Kickass Women I love: Lady Mary Wortley Montague
In 1716 a 20-something woman arrived in Turkey with her husband, who had just been appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. For the next two years Mary Wortley Montague wrote letters home, the Letters from Turkey, that have been an inspiration to women travelers ever since. Mary had a precocious child who devoured books, and wrote in her diary, “I am going to write a history so uncommon” when she was still not ten years old. Women were not formally educated at this time – she would campaign for women’s education later in her life – and so she taught herself in her father’s library, learning Latin and reading classical texts.
Mary became a poet in her teenaged years, eloped with her husband without permission from her father in 1711, and then traveled to Turkey with him. The marriage was not as successful as she had expected, though, and the two became estranged. Later in her life, in 1736, she met an Italian Count, the philosopher and poet Francesco Algarotti. By 1739 she told her husband she was going to the south of France for the winter to help with her health, and she never went back.
Their relationship ended in 1741, but Mary stayed abroad and travelled to Venice, Florence, Rome, Genoa and Geneva, and she finally settled in Avignon in 1742. She left Avignon in 1746 for Brescia, where she fell ill and stayed for nearly a decade, leaving for Lovere in 1754. After August 1756, she resided in Venice and Padua. Throughout all this time, Lady Mary exchanged letters with her daughter, Lady Bute, discussing topics such as philosophy, literature, and the education of girls, fashions she saw, and almost sociological studies of the places she was visiting.
The Poetry Foundation writes of Mary:
An outspoken woman of strong convictions, Montagu seems to have assumed that her class status justified a certain amount of flamboyant behavior, and allowed her to imitate the freedoms granted to aristocratic men: she was often mocked for refusing to wear wigs, for taking snuff, and for sporting elaborate Turkish dress.
Want to read Mary’s letters? There are several compilations including the Turkish Embassy Letters.
I could also, with very little trouble, turn over Knolles and Sir Paul Rycaut, to give you a list of Turkish emperors; but I will not tell you what you may find in every author that has writ of this country. I am more inclined, out of a true female spirit of contradiction, to tell you the falsehood of a great part of what you find in authors; as, for instance, in the admirable Mr Hill, who so gravely asserts, that he saw, in Sancta Sophia, a sweating pillar, very balsamic for disordered heads. There is not the least tradition of any such matter; and I suppose it was revealed to him in vision, during his wonderful stay in the Egyptian catacombs; for I am sure he never heard of any such miracle here. ‘Tis also very pleasant to observe how tenderly he and all his brethren voyage-writers lament the miserable confinement of the Turkish ladies, who are perhaps more free than any ladies in the universe, and are the only women in the world that lead a life of uninterrupted pleasure, exempt from cares; their whole time being spent in visiting, bathing, or the agreeable amusement of spending money, and inventing new fashions.
– Letter from Mary Wortley Montague
