Diminished, disparaged, derided. That’s how Sean Lusk describes the fate of Mary Wortley Montagu and other great women of the 18th century. He looks at how they came to be forgotten.
I had not intended to write a novel about Mary Wortley Montagu.
Her Turkish Embassy Letters were the inspiration for the character of Aunt Frances in my first novel, and I kept being snagged by those letters, and by what I’d learned about Mary and so many other remarkable women of that period – women who were hammering on the doors of institutions like the Royal Society, the Royal College of Physicians, and Parliament itself; women who were successful novelists, playwrights, journalists, astronomers, historians, and reformers.
Why aren’t they far better known? Why are we taught the names of Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, and Edward Jenner, and not those of Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, and Mary Wortley Montagu?
The answer is, of course, that they were women. That is hardly a revelation, least of all to women who continue to face discrimination today. Yet in researching Mary’s life, I came to realise how systematically men (not all men, but let us say most) worked both consciously and perhaps unconsciously to diminish women’s achievements.
Mary was born the eldest child of an earl, her father wishing to marry her off advantageously. But Mary was determined to live life her own way. She taught herself Latin as a child, wrote her first novel when she was 14, eloped to avoid the ‘hellish’ marriage her father had arranged for her, then worked to further her somewhat priggish husband’s political career.
This led to her first great journey, to Turkey, and her renowned Embassy Letters, in which she wrote about Islam, Ottoman society and of women’s position in that society, and did so in a manner that shattered long-held prejudices.
Soon after returning to England, she campaigned determinedly for immunisation against smallpox, which she had studied when in Turkey. She was belittled by senior figures from the medical and church establishments for bringing the practices of ‘ignorant women’ to Britain. But Mary persisted, and thousands of lives were saved.
The method, using live smallpox virus, was not as safe as vaccination, discovered by Jenner 70 years later. There are countless streets, schools and colleges named for him, and it’s right that he’s remembered.
But Mary deserves recognition too, and she has almost none. There is one street in the world named for her, and that is in Lovere, Italy.
Mary was a talented poet, and a close confidante of Alexander Pope. She helped Voltaire with his writing when he was in exile in England, edited Joseph Addison’s work and encouraged her young cousin, Henry Fielding, in his writing career.
Pope soon fell out with her, doing all he could to discredit her, implying that she was promiscuous and disloyal. Victorian biographers wrote that the dispute arose from Mary spurning Pope’s declaration of love. This is implausible for many reasons – it was much more likely to have been an intellectual dispute which ran out of control.
It was only as I reached back in my research, which had included Isobel Grundy’s dazzling 1997 biography of Mary, and sought out primary sources that I discovered the extent to which later biographers had distorted Mary’s achievements. They emphasised her beauty, her unconventional relationship with her husband, her dress sense and her friendships, and largely overlooked her political writing, her travels, and her work to modernise medical practices.
Seeing her letters in the wonderful Bute Collection at Mountstuart, and how her great grandson, Lord Wharncliffe, had annotated them with comments about her visits to the theatre and her card evenings, it became apparent that a Victorian man either refused to recognise, or was perhaps incapable of understanding the importance of his female forbear’s work.
This denial of legacy, this emphasis on ‘feminine virtues’ over substantive achievements, was certainly not confined to Mary.
Catharine Macaulay’s History of England was acclaimed in its time and sold in its thousands.
Catharine, one of the outstanding group of women intellectuals who were known in the mid-18th century as the Bluestockings, was a republican and a staunch advocate of liberty from tyranny, and her work was initially widely admired and quoted, but public disapproval of her marriage to a man half her age led to her writing being criticised. One can hardly imagine a male author’s reputation being so damaged by marriage to a much younger woman.
There were dozens of brilliant and admired female poets in the first half of the 18th century, yet so effectively were they written out of history that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was able to say one hundred years later, “… I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none.”
As Susannah Gibson says in her brilliant Bluestockings, “Victorian biographies of Elizabeth Montagu (the leading Bluestocking) downplayed her intellect, her sense of fun and her intense friendships; instead they praised her for her domestic skills.”
Mary lived in a self-imposed exile for the last two decades of her life, mainly in Italy. In Venice she was respected as a writer and intellectual. In one of the many ironies of her life, the people of the village where she lived wished to place a statue of her in the square. Mary resisted, less from modesty and more from fear that if word got back to England, she would be ridiculed.
She thought the world unjust and said so, using great wit and humour. In bringing the practice of inoculation from Turkey she saved countless lives.
If there are streets to be named and plaques to be put on walls, we might consider placing Mary Wortley Montagu’s name upon them.
A Woman of Opinion by Sean Lusk is published on 4 July, 2024.
Sean Lusk is the author of the BBC2 Between the Covers pick The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley.
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Read Sean’s feature about the unusual inspiration for his first novel in The strange death of the Levant company (and how a clock taught me about it).
Other related features you may enjoy include:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, mental health pioneer and
Discovering Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s porcelain, both by Jo Willett
The unsung heroes of Grub Street by Ruth Herman
London in 1708: a surprisingly modern city by David Fairer
A respectable trade in brutality: Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
Unboxing Pandora’s myth – in Georgian London by Susan Stokes-Chapman
Images:
- Mary Wortley Montagu by Charles Jervas, 1718–20: National Gallery of Ireland via Sailko for Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)
- Title page of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters, 1763: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Alexander Pope by Jonathan Richardson the Elder, c1718: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (fair use)
- Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson the Younger, 1725: Sandon Hall, collection of the Earl of Harrowby, via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Catharine Macaulay, 1764: Wikimedia (public domain)
