Foremother Poet: Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

“A Receit to Cure the Vapours”

Why will Delia thus retire
And languish Life away?
While the sighing Crowds admire
‘Tis too soon for Hartshorn Tea.

All these dismal looks and fretting
Cannot Damon’s life restore,
Long ago the Worms have eat him,
You can never see him more.

Once again consult your Toilet,
In the Glass your Face review,
So much weeping soon will spoil it
And no Spring your Charms renew.

I, like you, was born a Woman
Well I know what Vapours mean,
The Disease alas! is common,
Single we have all the Spleen.

All the Morals that they tell us
Never cur’d Sorrow yet,
Chuse among the pretty Fellows
One of humour, Youth, and Wit.

Prithee hear him ev’ry Morning
At least an hour or two,
Once again at Nights returning,
I be1eive the Dose will do.

Mary Wortley Montagu, attributed to Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723)

Dear friends and readers,

One of the great poets of the 18th century century, (once called Lady) Mary Wortley Montagu has been best known for her letters, be they the whole (partial — much has been lost) collection or just the ones addressed from Constantinople (The Embassy Letters), and her courageous use of inoculation against the small pox on her son and promotion of the procedure. Perhaps her life as a whole in several excellent biographies and literary studies, her relationships with brilliant famous men, periods at court and in Italy, proto-feminist prose, together with her verse, now vie for equal attention. Still while I like most of these, and am stirred, amused, absorbed by her letters, I’d say she was a great poet first of all. Along with Anne Finch and Charlotte Smith, Mary Wortley Montagu is one of the great woman poets of the long 18th century.

And there is too much to chose from, some so complex in the way of 18th century verse, and of differing variety, for one small entry. Short Martial epigrams:

Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet;
In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.

Strong satire where she takes an unusual point of view. Most people at the time (and romantics still) seem to sympathize with Mary Queen of Scots, romanticize and glamorize her as a victim: in my view it’s an iconography of compensation and vicarious acting out made acceptable by Mary’s own defeat (she was in life a bad politician). Well Wortley Montagu comes out on the side of Elizabeth I, who actually kept her power, won, never married and remained strong.

An Epilogue to a new play of Mary Queen of Scots [never finished], design’d to be spoke by Mrs Oldfield:

What could Luxurious Woman wish for more
To fix her Joys, or to extend her Power?
Their every Wish was in this Mary seen,
Gay, Witty, Youthful, Beauteous and a Queen!
Vain useless Blessing with ill Conduct joyn’d!
Light as the Air, and Fleeting as the Wind.
What ever Poets write, or Lovers vow;
Beauty, what poor Omnipotence hast thou!
Queen Bess had Wisdom, Councel, Power
How few espous’d a Wretched Beauty’s Cause!
Learn hence, ye Fair, more solid charms to prize …

If you will Love, love like Eliza then,
Love for Amusement like those Traitors, Men.
Think that the Pastimes of a Leisure Hour
She favour’d oft — but never shar’d her Power.

The Traveller by Desart Wolves persu’d,
If by his Art the savage Foe’s subdu’d,
The World will still the noble Act applaud,
Tho’ Victory was gain’d by needfull Fraud.

Such is (my tender Sex) our helpless Case
And such the barbarous Heart, hid by the begging Face.
By Passion fir’d, and not with held by Shame,
They cruel Hunters are, we trembling Game.

Trust me Dear Ladys (for I know ’em well),
They burn to Triumph, and they sigh — to tell.
Cruel to them that Yeild, Cullys to them that sell.
Beleive me tis by far the wiser Course,
Superior Art should meet superior force.

Hear: but be faithfull to your Interest still,
Secure your Hearts, then Fool with who you will.

Maria Skerrett (later Walpole’s wife), Mary’s friend by Jean-Baptiste van Loo

The same woman wrote (as Byron said), one of the truest descriptions of the experience of mutual adult love. It’s in the form of a balled to Robert Walpole’s mistress, Molly Skerritt, her friend. Montagu’s vision of public posing and stifling behavior in her epistle to Molly Skerritt is placed against her definition of a false and true lover:

At length, by so much importunity press’d,
Take (Molly) at once the inside of my breast.
This stupid indiff’rence so oft you blame,
Is not owing to nature, to fear, or to shame:
I am not as cold as a virgin in lead,
Nor are Sunday’s sermons so strong in my head:
I know but too well how time flies along,
That we live but few years, and yet fewer are young.

But I hate to be cheated, and never will buy
Long years of repentance for moments of joy.
Oh! was there a man (but where shall I find
Good sense and good-nature so equally join’d?)
Would value his pleasure, contribute to mine;
Not meanly would boast, nor lewdly design;
Not over severe, yet not stupidly vain,
For I would have the power, though not give the pain.

No pedant, yet learned; no rake-helly gay,
Or laughing, because he has nothing to say;
To all my whole sex obliging and free,
Yet never be fond of any but me;
In public preserve the decorum that’s just,
And show in his eyes he is true to his trust!
Then rarely approach, and respectfully bow,
But not fulsomely pert, nor yet foppishly low.

But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear;
Be banish’d afar both discretion and fear!
Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,
He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live,
And he may be rude, and yet I may forgive.

And that my delight may be solidly fix’d,
Let the friend and the lover be handsomely mix’d;
In whose tender bosom my soul may confide,
Whose kindness can soothe me, whose counsel can guide.
From such a dear lover as I here describe,
No danger should fright me, no millions should bribe;
But till this astonishing creature I know,
As I long have liv’d chaste, I will keep myself so.

I never will share with the wanton coquette,
Or be caught by a vain affectation of wit.
The toasters and songsters may try all their art,
But never shall enter the pass of my heart.
I loathe the lewd rake, the dress’d fopling despise:
Before such pursuers the nice virgin flies;
And as Ovid has sweetly in parable told,
We harden like trees, and like rivers grow cold

She could write exquisitely delicate lyrics, which use the pictorial techniques of emblematic poetry:

Hymn to the Moon

Thou silver deity of secret night,
Direct my footsteps through the woodland shade,
Thou conscious witness of unknown delight,
The Lovers guardian, and the muse’s aid.

By thy pale beams I solitary rove,
To thee my tender grief confide,
Serenely sweet you gild the silent Grove,
My friend, my goddess and my guide.

Even thee fair queen from thy amazing height
The charms of young Endimion drew,
Veil’d with the mantle of concealing night,
With all thy greatness and thy coldness too

And the most remorseless of bitter epitaphs. This pair escaped the hypocrisies and cruelties of the social group — and also time and chance ever after. The sarcasm is aimed at Pope:

Epitaph

Here lyes John Hughs and Sarah Drew.
Perhaps you’ll say, what’s that to you?
Believe me Freind much may be said
On this poor Couple that are dead.
On Sunday next they should have marry’d;
But see how oddly things are carry’d.
On Thursday last it rain’d and Lighten’d,
These tender Lovers sadly frighten’d
Shelter’d beneath the cocking Hay
In Hopes to pass the Storm away.
But the bold Thunder found them out
(Commission’d for that end no Doubt)
And seizing on their trembling Breath
Consign’d them to the Shades of Death.
Who knows if ’twas not kindly done?
For had they seen the next Year’s Sun
A Beaten Wife and Cuckold Swain
Had jointly curs’d the marriage chain.
Now they are happy in their Doom
For P. has wrote upon their Tomb.

She also had a beloved for whom she threw away her English life and never did retrieve it (see the biography below):

Francesco Algarotti, drawn by Jonathan Richardson, 19 August 1736

My favorite for a long time was her elegant Horatian contemplative and melancholy-disillusioned Epistle from Constantinople since it’s long and frequently-reprinted I just offer the URL to Written in January 1718 in the Chiosk at Pera overlooking Constantinople. Wortley Montagu writes as fine a Horatian poem, Georgic and complex a satire as Alexander Pope in her Epistle to Lord Burlington, where she critiques and remembers a philosophical point of view emerging from landscape meditation.

Not on line nor much discussed finally are her contrasting amoral disturbing (to read) poems where Wortley Montagu takes what feels to be a cruel point of view towards a woman. In each case a woman contemporary who had been treated very badly in public after a sex scandal becomes the target of a poem where the poet presents the woman as having “asked” for the sex (in a way that presented the woman’s desire as reprehensible and disgusting, or unsympathetically vulnerable). Montagu will mock the woman in satires where she was said to have played the part, say, of the coachman (or other male servant) who in the scandal sheets was either accused of raping, intruding on the woman’s room, or being invited into it. These have sufficient raw imagery to be startling today. The titles are “Virtue in Danger:” A Lamentable Story how a vertuous Lady had like to have been Ravished by her Sister’s Footman,” “Epistle from Arthur Gray to Mrs Murray,” “On a Lady mistaking a Dyeing Trader for a Dying Lover.”

She wrote too from the point of view of the woman who had been “compromised,” and then found herself ejected or divorced and deprived of income and ostracized, e.g., “Epistle from Mrs Younge to her Husband,” “Miss Cooper to …”. On this last Montagu’s mask is that of a fellow woman diarist, letter-writer and poet, Judith Cowper Madan (1702-81). Madan also destroyed much of her work and was Pope’s muse (for a time). In some courtship letters a jealous Judith Cowper wrote that her suitor and later husband, Captain Martin Madan, neglected her. In Montagu’s poem Miss Cooper is clearly in love with the absent male who is apparently indifferent to her — and openly unfaithful. Montagu makes him unusually ambitious, avaricious, and hypocritically jealous because for advancement he would connive at his own cuckoldry. Here the unfeeling nature of the husband (“Who cannot pity, what you cannot feel”) is opposed to the passionate one of the wife. The result though is not so much desperation as fierce anger.

The strong Disorders on my Vitals prey,
I weep all night, yet Hate the Dawning Day,
The Day restores me to the Cursed Care
To hide a Torment which I cannot bear.

The poet describes the cool ruthless conduct of the husband and then recoils from this in a display of intense unanswered emotion which demands sincerity and emotion and can find none anywhere, which looks for seriousness in others and finds only cant:

Take back, ye Gods, this useless pow’r to please,
It gains no Glory, and it gives no Ease!
While at my Feet neglected Lovers lie
‘Tis I that languish and ’tis I that dye.
With silent sorrow they reproach my Scorn,
With more than equal pangs this Heart is torn,
And when I see you (’tis not to be told)
I see you Careless, Insolent, or Cold,
What ere you say, you say with too much ease,
No fear to lose me, nor no Care to please.
Dull common Courtship comes not from the Heart,
No rapture when we meet, no pain to part.

The art of the poem is in its simultaneous analysis and narration, a concrete story and an emotional tidal wave:

Go Faithless Man, this wretched Victim leave,
I cannot be more lost, or you deceive.
Persue the dirty Paths that lead to Gold
And like a Common Prostitute be sold.
Are these the Steps by which to Power you move?
Is this the picture of the Man I love?

By Heaven, I will this mean Desire controul,
I’ll tear this hated Passion from my Soul,
I will not thus be toss’d — Desire — Despise,
Contemn your Folly, yet adore your Eyes

Corrosive, ruthless, yet facing her passion.

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Thoresby Hall, Nottingham, where she grew up from 1699

Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century Lady Mary Pierrepont Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was known as an eccentric, a risqué earl’s daughter separated from her miser of a husband, both of whom were scourged by Pope. What respect she had was for helping to spread the practice of inoculation for smallpox after she had been its victim — and for her sparklingly witty though lonely letters. These latter were frequently compared to the letters of Madame de Sévigné, another mother whose daughter seemed (at least to those who read the letters) not sufficiently grateful for such an outpouring of love and genius. In 1838 her status as a letter-writer was further reinforced by the publication of a series of letters she wrote when Lady Mary (as she was then known) accompanied her husband as wife of the ambassador to Constantinople: these were eventually published as Letters from the Levant During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716- 1718. She told of walking through the streets of the city swathed in veils, of insinuating herself into harems where she praised the women’s life there. We might call her the Germaine Greer of her day, by the mid-20th century Montagu’s image had changed only insofar as her letters were respected and her reflective passionate intelligence was caught in her poetry.

Montagu seems to have been a restless spirit, daring, unconventional in public, never wanting to retreat from the difficulties or divertissements of life. Montagu dared to leave her husband, threw over place, position, and access to a secure large income to meet in Italy an Italian philosophe, Francesco Algarotti, whom she wanted to live with her as her lover. She ended alone in Italy and then was fleeced by a much younger lover. An emotional need, and isolation from any real friends and loneliness, led her to turn to the cold conformist daughter — and write more remarkable letters. She did remain strongly hostile to her son.

Only recently has Montagu’s poetry been discussed adequately. It used to be treated only in terms of its narrow topic content and social context. It has been hard to see these as feminist until recently too. Although Montagu was learned and spoke eloquently of the disadvantages English women suffered, she always said that women were naturally vulnerable to folly (particularly when without fathers or husbands), and advised learning for women as a cheap way to fill up idle hours. In contrast to Finch, Montagu helped to destroy her writing. She burnt as she wrote. We do not know what her family burnt before the 1803 edition of her works, but we do know that upon her elopement with Edward Wortley Montagu, her sister, Lady Frances Pierrepont (later Mar), hurriedly burnt all the diaries and papers she could find, knowing Montagu would approve. Montagu’s closest relative, her daughter, Mary Wortley Stuart, Lady Butte burnt all her mother’s private papers. And Montagu herself burnt all her letters to Maria Skerrett, Robert Walpole’s mistress, and all those to John Hervey, the latter act mourned thus by Robert Halsbands “they must have been brilliant and revealing of the interests they had in common: politics, literature and love.” Upon that pyre she also placed her history of her own time. She died in a comedy of cross-purposes over those of her letters that she did want to survive. In Halsband’s ironic words, “She expressed great anxiety that the two volumes of [the Turkish Embassy] letters she had given to the clergyman in Holland should be published. Her family were in terror lest they should be.”

So it becomes very hard to assess her, to know what is a signature poem, but I’ll end here on one I’ve read over and over to myself over the years. It was written by her very late in life:

Exil’d, grown old, in Poverty and Pain;
Philosophy could calm the Poet’s breast:
But oh! what cure for those who wish in Vain!
What Lesson is it must restore my Rest?
Let others court the mighty Idol Fame;
Let all the World forget Clarinda’s Name,
I could lose all that Avarice requires
OF all that Beauty that the World admires,
This only greife I cannot bear or cure,
The firmness of my Soul gives way,
Some pitying Power behold what I endure

I’ve written several papers on her. The longest (and best) shows how like she is to Anne Finch: Anne Finch and Mary Wortley Montagu, Sister Poets. Another justifies and revels in their anger, depressions, and morbidity: “I hate such parts as we have plaid today.” IF you can reach my Library Thing, you will find my library of books on Mary Wortley Montagu

Frances Pierrepont Montagu Erksine, countess of Mar, Mary’s sister, by Godrey Kneller (probably in 1715)

Some advice: begin and end with Isobel Grundy. Grundy’s biography contextualizes Wortley Montagu much more adequately: for example,
in her family, and among her women friends. She tells far more than Halsband about the marriage to Wortley and shows how Lady Mary tried hard and how Wortley really did abuse her emotionally. There’s much more about the years in Italy too. I also like an old book: Symonds, Emily Morse (pseudonym George Paston) [as opposed to Gibbs’s old book still findable on the Net and misogynistic], Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times. London: Methuen, 1907. A newer good one attempts to explain away or justify the anti-feminist hostility (cruelty) of Lady Mary’s verses which further scapegoated women already made targets for nastiness: Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth Century Familiar Letter (Athens: Georgia UP, 1994), 114-52. For the response of one of the women Montagu wrote about see Robert Halsband, “Virtue in Danger: The Case of Griselda Murray,” History Today, 17 (1967): 693-700.

I find the years in Italy are not written about adequately (truthfully enough) at all, especially the long period where she basically lived with this younger Italian crook-type. Grundy really has a good one on this, trying to explain why Wortley Montagu had to lie and cover up what had happened: “Isobel Grundy, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Italian Memoir,'” The Age of Johnson, 6 (1994): 322-24, 339- 43. On the way she goes into the real problems women confront when they want to write truthfully about their lives.

As to editions, I recommend Grundy’s Essays and Poems and Simplicity a Comedy (Oxford UP, 1977), the complete letters but if you cannot find or have time for them, then Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. introd. Isobel Grundy [again] (Penguin, 1997). For fun and information and insightful and delightful pictures, Dervla Murphy, introd. Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. compiled by Christopher Pick (New Amsterdam book, 1988) Companion volumes: Robert Halsband’s Lord Hervey, Eighteenth Century Courtier and Peter Quennell’s Alexander Pope: The Education of Genius, 1688-1728 (New York: Stein and Day, 1968).

Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson, ca. 1726 — the best known authenticated picture

Ellen