day afraid of witches and hobgoblins, or turned Methodist." However, driven by a natural curiosity and love of learning, Montagu discovered her father's libraries and by the age of 13 she had taught herself enough Latin to enjoy the great classical authors. Reading seemed to lead naturally to writing. A year later, she copied some of her prose and poetry compositions into an album and composed the following preface:

I question not but here is very manny faults but if any reasonable Person considers 3 things they wou'd forgive them

1. I am a woman
2. without any advantage of Education
3. all these was writ at the age of 14.

Montagu's biographer, Robert Halsband, has observed that even her earliest writings show "a curious mixture of romantic emotionalism and cynical rationalism—the two contrasting sides of her own nature." Those contrasting facets of her temperament are clearly evident in her letters to Edward Wortley Montagu. Risking her father's anger and her reputation by writing to a man, assuring Edward that she would always love and never deceive him, she nevertheless insisted that he must also make a contribution to their happiness and grew weary of constantly reassuring him:

I begin to be tired of my humility. I have carried my complaisances to you farther than I ought. You make new scruples, you have a great deal of fancy, and your distructs being all of your own making are more immovable than if there was some real ground for them.

The frequent coolness evident in their courtship letters foreshadowed what was to become the tone of their marriage. Edward was 34 when he married the 23-year-old Mary Pierrepont, and he has been called "dour and humorless, without any genuine tenderness to match hers." She hoped that the birth of their son, Edward Wortley Montagu, Jr., in May 1713, would improve matters, but the reverse was the case. Edward spent much time in London, leaving her alone and lonely in the country. In 1714, after sending many affectionate and solicitous letters, she wrote frankly:

I am very sensible that I parted with you in July, and 'tis now the middle of November. As if this was not hardship enough you do not tell me you are sorry for it. You write seldom and with so much indifference as shows you hardly think of me at all…. If your inclination is gone I had rather never receive a letter from you than one which in lieu of comfort for your absence gives me pain even beyond it.

In January 1715, Montagu's life brightened when she joined her husband in London. The death of Queen Anne the previous year and the succession of George I to the throne meant that the Whig party, to which Edward had long been loyal, would finally secure power. Mary set out to win favor at court and to advance her husband's career. She also began her correspondence with Alexander Pope, soon to become England's preeminent poet. Montagu had written her first published piece the year before, a satirical essay which had appeared anonymously in the Spectator. Turning to poetry in 1715, she composed, with Pope and John Gay, the Town Eclogues, a satirical reworking of Virgil's pastoral eclogues, verses in which shepherd and shepherdesses were replaced by lords and ladies, thinly disguised representations of the London court figures she was coming to know well. The verses were not published but rather circulated in manuscript form among friends without mention of their authorship. However, in 1716, the three eclogues were illegally printed by an unscrupulous publisher, Edmund Curll, who attributed them to "a lady of quality." While she was proud of her learning and clearly enjoyed the whispers about her wit and poetic ability, Montagu

was, in many ways, a product of her class. Throughout her life, she maintained very rigid ideas about the role and responsibilities of the aristocracy, while recognizing that others might regard her views as examples of "an old-fashioned way of thinking." Thus, while she reflected in old age that "nobody ever had such various provocations to print as myself" she had "never aimed at the vanity of popular applause" and was convinced that persons of quality should content themselves with the applause of their friends.

In December 1715, Montagu was struck by smallpox, a dreaded scourge of the time. It could prove fatal; indeed her brother had died of the disease two years earlier at the age of 20. When it did not kill, it usually disfigured its victims, and Mary, whose beauty had been widely celebrated, was left with a deeply pitted skin and no eyelashes. The news, which came in April 1716, that her husband had been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the court of Turkey must have been welcome indeed. Mary loved traveling and enjoyed reading romances and books of travel; now was her chance to see the mysterious East for herself. Her only pangs of regret were engendered by the prospect of a lengthy separation from relatives and friends, since the usual term of appointment to such posts was 20 years. Pope, in particular, was desolate at the prospect of her departure. Highly strung and sensitive, plagued by recurrent illness and a curved spine, he had come to worship Montagu and told her: "I find I begin to behave my self worse to you than to any other woman, as I value you more. And yet if I thought I shou'd not see you again, I would say some things here, which I could not to your person."

Pope, whose letters were to become increasingly flirtatious, was not to be without the object of his passion for as long as he had feared. The family arrived at Adrianople, the capital of the Turkish Empire, in March 1717, and by September Edward had been recalled to England. Making no haste to answer the summons, however, the family did not leave Turkey until the summer of the following year, finally arriving in London in October 1718. It is from this period of less than two years abroad that much of Mary Wortley Montagu's literary fame springs. As well as keeping a journal (burned by her daughter after her death) and writing regularly to her many friends and to her sister, Frances, countess of Mar , Mary assembled a collection of 52 letters, transcribed and revised into an album. This collection, which came to be known as the Embassy Letters, forms a cohesive narrative account of her travels, starting with her departure from England and ending with her return. It was the first of her works to be published under her own name, albeit not until after her death, and achieved remarkable popularity.

The editor of Montagu's letters calls her "unabashedly open-minded"; she cast her gaze everywhere and composed vividly detailed accounts of everything she saw, drawing comparisons which are far from the usual smug European self-congratulation. Indeed, she praised and often preferred the examples of daily living and customs which she observed in Europe and the East to the habits which she had left behind. Writing of the custom whereby married Viennese women attracted and encouraged young admirers, to the extent that they might have been said to have two husbands, "one that bears the name, and another that performs the duties," Montagu observed in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Rich :

Thus you see, my dear, 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 Judgement.

Montagu's moral and cultural relativism while abroad, in such sharp contrast to the rather conventional aristocratic views she expressed while in England, is a primary element in making the Embassy Letters such enthralling reading. She begins a letter addressed to her sister by describing every detail of a Turkish woman's dress and then moves on to comment on the morality and conduct of the ladies. Criticizing others who have written on the subject as either extremely discreet or extremely stupid, Montagu asserts: "'Tis very easy to see that they have more liberty than we have." The women's heavy veiled state of "perpetual masquerade," according to Lady Mary, allows them to "follow their inclinations without danger of discovery" and she concludes that, "upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the Empire." Throughout this series of letters, Montagu carefully deconstructs the exotic tales of other travelers, emphasizing the similarities as well as the contrasts between the two cultures. In the same letter to her sister, she points a moral that is quite the opposite of that in the earlier letter to Elizabeth Rich:

Thus you see, dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would make us believe. Perhaps it would be more entertaining to add a few surprising customs of my own invention, but nothing seems to me so agreeable as truth.

Writing to Pope in June 1717, Montagu outlines her week's activities at her summer retreat outside Constantinople: "Monday setting of partridges, Tuesday reading English, Wednesday studying the Turkish language (in which, by the way, I am already very learned), Thursday classical authors, Friday spent in writing, Saturday at my needle, and Sunday admitting of visits and hearing music." Despite Edward's recall in the autumn of 1717, the family lingered in the East. Mary gave birth to a daughter ( Mary, Countess of Bute ), who was named after her mother, in February 1718, and in March she followed through on a resolution she had made the previous year and had her four-year-old son inoculated against the dreaded smallpox. Although it was not unknown in the West, indeed there had been published reports of the procedure in England in 1714 and 1716, Montagu first discovered inoculation against smallpox in the East, and she determined to promote it upon her return to England.

By October 1718, the family was back in London; Edward returned to Parliament and kept his seat for the rest of his life. Mary seems to have abandoned her attempts to further her husband's career and, commencing in 1722, she spent much of her time at their newly purchased country house in Twickenham, close to Pope's own retreat. Mary's reputation as a witty intellectual had been greatly enhanced by her travels. She continued to write brilliant letters to her sister, Lady Mar, and to other women friends; she also published an essay on the virtues of inoculation, under the pseudonym of "a Turkey Merchant," and found herself, along with Pope, at the center of a vibrant social circle.

The summer of 1722 saw the breakdown of Montagu's friendship with Pope. The reasons for the rift are unclear; speculation includes the allegation that Mary returned some sheets she had borrowed without laundering them, that she had found a new young admirer and Pope had become jealous, that he had found a younger woman to worship, that he had refused to write a satire when requested to do so by Mary and Lord Hervey and, perhaps the most likely possibility, that Pope had finally and unequivocally declared his love for her and she had laughed at him.

The years that followed the break with Pope were difficult ones for Montagu. Pope was now as passionate in his hatred as he had once been in his admiration and, in references to Mary which he barely bothered to disguise, his poems accused her of adultery, of having venereal disease, of meanness and predatory sexuality. A literary war began as other writers sprang to Montagu's defense; her reputation became the subject of widespread speculation and gossip. To make the situation worse, rumors were circulating about Montagu's possible romantic involvement with a French poet, Toussaint Rémond. The two had corresponded, and, when Mary lost some of his money in the famous collapse of the South Sea Bubble, he had threatened to publish her letters. Mary's father died in 1726, as did one of her sisters the following year. Also in 1727 her one remaining sibling, Frances, Lady Mar, had a mental breakdown and was to be the subject of a protracted custody dispute between Mary and the relatives of Lady Mar's husband. Montagu's own husband, soon to be described by a friend as "old and odd," buried himself in politics and his various business enterprises, leaving his wife completely without emotional support.

In the spring of 1736, when she was 47, Montagu met a handsome young Italian who was to transform her life. Francesco Algarotti was 24, a brilliant scientist and essayist from the University of Bologna who had come to England to seek patrons. Patronage was not slow to find him; Algarotti was bisexual and within two weeks of his arrival in England both Mary and her friend and literary champion, Lord Hervey, had fallen under his spell. Montagu's letters, always so elegantly constructed and polished, became as fervent and intemperate as those of a lovesick teenager. In August 1736, she wrote:

I no longer know how to write to you. My feelings are too ardent; I could not possibly explain them or hide them. One would have to be affected by an enthusiasm similar to mine to endure my letters. I see all its folly without being able to correct myself.

Rich, Elizabeth (fl. 1710)

English baroness. Name variations: Lady Rich. Born Elizabeth Griffith, probably in the 1680s; death date unknown; married Sir Robert Rich (1685–1768), 4th baronet and field marshal, around 1710; children: three sons and a daughter.

Lady Elizabeth Rich, known to history as one of the correspondents of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , was probably born in the 1680s and was perhaps slightly older than Lady Mary, for she is described as a "decayed beauty" by the 1720s. She married Sir Robert Rich about 1710. Lady Rich has been variously referred to as "giddy" and "vain and frivolous" and was said to have affected a girlish simplicity all her life, which made her the victim of jokes and pranks.

Mary (b. 1718)

Countess of Bute. Name variations: Lady Bute; Mary Wortley Montagu or Wortley-Montagu; Mary Stuart. Born in February 1718; daughter of Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) and Edward Wortley Montagu; married John Stuart (1713–1792), 3rd earl of Bute (a powerful politician and secretary of state).

Distressed at not having heard from Algarotti in September, she assured him that:

an exchange of letters with me ought to give you a kind of pleasure. You will see (what has never been seen till now) the faithful picture of a woman's heart without evasion or disguises, drawn to the life, who presents herself for what she is, and who neither hides nor glosses over anything from you.

Despite his frequent coolness, Montagu continued to pour out her heart, usually writing in French, a language in which she felt more comfortable when expressing deep emotion. Tormented by her feelings, she told Algarotti: "All that is certain is that I shall love you all my life in spite of your whims and my reason."

Perhaps in an effort to retain her reason and occupy herself during Algarotti's frequent travels, Montagu made a brief return to the world of politics, commencing in December 1737, when she published the first issue of a pro-government paper called The Nonsense of Common Sense. She had always been a supporter of Robert Walpole, now the leading minister, even though her husband disliked him, and, while keeping her identity hidden, she attempted to counter the Opposition paper, Common Sense. The paper did not achieve a wide circulation and was discontinued after nine issues. In March 1739, Algarotti returned to England and the two appear to have reached an agreement to live together in Venice. Telling her husband that she was traveling to improve her health, she left England in July 1739, not to return for almost 23 years.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters">

You will see (what has never been seen till now) the faithful picture of a woman's heart without evasion or disguises, drawn to the life, who presents herself for what she is, and who neither hides nor glosses over anything from you.

—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters

It was commonly believed in the 18th century that long journeys did have healing qualities. As long ago as 1727, Montagu had written to her sister: "I have a mind to cross the water, to try what effect a new heaven and a new earth will have upon my spirit." Edward seems to have been in agreement with what he knew of her plans; he sent her large amount of baggage (among which there were 500 books, including Latin classics and translated versions of the Greek authors) after her and made sure that she received a regular allowance, but he made no mention of joining her.

Arriving in Venice to wait for Algarotti, Montagu found herself being treated as a celebrity. The Venetians were delighted to have this distinguished aristocratic exile in their midst, she observed in a letter to Edward: "I verily believe, if one of the pyramids of Egypt had traveled, it could not have been more followed." The warmth of her reception moderated Montagu's impatience at Algarotti's tardiness. She wrote calmly from Florence in October 1740: "I have left Venice and am ready to go where you wish. I await your orders to regulate my life." The young man did finally leave England in 1740 but not for Italy; he had been summoned to Prussia by his friend Frederick II the Great, who had just succeeded to the throne.

Horace Walpole, the writer and son of Robert Walpole, was a young man of 21 when he met Montagu in Florence in 1740. Already developing his satirical, mocking style, he recorded a disparaging picture of her slovenly appearance and painted face and noted that she "is laughed at by the whole town." Joseph Spence, another English traveler in Italy at the same time, recorded a different picture, one which captures the contradictions in her personality:

Lady Mary is one of the most extraordinary shining characters in the world; but she shines like a comet; she is all irregular and always wandering. She is the most wise, most imprudent; loveliest, disagreeablest; best natured, cruelest woman in the world.

Almost two years after her departure from England, Montagu was finally reunited with Algarotti in Turin, but they were together only two months before Algarotti returned to Prussia. The cause of the rift is unknown; it was perhaps nothing more than Mary's realization that her dream of retirement with such an ambitious, worldly young man was quite impractical. Whatever the reason, as Montagu's biographer observes, "their friendship, which had run its unsteady course for five years, seemed to be ended, and neither her letters nor her vain hopes pursued him."

However, Montagu did continue to send letters to her family and friends. She seems not to have thought of returning to England but remained intimately connected with her homeland through her correspondence. She wrote regularly to Edward, still occasionally showing some of her youthful tenderness, as when she told him that she worried about his health when he did not write. They shared their concerns about their son, who had made an unsuitable marriage and had left England to avoid debtor's prison, and Mary rejoiced in the good qualities of their daughter, poignantly observing to her husband: "I hope her obedience and affection for you will make your life agreeable to you. She cannot have more than I have had; I wish the success may be greater."

For the next two decades, Montagu settled in various places in France and Italy: she lived in an old mill, which she converted into a house, in the beautiful medieval town of Avignon from 1742 to 1746. From 1746 to 1756, she took up residence in Brescia, Northern Italy, in an old palace which she refurbished, and between 1756 and 1761 she lived in Venice and Padua. As her eyesight grew poorer, she gave up her needlework and developed a passion for gardening, not merely growing flowers but, in addition to renovating all of her living quarters, undertaking major landscaping projects, growing vegetables, keeping cattle and poultry, even raising silk worms and growing tea. And despite her weakening eyesight, she continued to read voraciously, sometimes staying up all night to read the latest novels which her daughter sent from England. She retained her weakness for what she called "the gay part of reading"; it served to brighten a life, frequently lived "in solitude not unlike that of Robinson Crusoe," which must sometimes have been lonely. However, in her letters to her daughter, Montagu clearly struggled with her own weakness for the novel form and the sentimental and misleading plots and characterization she encountered: "All that reflection and experience can do is mitigate, we can never extinguish, our passions. I call by that name every sentiment that is not founded upon reason."

The tension between passion, by which Montagu means emotion, and reason was an especially difficult problem for 18th-century women because they were denied the opportunity to educate themselves and develop their rational faculties. Among the most fascinating of Montagu's letters are those in which she advises her daughter, Lady Bute, about the education of her own children, especially the daughters. No doubt thinking of the trouble that her dissolute son had brought her, Montagu advises her daughter to prepare for disappointments with her children and to try to avoid becoming overly fond of them. Writing in February 1750, she warns against allowing the daughters to assume they will all become great ladies: "You should teach yours to confine their desires to probabilities, to be as useful as possible to themselves, and to think privacy (as it is) the happiest state of life." She returns to the subject in January 1753, delighted at the news of Lady Bute's eldest daughter: "I am particularly pleased to hear she is a good arithmetician; it is the best proof of understanding." Montagu counsels that the girl's desire for learning should be encouraged: "Learning (if she has a real taste for it) will not only make her contented but happy in it. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting." However, she is to guard against considering herself learned when she has mastered Latin and Greek since: "True knowledge consists in knowing things, not words." Most important, she "is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness" so as not to make people envious. Anticipating her daughter's reaction, Mary continues:

You will tell me I have not observed this rule myself, but you are mistaken; it is only inevitable accident that has given me any reputation that way. I have always carefully avoided it, and ever thought it a misfortune.

Montagu clearly expected that her daughter would not welcome the learned education she was advocating, and in March she wrote further on the subject, justifying education "not only to make solitude tolerable but agreeable" in the event that the granddaughters, whom she regards as "a sort of lay nuns," find themselves living in the country or in a form of strict retirement like her own. She protests, in terms which were to become the familiar cry of the early feminist movement, "the unjust custom" of "debarring our sex from the advantages of learning, the men fancying the improvement of our understandings would only furnish us with more art to deceive them, which is directly contrary to the truth." That her unease at her daughter's reaction was well founded is demonstrated by the opening of a letter in June 1753:

You see I was not mistaken in supposing we should have disputes concerning your daughters if we were together, since we can differ even at this distance…. However, everyone has a right to educate their children in their own way, and I shall speak no more on that subject.

As her husband's political prospects improved, Lady Bute seems to have worried more about her rather eccentric mother, and Mary clearly made an effort not to offend or worry her increasingly punctilious daughter. Since her childhood Montagu had been aware that her aristocratic birth would not allow her to publish anything under her own name and, as we have seen, she carefully concealed her identity when her works did appear. Nonetheless, she had a great reputation as a writer in Italy and, as she wrote to her daughter in 1753, was frequently complimented and even asked to donate copies of her works. That she came increasingly to resent this restriction on her creativity as she grew older is evident in the outburst which followed: "To say truth, there is no part of the world where our sex is treated with so much contempt as in England."

It was to England and to her overly fastidious daughter that Montagu returned in January 1762. Edward had died a year earlier, at age 83. He had never achieved a title or well-paying court office but had been so extremely parsimonious that he left an estate said to have been worth over a million pounds. Meanwhile, her daughter's husband had risen to become secretary of state and Lady Bute had begged her mother to return home. Probably already suffering from the effects of the breast cancer that was to kill her within eight months, Montagu finally agreed. Understandably concerned about her literary legacy, she gave a copy of her Embassy Letters to the minister of the English church in Rotterdam and apparently agreed that they might be published after her death.

Unhappy after only a few weeks in England, Montagu considered returning to Italy but was prevented by her rapidly deteriorating health. Given doses of hemlock to dull the pain, she faced death with calm fortitude, drawing up her will in which she left the bulk of her estate to her daughter and only one guinea to her profligate son. She died on August 21, 1762, at age 73. On her death bed, she expressed her wish that the two volumes of her Embassy Letters be published; her daughter was equally determined that they should not be. Lady Bute purchased the letters back from the minister to whom they had been entrusted, but nonetheless the first of many published editions appeared in May 1763. The minister had apparently allowed a couple of Englishmen to borrow them, and they had surreptitiously copied them. The letters were an instant success, and they were reprinted and pirated, along with selections of her poetry, countless times. Gradually the family's resistance diminished and, at last, a collected edition of her works appeared in 1835, edited by her great-grandson, Lord Wharncliffe.

Although approximately 900 of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters survive, along with many examples of her poetry and political satire, much of her writing has been lost. Her daughter burned her lengthy series of journals, and Mary had exercised self-censorship. As she remarked in a letter to her daughter, written in 1758: "I am turning author in my old age." She had been working on a history of her own time and "as I write only for myself, I shall always think I am at liberty to make what digressions I think fit, proper or improper." But, remembering her position and aware of her daughter's concerns, she continued: "I can assure you I regularly burn every quire as soon as it is finished and mean nothing more than to divert my solitary hours."

It seems astonishing to the modern reader that the woman who defied the conventions of her day in so many ways should have been so obedient to the stricture which compelled her to hide her greatest gift. Had she been free to publish her work and polish her art there is little doubt that she would have been recognized in her own land as one of the major talents of her time. Yet she has left a substantial legacy despite her avoidance of the "vulgarity" of publication. While her poems and satires seem less effective than they were in her own day, divorced from the social and political context which gave rise to them, her extraordinary letters retain their power. Elegant and polished, intelligent and informative, spontaneous and passionate, affectionate and didactic, courageous and determined, they reveal a multifaceted woman in all of her many personas. They illuminate, as few other sources can, a significant time and place in history, and they allow us to know Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in a way that we can know few figures of the past. They are her enduring legacy.

sources and suggested reading:

Dictionary of National Biography, s.v., Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. London: Smith Elder, 1894.

Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth Century Familiar Letter. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e: Written during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa …. 2 vols. Lon don: T. Cadell, 1789.

——. The Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. London: Longman, 1970.

(Dr.) Kathleen Garay , Acting Director, Women's Studies Programme, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada