Women of History: Selected from the Writings of Standard Authors

by Various

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

[BORN 1690. DIED 1762.]
JEFFREY.

ADY Mary Pierrepoint, eldest daughter of the Duke of Kingston, was born in 1690, and gave, in her early youth, such indications of a studious disposition, that she was initiated into the rudiments of the learned languages along with her brother. Her first years appear to have been spent in retirement, and yet her first letters indicate a great relish for that talent and power of observation, by which she afterwards became so famous and so formidable. These letters were addressed to Mrs Wortley, the mother of her future husband, and, along with a good deal of girlish flattery and affectation, display such a degree of easy humour and sound penetration, as is not often to be met with in a damsel of nineteen, even in this age of precocity. "My knight-errantry," she says, "is at an end, and I believe I shall henceforth think freeing of galley-slaves and knocking down windmills more laudable undertakings than the defence of any woman's reputation whatever. To say truth, I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them." But, in the course of this correspondence with the mother, she appears to have conceived a very favourable opinion of the son. Her ladyship, though endowed with a very lively imagination, seems not to have been very susceptible of violent or tender emotions, and to have imbibed a very decided contempt for sentimental and romantic nonsense, at an age which is commonly more indulgent.

Married to Mr Wortley in 1712, she entered upon a gay life; but she does not appear to have been happy. We have no desire to revive forgotten scandals, but it is a fact which cannot be omitted, that her ladyship went abroad without her husband, on account of bad health, in 1739, and did not return to England till she heard of his death in 1761. Whatever was the cause of their separation, there was no open rupture, and she seems to have corresponded with him very regularly for the first ten years of her absence; but her letters were cold without being formal, and were gloomy and constrained when compared with those that were spontaneously written to show her wit or her affection to her correspondents.

A little spoiled by flattery, and not altogether "undebauched by the world," Lady Mary seems to have possessed a masculine solidity of understanding, great liveliness of fancy, and such powers of observation and discrimination of character, as to give her opinions great authority on all the ordinary subjects of practical manners and conduct. After her marriage, she seems to have abandoned all idea of laborious or regular study, and to have been raised to the station of a literary character merely by her vivacity and love of amusement and anecdote. The great charm of her letters is certainly the extreme ease and facility with which everything is expressed, the brevity and rapidity of her representations, and the elegant simplicity of her diction. While they unite almost all the qualities of a good style, there is nothing of the professed author in them; nothing that seems to have been composed, or to have engaged the admiration of the writer. She appears to be quite unconscious either of merit or of exertion in what she is doing, and never stops to bring out a thought, or to turn an expression, with the cunning of a practised rhetorician. Her letters from Turkey will probably continue to be more universally read than any of the others, because the subject commands a wider and more permanent interest than the personalities and unconnected remarks with which the rest of her correspondence is filled. At the same time, the love of scandal and private history is so great, that these letters will be highly relished as long as the names they contain are remembered, and then they will become curious and interesting, as exhibiting a truer picture of the manners and fashions of the time, than is to be found in most other publications.

Poetry, at least the polite and witty sort which Lady Mary has attempted, is much more of an art than prose writing. We are trained to the latter by the conversation of good society, but the former seems always to require a good deal of patient labour and application. This her ladyship appears to have disdained; and, accordingly, her poetry, though abounding in lively conceptions, is already consigned to that oblivion in which mediocrity is destined by an irrevocable sentence to slumber till the end of the world. Her essays are extremely insignificant, and have no other merit that we can discover, but that they are very few and very short.

Of Lady Mary's friendship and subsequent rupture with Pope, we have not thought it necessary to say anything, both because we are of opinion that no new light has been latterly thrown upon it, and because we have no desire to awaken forgotten scandals by so idle a controversy. Pope was undoubtedly a flatterer, and was undoubtedly sufficiently irritable and vindictive; but whether his rancour was stimulated upon this occasion by anything but caprice or jealousy, and whether he was the inventor or the echo of the imputations to which he has given notoriety, we do not pretend to determine. Lady Mary's character was certainly deficient in that cautious delicacy which is the best guardian of female reputation; and there seems to have been in her conduct something of that intrepidity which naturally gives rise to misconstruction, by setting at defiance the maxims of ordinary discretion.