Report from Constantinople

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

doi:10.1353/ner.2017.0058

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Report from Constantinople
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (bio)

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (born Mary Pierrepont) (1689–1762) secured a reputation among her contemporaries as a vivid, memorable presence and is now best known as the author of some of the liveliest and most engaging letters ever produced in English. When in 1741 a young English visitor had an opportunity to meet her in Rome, where she had traveled to be with her Italian lover, he judged her to be "the most wise, most imprudent; loveliest, disagreeablest; best natured, cruellest woman in the world." Born into an aristocratic family, she was the daughter of the Earl of Kingston and Mary Fielding (a cousin of the novelist Henry Fielding). Her mother died when Lady Mary was five years old; confined to home, she was largely self-educated, teaching herself several languages and reading her way through her father's impressive library. Out in the world, her intelligence, vivacity, and beauty were immediately evident, and she soon found herself in social circles that included prominent literary figures like the poet Alexander Pope.

When she was twenty-three, her father had arranged what he considered an appropriate marriage for her, but at the last minute she eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, an attorney eleven years her senior who was the brother of her close friend Anne Montagu, and with whom she had been in regular correspondence following Anne's early death. Edward had political ambitions, but the couple lived in difficult circumstances for the first few years, during which time Lady Mary contracted a case of smallpox that left her face permanently scarred. After being elected to Parliament, Edward was sent in 1716 to Constantinople (now Istanbul), the center of the Ottoman Empire, to help negotiate an end to a conflict between Austria and Turkey. Over the next four years, making use of the journals in which she recorded her observations, Lady Mary wrote the series of "Turkish Embassy Letters" for which she is most famous. After she and her husband returned to England, she worked to advance smallpox inoculation, a form of which she had discovered to be successful in Turkey. In addition, she continued to write in a variety of genres, but as befitted someone in her social position, her writings were usually circulated privately or published anonymously. Pope found her appealing in so many ways that he commissioned a portrait of her, but in subsequent years subjected her to withering scorn, possibly because his attentions had been greeted with amused dismissiveness. In 1739, infatuated by the young Francesco Algarotti, Lady Mary left her husband—though a cordial correspondence between them would continue, they would never see one another again—and began traveling in Italy. It was mostly in that country that she would spend the remaining decades of her life, but in her last year she returned to London, where she died in the summer of 1762. A sense of discretion ultimately led her daughter to destroy the journals that Lady Mary had kept for half a century, but her letters survived, and a three-volume selection appeared within a year of her death.

The letter presented here, written to her sister, is taken from the third edition of The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by Lord Wharncliffe, published in London by Henry G. Bohn in 1866.

—SD [End Page 195]