Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

(1689-1762)

   She was born in London to Evelyn Pierrepont, the wealthy Earl of Kingston, where she became a friend of Mary Astell, the defender of woman's rights (see entry). In 1712, she secretly married Edward Worley Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament. When Alexander Pope (see entry) professed his love for her and she rejected him, Pope satirized her in several poems, and she responded equally acrimoniously. From around 1736 - her marriage having broken down-she lived in France and Italy and when her husband died in 1761, she returned to London where, within months, she died of breast cancer. A cenotaph was erected to her memory in Lichfield Cathedral, Staffordshire, commemorating her introduction of inoculation for smallpox, which she had seen used in Turkey, where her husband had been ambassador in 1716. Her three main publications: Encheiridion, (a translation of 1710, Epictetus from the Latin). Town Eclogues, 1716. Letters from the East, 1763. Some of her poems: "Cease, fond shepherd - cease desiring," "Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband," "Farewell to Bath," "The Lady's Resolve," "Tho' I never get possession," "To a Lady Making Love."

   Sources: A Treasury of Minor British Poetry. J. Churton Collins, ed. Edward Arnold, 1896. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Eighteenth-Century English Verse. Dennis Davison, ed. Penguin Books, 1988. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stal, eds. W.W. Norton, 1996. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Treasury of English Poetry. Mark Caldwell and Walter Kendrick, eds. Doubleday, 1984. The Women Poets in English: An Anthology. Ann Stanford, ed. McGraw-Hill, 1972.