Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

For more information on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, visit Britannica.com.

The celebrated eighteenth-century poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), merits a place in public health history for her early advocacy of the practice of smallpox inoculation, which was also called variolation, or ingrafting. Lady Mary, who herself survived smallpox in 1716, learned of the practice in Constantinople, where her husband served as English ambassador from 1716 to 1718. While in Constantinople, she met Dr. Emanuel Timoni, who had published an account of inoculation in the Western scientific press in 1716. With Timoni's encouragement, Charles Maitland, the British surgeon brought by the Worthley family to Constantinople, successfully inoculated the Worthley's son. In a letter to Mrs. Sarah Chiswell, a London friend, Lady Mary described the ingrafting procedure, which consisted of taking dried secretions from smallpox blebs, or pustules, and either blowing them into the nostrils or injecting them into a vein or under the skin. This process produced a mild case of smallpox, which conferred lifelong immunity to natural smallpox. The process was hazardous—it occasionally caused serious disease or even death. Because smallpox was so lethal and disfiguring, however, it was considered an acceptable risk.

A severe epidemic of smallpox in London in 1721 led Lady Mary to begin a campaign in favor of inoculation that began with the inoculation of her young daughter. Shortly thereafter, royal permission was given to experimentally inoculate six condemned prisoners at Newgate Prison, all of whom survived and were pardoned. Lady Mary's strong connections with the royal family, and their adoption of inoculation among themselves, led to considerable public support for the practice, through strong opinions both for and against inoculation were widely published in the newspapers of the day.

Because it was occasionally fatal, many English physicians opposed the procedure. However, influential figures such as James Jurin (secretary of the Royal Society), John Arbuthnot, and Hans Sloane were supporters. Some historians believe that inoculation made a measurable impact on eighteenth-century mortality in England, particularly among the aristocracy, who were most likely to employ the practice. In the nineteenth century, inoculation was almost entirely supplanted by vaccination after William Jenner discovered in 1798 that immunity to smallpox could be established more safely by using material from the lesions of cows infected with cowpox or vaccinia.

(SEE ALSO: Jenner, Edward; Smallpox)

Bibliography

Grundy, I. (1994). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lawrence, A. W., ed. (1930). The Travel Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. London: Jonathan Cape.

— NIGEL PANETH; ELLEN POLLAK

Well known throughout polite society for her wit and verse, English world traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) also worked to introduce the practice of inoculation against smallpox to the medical establishment of eighteenth-century Britain, despite their resistance to taking advice from a woman.

In an age noted for its wit, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu outshone many of her contemporaries. While education was not considered mandatory for young women, Montagu channelled her enthusiasm, curiosity, and intellect into numerous areas, including the arts, language, history, and even science, sharing her insights and humor with others through social interactions, published writings, and letters to family and friends.

Born the Honorable Mary Pierrepont on May 26, 1689, Montagu was the daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, the Duke of Kingston. As a young girl she would miss the companionship of her mother, Mary Fielding, who died in 1694 when Mary was five, and the lack of supervision that resulted from her mother's absence created a streak of eccentricity that lasted into Montagu's adult life. The loss of a supervisory parent would be replaced by the company of books, as Montagu's father confined her to the house, which included a large library. Academically inclined, Montagu devoured the many volumes of classics and contemporary literature available to her as the daughter of a member of the landed gentry, and also taught herself several languages, including Latin, with the encouragement of an uncle and Bishop Burnet, a family friend. Among her close childhood friends was Mary Astell, who, sharing Montagu's independent spirit and intelligence, would grow up to become one of England's first feminists.

Socializes with Reigning British Intellectuals

In addition to her exposure to many of the intellectual lines of inquiry of her time, Mary's good looks, intelligence, and pleasant personality encouraged Montagu's father to expose his daughter to an active social life from an early age. Her social circles included some of the most noted thinkers and writers of the day, including novelist Henry Fielding (a nephew of her late mother) and poet Alexander Pope (author of "The Rape of the Lock"). Pope became one of her closest friends until that relationship was derailed years later by a series of quarrels, the root of which can only be speculated but likely stemmed from his unrequited declaration of love in 1722. Later in her life, Pope would prove to be one of her strongest critics, defaming her character as "dirty, avaricious, heartless, and eccentric to the point of insanity, " according to British Authors before 1800.

Accompanies Husband on Dangerous Trip to Turkey

Throughout her teenage years, Mary exchanged numerous letters with friend Anne Montagu, a correspondence that would be taken up by Anne's brother, Edward, after Anne's death in 1709. Edward Wortley Montagu, a Cambridge graduate who had been called to the bar in 1699, was at first impressed by Mary's ability to quote Roman poet Horace; as the couple's letter-writing continued, that respect ripened into love. Upon reaching the age of marriageability, however, Mary's hand was promised by her father to a rich lord; as she was on her way to the home of her intended husband, Mary and Edward eloped. The year was 1712, Mary was twenty-three, and the young couple lived together in relative poverty for the next four years while Edward's political fortunes floundered during Tory rule. Fortunately, with the death of Queen Anne in 1714, his Whig party once again came into prominence. Edward was elected to Parliament and, in the winter of 1716, with his young wife only recently recovered from a case of smallpox that had left her beautiful face permanently scarred, he was assigned to the task of ending hostilities between Turkey and Austria. As his wife, Mary willingly accompanied her husband on the long journey to his post at Constantinople (since renamed Istanbul), the seat of the Ottoman Turks.

A busy port, the city of Constantinople was the center of the ancient kingdom of Byzantium and the former home of Emperor Constantine the Great. Amid the ruins of this ancient culture, Mary Wortley Montagu soaked up the history, culture, and language around her, and busied herself with travel, study, and writing. Her activities were supported by her husband, who was a strong believer in the then-radical concept of an educated woman. It would be during her stay in Constantinople that Montagu would write her Turkish Embassy Letters, a collection of witty correspondence that, when published after her death, would become her major contribution to English literature. The Montagus remained in Turkey until 1718. Upon her return to England in the fall of that year, Montagu worked to popularize a method of inoculation (rather than vaccination) against smallpox that she had discovered while abroad, hoping to save others from the illness she had battled three years earlier.

Return to England Brings Rise, Then Fall in Fortunes

Home once more in England, the Montagus made a new home at Twickenham, near London and in the vicinity of Pope's home. The increased sophistication gained through her travels made Montagu now shine even more brightly in court. She was actively sought as a guest at numerous social functions, both with friends and through her husband's administrative capacity. Her vivaciousness and popularity made her even more attractive to Pope, who had a portrait of her painted and hung in a prominent place in his home. Pope, along with Horace Walpole, another leading literary figure of the day, was struck increasingly by her charms but spurned into anger after a declaration of his love for her resulted in rejection. The attractions of other men were of little interest to Montagu, who at this point devoted her time to her writing, to her friends, and to her growing family. A son, Edward Wortley Montagu Jr., had been born in 1713, and a daughter, also named Mary, had been born to the couple while stationed in Turkey. As a child, young Edward proved to be troublesome, and his parents were forced to send him to a tutor on the Continent, although his continued attempts to run away proved costly. As an adult, he would become notorious for marrying a succession of women, with nary a divorce between each marriage.

Between 1730 and 1750 several volumes of Montagu's poems were published, including Town Eclogues, which had been circulated without her permission in 1716 as Court Poems by a Lady of Quality and reprinted in its authorized edition in 1747 with additional verses. After 1727 her battle with Pope intensified, fueled by her participation in fellow poet Lord Hervey's Verses Addressed to the Imitator of Horace, a 1733 volume that directly attacked Pope. Pope responded by attacking Hervey as a homosexual and by publishing such poems as "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and "The Dunciad, " which served to ostracize Montagu socially and affect her husband's political career by implying that he was a dullard, a miser, and that his wife was repeatedly unfaithful to him. Between 1737 and 1738 she published, anonymously, a newspaper titled The Nonsense of Common-Sense. Running for approximately nine issues, its contents satirized the Tory-sponsored Common-Sense and helped to support her husband's Whig party. While Montagu continued to write, it was unfashionable for a woman of society to lower herself by publishing her works, so much of her writing remained privately held by friends.

Lives Abroad Independently

In 1739, shortly after organizing her daughter's wedding to the Earl of Bute, Montagu left her husband and her home in England and moved abroad. Some have surmised that her self-exile was a way of distancing herself from the negative public sentiment generated by Pope and Walpole and thus freeing her husband from its shadow, while others maintained that it was an effort to join the Italian author Francesco Algarotti, who was rumored to be her lover. While she would never see Edward Wortley Montagu again, the correspondence between Montagu and her husband showed that the couple remained full of affection for one another; indeed, without his wife's presence, Edward Wortley Montagu withdrew from friends and family and became miserly in his old age (by the time of his death, he had amassed almost a million and a half pounds, a considerable fortune for the period). Fifty years of age when she left England, Montagu did not join Algarotti, but lived alone, spending her middle years travelling in France and Italy and engaging in a voluminous correspondence with several people, most particularly her husband and her daughter, Lady Bute. Much of her time on the continent was spent in Brescia, a walled commune located at the foot of the Italian Alps, home to the Palazzo della Loggia and many Roman remains. Montagu remained away from England for twenty-three years, returning after her husband's death to spend her remaining time with her children. Unfortunately, her own death was imminent; she died of cancer, August 21, 1762, in London, at the age of seventy-three.

Turkish Letters Result in Lasting Fame

Despite the criticism heaped upon her by Pope and Walpole during her lifetime, Montagu was remembered for both her quick wit and her letters; even such a harsh critic as French writer Voltaire found her correspondence delightful. Dr. Samuel Johnson also enjoyed her prose, while historian Edward Gibbon would write, "What fire, what ease, what knowledge of Europe and Asia" upon reading her letters from Turkey. Her poetry, written in imitation of the style popularized by Pope, was collected in 1768 as Poetical Works; her Embassy Letters, written while she was in Turkey, escaped efforts by her family to acquire and destroy them and were released to great acclaim; a complete collection of her written works, containing both poetry and letters, was published in 1837; and a biography and an edited collection of Montagu's collected correspondence were published during the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, Montagu's personal diary was burned by her daughter in 1794 due to concerns that its nature would reflect poorly on the daughter's own social standing in the court of George III.

Further Reading

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 95: Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, 1990, Volume 101: British Prose Writers, 1660-1800, First Series, 1991.

Drabble, Margaret, editor, Oxford Companion to English Literature, fifth edition, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Halsband, Robert, Life of Mary Wortley Montagu, Oxford University Press, 1960.

Kunitz, Stanley, and Howard Haycroft, editors, British Authors before 1800, H.W. Wilson, 1952.

Bear, Richard, transcriber and annotator, Selected Prose and Poetry of Lady Wortley Montagu,http://www.darkwing.uoregon.edu (March 15, 1998).

Quotes:

"I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it."

"We are no more free agents than the queen of clubs when she victoriously takes prisoner the knave of hearts."

"People commonly educate their children as they build their houses, according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed."

"A face is too slight a foundation for happiness."

"The pretty fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is it impossible to be diverted with what one despises? I can laugh at a puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my attention or regard."

"Life is too short for a long story."

See more famous quotes by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Mary Wortley Montagu, by Charles Jervas, after 1716.

The Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (26 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was an English aristocrat and writer. Montagu is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from Turkey, which have been described by Billie Melman as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient”.^[1]

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Legacy 2 Ottoman smallpox inoculation 3 Literary place 4 Paintings 5 References 6 Bibliography 6.1 Book reviews 7 Notes 8 External links

Life

Lady Mary was born in London either in April or May of 1689; her christening is recorded for 26 May 1689 at St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden.^[2] She was a daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. Family holdings were extensive, including Thoresby Hall and Holme Pierrepont in Nottinghamshire, and a house in West Dean in Wiltshire. Thoresby Hall had one of the finest private libraries in England, which Montagu loved, but the library was lost when Thoresby Hall burned in 1744.

Lady Mary's close friendships included Mary Astell, a champion of women's rights, and Anne Wortley Montagu, granddaughter of the 1st Earl of Sandwich. With Anne, she carried on an animated correspondence. Anne's letters, however, were often copied from drafts written by her brother, Edward Wortley Montagu, and after Anne's death in 1709 the correspondence between Edward and Lady Mary continued without an intermediary. Lady Mary's father, now Marquess of Dorchester, rejected Wortley Montagu as a son-in-law because he refused to entail his estate on a possible heir. Negotiations were broken off, and when Lord Dorchester insisted on another marriage for his daughter, Edward and Mary eloped in 1712. The early years of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's married life were spent in seclusion in the country. Her husband became Member of Parliament for Westminster in 1715, and shortly afterwards was made a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. When Lady Mary joined him in London her wit and beauty soon made her a prominent figure at court.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with her son Edward, by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, circa 1717.

Early in 1716, Edward Wortley Montagu was appointed Ambassador at Istanbul. Lady Mary accompanied him to Vienna, and thence to Adrianople and Istanbul. He was recalled in 1717, but they remained at Istanbul until 1718. The story of this voyage and of her observations of Eastern life is told in the Turkish Embassy Letters, a series of lively letters full of graphic description; Letters is often credited as being an inspiration for subsequent female traveller/writers, as well as for much Orientalist art. Lady Mary returned to the West with knowledge of the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox, known as variolation. In the 1790s, Edward Jenner developed a safer method, vaccination.

Before starting for the East she had met Alexander Pope, and during her absence he wrote her a series of extravagant letters, which appear to have been chiefly exercises in the art of writing gallant epistles. Very few letters passed between them after Lady Mary's return, and various reasons have been suggested for the subsequent estrangement and violent quarrel. The last of the Letters during the embassy to Istanbul is addressed to Pope and purports to be written from Dover on 1 November 1718. It contains a parody on Pope's Epitaph on the Lovers struck by Lightning. The manuscript collection of these letters was passed round a considerable circle, and Pope may have been offended at the circulation of this piece of satire. Jealousy of her friendship with Lord Hervey has also been alleged, but Lady Louisa Stuart says Pope had made Lady Mary a declaration of love, which she had received with an outburst of laughter. In any case Lady Mary always professed complete innocence of all cause of offence in public. She is alluded to in the Dunciad in a passage to which Pope affixed one of his insulting notes. A Pop upon Pope was generally thought to be her work, and Pope thought she was part author of One Epistle to Mr A. Pope (1730).

Pope attacked her again and again, but with especial virulence in a gross couplet in the Imitation of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, as Sappho. Verses addressed to an Imitator of Horace by a Lady (1733), a scurrilous reply to these attacks, is generally attributed to the joint efforts of Lady Mary and her sworn ally, Lord Hervey. She had a romantic correspondence with a Frenchman named Rémond, who addressed to her a series of excessively gallant letters before ever seeing her. She invested money for him in South Sea stock at his desire, and as was expressly stated, at his own risk. The value fell to half the price, and he tried to extort the original sum as a debt by a threat of exposing the correspondence to her husband. She seems to have been really alarmed, not at the imputation of gallantry, but lest her husband should discover the extent of her own speculations. This disposes of the second half of Pope's line "Who starves a sister, or forswears a debt" (Epilogue to the Satires, 113), and the first charge is quite devoid of foundation. She did in fact try to rescue her favourite sister, the countess of Mar, who was mentally deranged, from the custody of her brother-in-law, Lord Grange, who had treated his own wife with notorious cruelty, and the slander originated with him.

In 1739 she left her husband and went abroad, and although they continued to write to each other in affectionate and respectful terms, they never met again. At Florence in 1740 she visited Horace Walpole, who cherished a great spite against her, and exaggerated her eccentricities into a revolting slovenliness (see Letters, ed. Cunningham, i. 59). As Lady Mary was then in her sixty-third year, the scandalous interpretation put on the matter by Horace Walpole may safely be discarded.She lived at Avignon, at Brescia, at Gottolengo and at Lovere on the Lago d'Iseo. She was disfigured by a painful skin disease, (smallpox), and her sufferings were so acute that she hints at the possibility of madness. She was struck with a terrible fit of sickness while visiting the countess Palazzo and her son, and perhaps her mental condition made restraint necessary.

Her husband spent his last years in hoarding money, and at his death in 1761 is said to have been a millionaire. His extreme parsimony is satirized in Pope's Imitations of Horace (2nd satire of the 2nd book) in the portrait of Avidieu and his wife. Her daughter Mary, Countess of Bute, whose husband was now Prime Minister, begged her to return to England. She came to London, and died in the year of her return, on 21 August 1762. Her son, Edward, was also an author and traveller.

Legacy

Scholarly editions of her works only appeared during the late 20th century.

In Post Captain, volume II of the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian (published 1972), Mrs Williams refers to Lady Montagu as a great traveler.

She is mentioned in the Doctor Who novel Only Human by Gareth Roberts as an example of why marrying for love is "overrated".

In 2003, Jennifer Lee Carrell published The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox, which recounts the tale of Lady Mary's struggle to bring inoculation to London, drawing heavily on her diaries and personal correspondence.

Ottoman smallpox inoculation

When Lady Mary was in the Ottoman Empire, she discovered the local practice of inoculation against smallpox – variolation. Unlike Jenner's later vaccination, which used cowpox, variolation used a small measure of smallpox itself. Lady Mary's own brother had died of the disease, and her own famous beauty had been marred by a bout with the disease, prior to her visit to Turkey. She was eager to spare her children similar suffering, and had them inoculated while in Turkey. On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure, but encountered a great deal of resistance from the medical establishment both because it was an "Oriental" process and because of her gender. However, the British royal family had their own children inoculated.^[3]

Literary place

Lady Mary avoided publication during her lifetime, partly to avoid the personal attacks that inevitably followed, and much of her work has not survived. However, her letters from Turkey were clearly intended for circulation among members of her own social circle, and she revised them extensively after her return.

Montagu's Turkish letters were to prove an inspiration to later generations of European women travellers to the Orient. In particular, Montagu staked a claim to the particular authority of women's writing, due to their ability to access private homes and female-only spaces where men were not permitted. The title of her published letters refers to "Sources that Have Been Inaccessible to Other Travellers". The letters themselves frequently draw attention to the fact that they present a different (and, Montagu asserts, more accurate) description than that provided by previous (male) travellers: "You will perhaps be surpriz'd at an Account so different from what you have been entertaind with by the common Voyage-writers who are very fond of speaking of what they don't know."^[4] Montagu provides an intimate description of the women's bathhouse, in which she derides male descriptions of the bathhouse as a site for unnatural sexual practices, instead insisting that it was “the Women’s coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc”.^[5] However, Montagu's detailed descriptions of nude Oriental beauties provided inspiration for male artists such as Ingres, who restored the explicitly erotic content that Montagu had denied. In general, Montagu consistently derides the quality of European travel literature of the 18th century as nothing more than "trite observations...superficial...[of] boys who only remember the best wine or the prettyest women."^[6]

Montagu's Turkish letters were frequently cited by imperial women travellers, more than a century after her journey. Such writers cited Montagu's assertion that women travellers could gain an intimate view of Turkish life that was not available to their male counterparts. However, they also added corrections or elaborations to her observations. Julia Pardoe, in describing her own visit to a bathhouse, wrote "I should be unjust if I did not declare that I saw none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady Mary Montagu. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate and fastidious in the ideas of propriety."^[7] Emmeline Lott, who wrote a book about her experience working as a governess for the son of Ishamel Pasha, claimed that Montagu's aristocratic rank meant that she had seen only the most attractive elements of Oriental life: "...her handsome train, Lady Ambassadress as she was, swept but across the splendid carpeted floors of these noble Saloons of Audience, all of which had been, as is invariably the custom, well “swept and garnished” for her reception."^[8]

Her Letters and Works were published in 1837. Wortley Montagu's octogenarian granddaughter Lady Louisa Stuart contributed to this, anonymously, an introductory essay called Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu, from which it was clear that Stuart was troubled by her grandmother's focus on sexual intrigues and did not see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Account of the Court of George I at his Accession as history.^[9]

In 1901, her letters were edited and published as The Best Letters of Mary Wortley Montagu by Octave Thanet.

Paintings

On a recent episode of the British TV show "Antiques Roadshow", several paintings attributed to Lady Mary were brought in for valuation. Remarkable for their sensitive portrayals of royal courtiers of the Turkish empire, the paintings show lively and genuine artistic talent. The colours are still vibrant, and it is interesting to note that she was allowed to paint male members of the royal family. These valuable works are currently in the hands of a private owner, who plans to bequeath them to a museum.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu BBC Radio 4, Woman's Hour, History and science archive. 6 April 2007 . Accessed April 2007

Bibliography

• Halsband, Robert (1956). The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Illustrated ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. 
• The complete letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vols, edited by Robert Halsband, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-67.
• Romance Writings, edited by Isobel Grundy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
• Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, edited by Isobel Grundy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, revised 2nd 1993.
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment, Isobel Grundy, Oxford University Press, USA; New edition 2001 714 pp ISBN 0-19-818765-3
• The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Wharncliffe and W. Moy Thomas, editors. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861.

Book reviews

• Prescott, Sarah. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment, Isobel Grundy 1999. Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 202 (May, 2000), pp. 300-303

Notes

1. ^ Melman 1992
2. ^ Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, p. 5. Oxford UP (1999).
3. ^ "Sequence 263 (Page 59): Montagu, Mary Wortley. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W---y M----e :written, during her travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, to persons of distinction, men of letters, &c. in different parts of Europe : which contain, amo". http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7320431?n=263. Retrieved 2008-08-27. 
4. ^ Montagu and Halsband 1965-1976: 343
5. ^ Montagu and Halsband 1965-1976: 314
6. ^ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Selected Letters, Penguin: 359
7. ^ Pardoe, J. (1837). The city of the sultan. London,, H. Colburn.
8. ^ Lott 1866: vi-vii
9. ^ Looser, Devoney, British Women Writers and the Writing of History 1670-1820 (JHU Press, 2000, ISBN 0801879051) pp. 64-67

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

• Works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at Project Gutenberg
• The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lord Wharncliffe (great-grandson), ed. 2 Vols. Third Edition, with Additions and Corrections Derived from the Original Manuscripts, Illustrative Notes, and a New Memoir By W. Moy Thomas. Henry G. Bohn, London: York Street, Covent Garden, 1861.
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Exhibition at The Graves Art Gallery Sheffield, 10 March until 3 June 2007
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu biography at the Montagu Millennium family history website
• Archival material relating to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu listed at the UK National Register of Archives

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)