Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment Book

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont) was born in 1689 into an extremely wealthy, well-connected family, and lived a long and extraordinary life. A proto-feminist, poet and wit, she was disinherited by her family, when she refused to marry the man her father picked for her ("Hell") and instead eloped, not with a passionately adored lover ("Paradise"), but with Edward Wortley Montagu--a rational choice ("Limbo"). The foremost champion of the practice of inoculation against smallpox-- a medical advance she witnessed in Turkey, where, as the Ambassador's wife, she gained privileged and unprecedented access to Turkish society--Lady Mary's campaigning earned her equal portions of adulation and vilification. Indeed, as Isobel Grundy writes: "She was different, she was unique, she provoked delight or disgust, nothing in between." And, in Alexander Pope, she famously provoked both. This 600-plus page biography provides a detailed, frequently entertaining, analysis of Lady Mary's extant texts: poems, correspondence, fiction, other prose and an up-close reading of her family life, travels and travails. But although this work is a triumph of research, Grundy doesn't step quite far enough back from her subject to fit her fully in context. It will, therefore, appeal more to the informed reader, who knows enough of the 18th century to paint in the backdrop, than to the general biography lover. --Lisa GeeRead More