Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu
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rheinsbergThis is a write-up by selenak of Isabel Grundy's biography Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment.
Main write-up
Overall: Isabel Grundy's biography of Lady Mary - which, as the daughter of a Duke married to someone of lower rank, was her title - is very informative, if also dense and sometimes exhausting to go through. Grundy admirably points out whenever she has to go into speculation, as already indicated in her foreword:
The most obvious facts about her, when examined, prove ambiguous or slippery. She eloped like a quintessential romantic heroine — but with a man she did not love. She respected him; she knew he would be hard to live with; she had broken off her relationship with him a dozen times. She was in love with a different man, someone who was already lost to her for reasons as unknown as himself.
Her face was ruined by smallpox — but within a few years it was de rigueur again for those meeting her to comment on her beauty, as if either her looks had somehow repaired themselves or those around her found it unthinkable that she should not be beautiful.
The period when Pope was her worshipper is not directly visible, but only refracted through the letters he wrote when she was safely distant and expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. The true causes why his worship turned to rancour are still mysterious, and unlikely ever to be fully explained. Fuller understanding could probably emerge not from hunting a particular moment or particular event, but only from clearer and bolder thinking about the working out of gender issues. We have made some progress in capacity to detect the hostility already immanent in the adoration. No reader today will find in Pope's letters to Lady Mary on her travels a transparent wish to please. He constructs her as a beautiful body - implicitly a nude body — while she is busy constructing herself as doing and seeing and writing. She was still constructing herself this way years later, when he was painting her as a monster.
Pope's final, full-blown, gendered hatred is extraordinary, yet it is also typical. As a highly visible, assertive, unconforming woman Lady Mary was a lightning rod for misogynist anxiety and anger. In the almost half a century from her elopement to the British expatriate campaign against her when she was an old lady in Venice, she seldom ceased to attract opprobrium.
Something Grundy also does is pointing out Lady Mary's own flaws and prejudices; for example, one of her enduring enemies, Griselda Murray, became her enemy after Lady Mary wrote a mocking poem about what was either a rape attempt or a covered up blackmail attempt, but either way, Griselda Murray was justifiably furious and never forgave her. And she points out the source problem: in Lady Mary's life time, she published only anonymously, and the majority of her poems and pamphlets were circulated in hand written copies among the aristocrats and literati. Which makes it difficult to say which ones were hers (save for some where we have a printed anthology copy where there are in her handwriting remarks like "this one is mine" or "I admit it"), or there's a manuscript. (And even then: copying something you like in your handwriting was also a thing for her circle back then.) The one manuscript she meant for publicaton were the "Embassy Letters". Which weren't, actually, the rl letters she wrote when she was in Turkey. They were based mostly on her diary entries at the same and some of her actual letters; for publication, she edited them to a form where no letter repeats information the previous has (as would have been inevitable in rl) and edited out any too personal info re: her and the recipients. This manuscript she left with a Dutch publisher on her journey back to England from Italy when she had breast cancer and knew she would die soon, with the strict instructions that it was only to be published after her death. All of this due to the social taboo that female aristocrats did not publish (and certainly not for monetary gain).
Her diaries, sadly, are lost to us safe for a few fragments. She left them to her daughter, Lady Bute (wife of Lord Bute the PM who ended the subsidies to Fritz and thus gained his unending hostility), who kept them until her own old age and according to her daughter Louisa often read them - Louisa was only permitted to read some excerpts, which she admired very much and tried to recreate from memory later -, but in the end shortly before her own death, she burned them. And this wasn't the only autodafé; when Lord Hervey's son returned the letters Lady Mary had written to his father during those last months of her life to her, she sadly told him they were a remarkable testimony of how much a man and a woman who never were lovers could care for each other as friends, and how his father was the best friend she ever had, whom she could tell everything to - and promptly burned them as well. (By contrast, a great many of Hervey's letters to Lady Mary thankfully survive since she kept and didn't burn them.) See, this is why we're lucky Mrs. Fredersdorf didn't return (most of) Fritz' letters to him!
And then there's the usual historical difficulty of everyone having the same names. There are three guys called Edward Wortley Montagu of relevance; Grundy tries to help by calling Lady Mary's husband Wortley, her son Edward, and the cousin "Montagu". Otoh, she also calls Lady Mary "Lady Mary" only when talking of her as a society person but when talking of her as an author, calls her "Montagu" as well. This is not helping!
With all these caveats: it's still a remarkable story that unfolds, if often frustrating, and I'm glad to have read it. Our heroine is a spirited book-loving girl of a rich aristocratic father, who in addition to getting the standard education for aristocratic females teaches herself what she can by passionate reading. She and her female friends joke about marital prospects being a "heaven" (marrying the one you love), "hell" (unloved parents choice, often old) and "limbo" (compromise, sensible but blah). Lady Mary ends up with a "limbo" in order to avoid her father's "hell". Originally, she'd been friends with her future husband's sister, and they wrote each other giggly letters. Then Wortley took over (we know this because the next few letters his sister wrote exist in his hand writing first) though without revealing himself. Then the sister died, and he did approach Mary directly. Cue awkwardness, various failed attempts at romance and parental negotiations (he wasn't yet rich, though he would become so later in life), and eventually she eloped with him not out of love but in order to avoid a worse prospect.
At least, though, we have a lot of primary data about her marriage and how it came to be. Most of her romantic life is based on speculation. Gossip gave her a lot of affairs, but the letters don't exist, and given how utterly she fell for Algarotti in her middle age and opened her heart then, Grundy thinks she might not have had affairs at all earlier (though flirtations, sure). She also, being a modern biographer, states that of course men aren't the only options. She had some intense friendships with women. One of them was with Maria Skerret, who was first the mistress of Robert Walpole the long term PM and then, after the death of his first wife, his second wife. (Very very unusual, this; mistresses getting married, I mean.) Horace Walpole the writer was the son of wife No.1, very much resented Stepmom and hated Lady Mary as her bff, which ensured she'd be vilified by one of the two main memoirists of the era (the other being Hervey, who adored her). She - Lady Mary - also copied one of Hervey's "Lesbian" poems for her collection, and one of her "Embassy Letters" became sensational because it describes a visit to a Turkish bath, celebrating the unabashed and relaxed nudity of the Turkish women. So Grundy thinks "maybe", but points out we don't have more than that, and again, there's the Algarotti case for how Lady Mary behaved when she was unquestioningly in love.
She quickly moved in not just fashionable but literary circles and gained the reputation of a wit, as well as a lot of colorful friends. She was one of the few people who managed to get along with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (yes, the very one from The Favourite, now in disgrace; also Winston's ancestress) and with Sarah's daughter, both of whom were famous for arguing with almost everyone (including each other). Incidentally, when Grundy establishes the Georgian background as Queen Anne dies and Georg Ludwig von Hannover becomes George I. of England, things get very Anglosaxon, as in her explanation to her readers what an "Elector" was: "He had the right to vote for the Austrian Emperor in Vienna." I suppose technically that's one way to describe it, but really, being Elector in the HRE had once been a crucial thing in the Middle Ages, and it was still important enough to be a bargaining tool in the 18th century. Also: not the Austrian Emperor. The Emperor, who is an Austrian at this point, but he was reigning Archduke of Austria and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. Who was crowned in Frankfurt, not Vienna, for that reason.
Both Grundy and Halsband repeat without qualifying the English aristocratic dig that George I., speaking little to no English when he ascended to the throne, was something of a blockhead. Now, an intellectual he wasn't, but as a typical high-ranking continental aristocrat of his time and the son of the very clever Sophie of Hannover and brother of Sophie Charlotte, he was bilingual in German and French, and good in Italian and Latin, with some Dutch. Meanwhile, Grundy without noting the irony states that Wortley was hoping to get the King's favour because among the four gentlemen working in the Treasury (the ministry, that is), he was the only one able to speak French. (And no other foreign language.) (It didn't work, because George I. wasn't interested in the Treasury.) Halsband, writing in the 1970s, still makes the mistake Horowitz mocks in his book, repeating the contemporary assumption that George arrives with two German mistresses (Katte's sort of aunt Melusine von Schulenburg and Sophia Charlotte (yes, another one) von Kielmansegg), while Grundy is more up to date and knows Kielmansegg was, in fact, George's illegitimate half sister, daughter of his father Ernst August, which the British aristos with their lack of German and evidently none too fluent French did not get. This Anglocentric world view continues; these biographies (of Lady Mary and Lord Hervey, respectively) are the first ones I've seen the Diplomatic Revolution described as England's daring and revolutionary decision to ally with Prussia instead of Austria. Bless.
Back to Lady Mary, earning a reputation as a wit with literary gifts and at this stage adored by Alexander Pope. Because his later hate of her was so fateful, there's a lot of Pope in the book. When he enters the tale, Grundy points out he himself was someone who rose against the odds: Not only was he excluded, as a Catholic, from full civil rights; he suffered a serious disability. Pott's disease (tuberculosis of the bone) had stopped his growth at about four foot six, and he was gradually and inexorably becoming more hump-backed. Side-effects included severely impaired sight, almost constant headache, muscle pains, and respiratory troubles. These he faced not merely with courage but with gallantry and panache; but the years 1715-16 were among his healthiest. (....) Hampered in or barred from most of the usual social expressions of his masculinity, he was now, in his twenties, eager to declare himself intensely and outrageously attracted by witty women, while his chosen ideal of femininity was one of muted and attentive docility.
Another fateful event of those years was that Lady Mary's sister Frances was married off to a future Jacobite, Lord Mar, likely because her father wasn't sure the Hannovers could carry the day and wanted to have a foot in both camps. This turned out to be a be a disaster for poor Frances, because her husband, at least as described by Grundy, proved to be an utter bastard. He first led the first Jacobite rebellion more out of spite than belief, than turned turncoat and sold out his comrades. She spent most of the subsequent years in exile in France (and we have Mary's letters to her and many of hers to Mary), and ended up going from depression to nervous breakdown to complete mental collapse. Cue ugly family quarrel about who got to have custody of Frances.
But back to earlier times. After not really getting anywhere in government, Wortley worked for an embassy post and got one. Not too long before their departure, Lady Mary contracted the small pox, which ravaged her. She maintained a scarred face and scars all over her body, and her eyelashes never grew back, which made her previously praised "very fine eyes" looking very intense. Now, the portraits painted of her after this show no more scars than the portraits painted before, when she had the reputation of a beauty. This seems to have been the usual policy (you don't see any small pox scars on Mozart portraits, either, or on Katte's, for that matter) for painters, but as Grundy points out, it's noticeable that the compliments for Lady Mary's beauty continue after an interlude of about a year as if the small pox never happened. She did use makeup, but still. Charm and allure of personality or the victory of trope over reality?
Once she was healthy, she, her husband and their kid sum took off to Turkey, the long way around. This meant they visited a lot of European countries and met a lot of people before ever getting to Turkey. Including Prince Eugene at his prime, fresh from his most famous victory over the Turks, giving travel advice (he told them to wait for the spring, when the Danube would have thawed), and Mt's parents in Vienna:
The high point of Lady Mary's visit, described early in the Vienna Embassy Letters, was reception at court. The requisite costume was not only formal but 'more monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason than tis possible for you to imagine'. She addressed her embassy account of it to sister Frances (her chosen recipient for almost all her accounts of exotic clothes),and did her level best to realize it for her mind's eye. The headdress had a foundation 'about a yard high', covered in both false and natural hair,' it being a particular beauty to have their heads too large to go into a moderate Tub ... Their whalebone petticoats out-do ours by several yards Circumference and cover some Acres of Ground. You may easily suppose how much this extrordinary Dresse sets off and improves the natural Uglyness with which God Allmighty has been pleas'd to endow them all generally.'
Despite this robust resistance to Viennese fashion, Lady Mary was thoroughly charmed with the empress, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel: with her beauty, her sweetness, her favour to her English visitor, her pregnancy, and later by her grief at the death of her previous child, five months old, long desired, and male. (Lady Mary did not hesitate to blame his death on bad management, saying he was ‘kill’d by ... weaning him in the beginning of the Winter'.)
Lady Mary in general was no fan of anything old fashioned on the continent, but she admired more modern stuff, like the use of china on stoves which she witnessed in Dresden, and hoped she'd have the chance to use it back home. During the obligatory stop at Hannover - where George I. was in residence - she made much of little Fritz of Wales, then a nine years old kid who impressed her with his "sprightliness and understanding". Once the Wortley Montagus have reached Serbia, Lady Mary shows a very unusual reaction for the era to being shown Eugene's last great battlefield against the Turks:
The last topic Lady Mary found for her pen in Christian Europe was the battlefield of Peterwardein, scene of Eugene’s ‘last great Victory' , when the Turkish cavalry fled towards Belgrade, leaving perhaps 30,000 janizaries to be slaughtered and some impaled or decapitated . An English officer wrote, 'We took no more than twenty prisoners because our men wanted their blood and massacred them all . ' All this had happened almost as the Wortley Montagus left England. ' No attempt was made to bury the dead ' ; they must have been badly decomposed, though now , with snow lying on the ground, they no longer stank. Lady Mary's first response was emotional shock and outrage — sharpened , no doubt, by her personal acquaintance with the victor, who had been fresh from this triumph when she met him . But these painful feelings quickly modulated into intellectual analysis of the human systems which permit struggle and slaughter for the sake of small spots of earth , even while fertile tracts lie unoccupied.
"The marks of that Glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strew'd with the Skulls and Carcases of unbury'd Men, Horses and Camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled humane bodys, and reflect on the Injustice of War, that makes murder not only necessary but meritorious."
The entrenched acceptance of such a harmful custom, she thought, plainly proved 'the irrationality of Mankind (whatever fine claims we pretend to Reason)'. In her Embassy Letters she addressed this impassioned argument to Pope.
What shows up here gets more of a theme when Lady Mary actually arrives in Turkey; she very much rejected the contemporary view of the Turks (and Muslims in general) as inferior or barbaric. Whether it was the comfort of sofas ("I shall never endure a chair again") or the baths:
The women's beauty delighted her: the ‘shineingly white 'skins, with no ornament but ‘their Beautiful Hair divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulders'. The good order, good humour, and friendliness of the naked assembly — the freedom from 'surprize or impertinent Curiosity', immodest gestures, disdainfull smiles or satyric whispers '-—impressed her even more . So did the egalitarianism (you could hardly tell the great lady from her slave). As usual,Lady Mary was alert to what was and what was not different. The female body was the standard of beauty in her own culture; the Turkish women's grace and charm were what she might have expected (though their freedom from smallpox scarring, and from the red marks left by tight lacing, were unfamiliar). It was like an artist's fantasy, and Lady Mary ‘had wickedness enough to wish secretly ' that her friend Jervas might have been there invisible to represent it on canvas. But to find unadorned ,
unimproved femininity free from lewdness or narcissism or rivalry: this was a most happy denial of what her own culture had led her to expect. From now on she had two separate models of the admirable in Turkish culture: the male library and this ‘ Women's coffee house'.
She learned Turkish, and during her time there tried to learn as much as she could about local literature and music, too. The most lasting legacy of her time in Turkey was the inoculation performed on her son Edward, though, which when she had it repeated on her daughter - who was born in Turkey - years later when they were back in England started the big fight for inoculation there. Very importantly to Lady Mary, the Turkish style of inoculation differed from what European doctors later tried first - which included enormous bloodletting and big amounds of infected matter transfer instead of a "small prick" done in Turkey.
For all her openness to another culture, though, Lady Mary, and Grundy doesn't hide this, was utterly typical of her time when it came to a) slavery and b) racism against black people. Whom she saw very differently to how she saw Turks and Arabs; imagine all the usual vile slanders and prejudices, and yes, she said and wrote them. (Including even speculation that surely there miust have been some "cross breeding" with animals.) This sadly isn't a paradox when compared to her admiration for Turkish culture; I remember reading the memoirs of Emily Huete, born Salmé bin Osman, a Sansibar princess, which include a whole rant on how slavery is right because "negroes" are just that inferior and only happy when employed in service etc etc etc; this from a woman who herself endured a lot of anti-Arab prejudice when living in Europe.
Wortley when being called back to England just about had it with civil service; he want private, and became a coal magnate in the north of England. Lady Mary remained in London, became bff with Hervey, conducted her inoculation campaign... and then the feud with Pope started. Grundy doesn't think the story about her rejecting a direct pass is true because she doesn't think Pope would have made himself vulnerable like that. But whether or not it happened, Pope, who in his letters to her during her time abroad had built her up and up and up in his imagination, could not cope with the real deal, and started to attack her. After that "poxed by her love, and pillored by her hate" quip, she had enough, and enlisted Hervey (also attacked by Pope as "Sporus", an allusion to the dancer Nero had castrated and then dressed up as a woman he could marry); together, they wrote a counter satire on Pope, which was just as vicious, and then the literary feud began in earnest. Unlike Fritz/Voltaire, this one isn't funny, because with Fritz and Voltaire, you think they both could take it (and deserved it). Pope - again, the poet of the age - really cut loose, no holds bared, and threw everything at "the furious Sappho" (i.e. Lady Mary) he could think of, from sexual license and STD (of course) to financial greed (he accused her of starving her by then mentally ill sister so she could enjoy their father's money, which was completely untrue) to being physically repellent and dirty. This proved so effective a portrait that young Horace Walpole, a Pope fan and predisposed to dislike Mary anyway (due to her friendship with his stepmother), later when he met her in Italy described her in terms identical to Pope's without (and only very late in life admitting that well, okay, all that "dirt" talk was maybe a bit of an exaggaration), with some additional horror of the middle aged (by then) female body because he'd heard (or claimed he did) that she'd gotten her menses so strongly that she bled into the inn where she was passing through and had to pay the innkeeper for a new linnen. That she at age 51 still menstruated was to him the epitome of monstrosity. He also couldn't believe she still danced and called it utterly shameless and again repellent; a woman of 50 going through physical activity that made her sweat was disgusting, and so forth.
There's a lot of inner English politics in the book as well - Lady Mary was a Whig and friends with some key Whigs, Hervey included, after all - and I thought all the manouevres and counter manouevres were somewhat more lucidly explained in the Hervey biography. Then Algarotti arrives, and the two biographies work very well as completing each other. He couldn't have shown up at a worse time in terms of Lady Mary being extremely vulnerable. She was becoming exhausted with all the literary pilloring and the struggle about her sister Frances. Her son Edward (who was Algarotti's age) had turned out to be an increasingly rotten character, a scoundrel of the unfun kind and a cheat. Her daughter, with whom she had gotten along very well when said daughter was still a child, and would get on very well again once she was married and a mother herself, was now a teenager in love butting heads with Mom. And presto, here's this young, charming, dazzling Italian. She must have thought this was finally a break, something new and good in her life. And for the first time - if there were previous times before - she threw caution in the wind and allowed herself to utterly and completely fall for someone, not holding anything back. :(
Well, we know what happened. Grundy's description of Fritz showing up in Algarotti's life works as an amusing antidote (she notes Algarotti must have thought he hit the jackpot - a princely patron who was young, smart, charismatic and sexually compatible! - and with some Schadenfreude reports how that turned out). Lady Mary herself never met Fritz, but she did tease Algarotti about him when they were resuming relations in their final years, during the 7 Years War in the later 1750s:
The balance of power had shifted between them. Lady Mary was no longer emotionally nor Algarotti financially grasping. She was a self confessed old woman, and he a scholar- critic in his early forties, retired from public life. Their minds still struck sparks. (...)n She told him that Graeme was piqued at having laid siege for months to a citadel (herself ) which Algarotti had once taken by storm in a fortnight. On the other hand she freely mentioned her age. She had turned soft and sentimental, she said, and was recklessly squandering her short remaining time when she enjoyed the pleasures of Carnival. As before, she sought to charm him by her wit. The earliest of these letters, written at the end of 1756, showed off by imitating Homer (as she put it) in combining different dialects: that is, in her case, by shifting from English into Italian and thence into French. It also flattered him and sniped at his former ‘Roial Patron' by exalting the wisdom of retirement and attacking the destructive, even demonic, pleasures of the military hero. She sounded and resounded this anti-war motif, playing it both for strong feeling and for airy paradox. She suggested that killing innocent beasts for sport is more culpable than killing human beings who mostly deserve no better. The butcher-hero thus becomes the hunted animals avenger, less guilty than meat- eaters like herself. She blended her Enlightenment reformism with impish play.
The story of Lady Mary's years in Italy (and some in France) have their drama quite apart of the Algarotti epilogue; one of the local gangsters named Palazzi managed to first trick, then threaten her (to the point where she wasn't allowed to go anywhere without his "protection") , helping himself to a considerable part of her money, until she finally managed to get free and rid of him. (He later ended up imprisoned and executed for murder; this really could have ended lethally.) But on the bright side, she still was a fascinated traveler and explorer of other societies, and a voracious reader, who was very glad when her daughter kept sending her new books from England (which she always reviewed and wrote comments on). As mentioned, relations with her daughter became very well again; by contrast, her son - who showed up once or twice in the hope to get some money - went from bad to worse. The war stories worried her from afar; she had retained her atypical dislike of war, was a stranger to Fritzmania and didn't think England should stay involved. When she returned just as the war was ending, as mentioned, she left her "Embassy Letters" manuscript with a Dutch printer en route, figuring, probably correctly, that if she brought it to England her family would not let it get published, or at least not the way she wanted. As it was, it turned into a bestseller - an international one; Heinrich read it in Prussia and recced it to Fritz, remember - , and awoke an appetite for more letters and writings of hers. But that was after she had died, with her daughter and grandchildren, her husband (with whom she'd kept in contact throughout their lives) having died already at that point. An edition of her work beyond the Embassy letters was published in 1803, but by then, the climate had been changing, and not in a way friendly to controversial women. Grundy just gives a quick epilogue, covering the publication history of Lady Mary's works, which is a telling difference of emphasis to Halsband's epilogue for Lord Hervey with its "where are they now?" story. Hervey was a hobby poet, a courtier and a memoirist, and his biographer put the main emphasis on his life; Grundy always tries to balance Montagu the writer with Lady Mary the person, and makes the case that it's as a writer she has become immortal.
Useful for Enlightenment crossovers: like Hervey, Lady Mary met and befriended Voltaire when he was in England. (Neither of them was uncritical of Voltaire as a writer, but they kept up good relations from a distance, and Voltaire wrote a glowing review for the French papers when the Embassy Letters got published.) Depressingly, she didn't meet (that we know of) Émilie - her travels didn't coincide - but that's where fiction could come in. Incidentally, while Halsband in the 70s knows so little of Émilie that he thinks Voltaire was the only one writing about Newton and that Émilie was "catty" to Algarotti the second time he visited because his work about Newton was a rival to Voltaire's, Grundy knows just a little more and thinks Émilie was annoyed that Algarotti didn't dedicate his "Newton for Dummies" to her. Neither mentions Émilie's own work on Newton, or Émilie's work in general. Anglocentrism to the end.
However: Lady Mary and Wilhelmine were in Italy at the same time! And they definitely could have met. (If they have, I don't recall it from the letters posted at the travel letters website, but I could easily have missed it - I haven't read every single one. If they haven't, well, maybe they kept it secret for Reasons!)
Supplements
1) Lady Mary and Algarotti in Italy:
The recent context of Lady Mary's waiting and of Algarotti's pursuing other goals, both sexual and careerist, might lead one to expect that he rejected her expeditiously even if not unkindly.
A newly noticed clue to their meeting is a poem lodged in Lady Mary's copy of Marie Madeleine de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves. This novel ( about a married woman who heroically resists illicit love) dated from 1678 , but this was a new edition, printed at Paris in 1741. Pinned inside it --probably by the owner - is a scrap of paper bearing fourteen lines of Italian verse in Algarotti's hand. The poem is clearly original and occasional. It essays a definition of love : learnedly, mock -scientifically, personally. It opens , ' True love is , my fair lady, if you don't know it — myself I learned it from you - the child of who knows what ...' It ends , ' True love , Maria, is what one guesses it to be.'
2) BTW, the Hervey biography ends thusly, after our main character is dead, in an "where are they now?" epilogue about the rest of the cast:
Lady Mary, after her four-year sojourn in Avignon , settled in the Venetian province of Brescia ; and in 1756 she moved to Venice and resumed her correspondence with Algarotti, this time as a witty bel esprit instead of a lovesick matron . “When we meet,' she wrote to him in 1758 (four years before her own death ), ‘the Memory of Lord Hervey shall be celebrated ; his Gentle Shade will be pleas'd in Elysium with our Gratitude . I am insensible to every thing but the remembrance of those few Freinds that have been dear to me.' Perhaps, then, Hervey enjoys eternity in the company of the enchanting Algarotti and the witty Lady Mary.
Last line of the biography. Leaving aside the part where this might indeed be Hervey's idea of paradise, and even Lady Mary's, but probably not Algarotti's, it's a neat note to go out on. Both Halsband and Grundy agree that the Lady Mary & Lord Hervey friendship was one of the most important in their respective lives to them. It surviving the crisis to it which the initial triangle situation with Algarotti was (when Hervey did see Lady Mary as a rival and wasn't yet sure which way Algarotti would go) was a great relief to both biographers.
3) On Lady Mary and Lord Hervey remaining friends despite the love triangle:
They were among each other's favourite people and loyal through a great number of ordeals (among other things, being attacked by the foremost English poet of their age, Alexander Pope, who first praised Lady Mary to the skies and then turned against her - whether or not it was because he finally did dare a pass and she laughed at him is debated - with a vengeance), and it would have been a shame to lose this over the most fickle of swans. Something remarkable: Lady Mary got attacked not just by Pope but later Horace Walpole wiht every accusation misogyny can inspire, including, of course, sexual licence. And yet neither of them when accusing her of having lovers, including younger lovers, names Algarotti. Her unrequited love for him and Algarotti ending up with Hervey (for a while) would have been a gift to satirists hating both her and Hervey. And Algarotti was such a prominent figure at that point: the story would have been eaten up with relish by a wide audience, especially since it ended up with Lady Mary humiliated. And yet - neither Pope, who accuses Lady Mary of "poxing her lovers" (which is a nasty pun on her inoculation work against small pox, mixing it with the accusation of inflicting STD) nor Walpole, who when she returned near the end of her life to die in England said she shold be quaranteened because she was sure to be so dirty, ever caught wind of the Algarotti situation. Which must mean that both Hervey (who usually loved to gossip) and Algarotti kept absolutely mum.
4) Algarotti's Il Newtonianismo per le Dame:
Lady Mary's biographer Grundy, btw, argues that Lady Mary as well as Émilie might have influenced Algarotti's depiction, and points out that lacking erotic enthusiasm for her or not, he did take her serious as an author and did learn from her (not the other way around):
Of the poems of hers which he kept, in her handwriting or his own, several are not original but extemporary adaptations, either from others or from herself. This does not mean that he sapped her originality but that she was thinking and writing on the spur of the moment, as she often did in topical writing. Now she was mediating for him the English poetic tradition. Among other things this was a tutor-pupil relationship, with the woman, unusually, as tutor. Algarotti kept the erotic addresses, from woman to man and from man to woman, which she crafted out of Lansdowne or Addison ( who in turn was just then drawing on Horace). He also kept a political epigram which she had already adapted and updated , and a dramatic speech she wrote for Brutus, justifying
his murder of Caesar. (...)
During his months in England Algarotti was finishing his version of Newton's Optics ( published at Milan, late 1737). Lady Mary (an experienced collaborator) and Hervey listened , praised, and offered linguistic and other finishing touches. Algarotti set the scientist - narrator's dialogues with his noble, brilliant, and beautiful female pupil in an arbour or private Parnassus, which reflects both Lady Mary's Twickenham garden and Voltaire's Cirey.
The pupil is a marchesa (Emilie du Châtelet's title). She speaks strongly against war, and is called a citizen of the world (as Lady Mary called herself). Early in volume ii comes a more unmistakable allusion. To prove the utility of science to women, the narrator cites inoculation, which now preserves the charms of English as well as of Circassian beauties.
On the scale of tributes to Lady Mary's inoculation work, this ranks somewhere between The Plain Dealer's gallantry and Voltaire's heroinizing. Algarotti does not name her; he stresses the saving of beauty, not of life; and he takes no note of her engagement in social struggle. However, his treatise won from her a commendatory poem which he placed first in the volume when the Newtonanismo was reprinted at Naples, 1739 .
selenak of Isabel Grundy's biography Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment.Main write-up
Overall: Isabel Grundy's biography of Lady Mary - which, as the daughter of a Duke married to someone of lower rank, was her title - is very informative, if also dense and sometimes exhausting to go through. Grundy admirably points out whenever she has to go into speculation, as already indicated in her foreword:
The most obvious facts about her, when examined, prove ambiguous or slippery. She eloped like a quintessential romantic heroine — but with a man she did not love. She respected him; she knew he would be hard to live with; she had broken off her relationship with him a dozen times. She was in love with a different man, someone who was already lost to her for reasons as unknown as himself.
Her face was ruined by smallpox — but within a few years it was de rigueur again for those meeting her to comment on her beauty, as if either her looks had somehow repaired themselves or those around her found it unthinkable that she should not be beautiful.
The period when Pope was her worshipper is not directly visible, but only refracted through the letters he wrote when she was safely distant and expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. The true causes why his worship turned to rancour are still mysterious, and unlikely ever to be fully explained. Fuller understanding could probably emerge not from hunting a particular moment or particular event, but only from clearer and bolder thinking about the working out of gender issues. We have made some progress in capacity to detect the hostility already immanent in the adoration. No reader today will find in Pope's letters to Lady Mary on her travels a transparent wish to please. He constructs her as a beautiful body - implicitly a nude body — while she is busy constructing herself as doing and seeing and writing. She was still constructing herself this way years later, when he was painting her as a monster.
Pope's final, full-blown, gendered hatred is extraordinary, yet it is also typical. As a highly visible, assertive, unconforming woman Lady Mary was a lightning rod for misogynist anxiety and anger. In the almost half a century from her elopement to the British expatriate campaign against her when she was an old lady in Venice, she seldom ceased to attract opprobrium.
Something Grundy also does is pointing out Lady Mary's own flaws and prejudices; for example, one of her enduring enemies, Griselda Murray, became her enemy after Lady Mary wrote a mocking poem about what was either a rape attempt or a covered up blackmail attempt, but either way, Griselda Murray was justifiably furious and never forgave her. And she points out the source problem: in Lady Mary's life time, she published only anonymously, and the majority of her poems and pamphlets were circulated in hand written copies among the aristocrats and literati. Which makes it difficult to say which ones were hers (save for some where we have a printed anthology copy where there are in her handwriting remarks like "this one is mine" or "I admit it"), or there's a manuscript. (And even then: copying something you like in your handwriting was also a thing for her circle back then.) The one manuscript she meant for publicaton were the "Embassy Letters". Which weren't, actually, the rl letters she wrote when she was in Turkey. They were based mostly on her diary entries at the same and some of her actual letters; for publication, she edited them to a form where no letter repeats information the previous has (as would have been inevitable in rl) and edited out any too personal info re: her and the recipients. This manuscript she left with a Dutch publisher on her journey back to England from Italy when she had breast cancer and knew she would die soon, with the strict instructions that it was only to be published after her death. All of this due to the social taboo that female aristocrats did not publish (and certainly not for monetary gain).
Her diaries, sadly, are lost to us safe for a few fragments. She left them to her daughter, Lady Bute (wife of Lord Bute the PM who ended the subsidies to Fritz and thus gained his unending hostility), who kept them until her own old age and according to her daughter Louisa often read them - Louisa was only permitted to read some excerpts, which she admired very much and tried to recreate from memory later -, but in the end shortly before her own death, she burned them. And this wasn't the only autodafé; when Lord Hervey's son returned the letters Lady Mary had written to his father during those last months of her life to her, she sadly told him they were a remarkable testimony of how much a man and a woman who never were lovers could care for each other as friends, and how his father was the best friend she ever had, whom she could tell everything to - and promptly burned them as well. (By contrast, a great many of Hervey's letters to Lady Mary thankfully survive since she kept and didn't burn them.) See, this is why we're lucky Mrs. Fredersdorf didn't return (most of) Fritz' letters to him!
And then there's the usual historical difficulty of everyone having the same names. There are three guys called Edward Wortley Montagu of relevance; Grundy tries to help by calling Lady Mary's husband Wortley, her son Edward, and the cousin "Montagu". Otoh, she also calls Lady Mary "Lady Mary" only when talking of her as a society person but when talking of her as an author, calls her "Montagu" as well. This is not helping!
With all these caveats: it's still a remarkable story that unfolds, if often frustrating, and I'm glad to have read it. Our heroine is a spirited book-loving girl of a rich aristocratic father, who in addition to getting the standard education for aristocratic females teaches herself what she can by passionate reading. She and her female friends joke about marital prospects being a "heaven" (marrying the one you love), "hell" (unloved parents choice, often old) and "limbo" (compromise, sensible but blah). Lady Mary ends up with a "limbo" in order to avoid her father's "hell". Originally, she'd been friends with her future husband's sister, and they wrote each other giggly letters. Then Wortley took over (we know this because the next few letters his sister wrote exist in his hand writing first) though without revealing himself. Then the sister died, and he did approach Mary directly. Cue awkwardness, various failed attempts at romance and parental negotiations (he wasn't yet rich, though he would become so later in life), and eventually she eloped with him not out of love but in order to avoid a worse prospect.
At least, though, we have a lot of primary data about her marriage and how it came to be. Most of her romantic life is based on speculation. Gossip gave her a lot of affairs, but the letters don't exist, and given how utterly she fell for Algarotti in her middle age and opened her heart then, Grundy thinks she might not have had affairs at all earlier (though flirtations, sure). She also, being a modern biographer, states that of course men aren't the only options. She had some intense friendships with women. One of them was with Maria Skerret, who was first the mistress of Robert Walpole the long term PM and then, after the death of his first wife, his second wife. (Very very unusual, this; mistresses getting married, I mean.) Horace Walpole the writer was the son of wife No.1, very much resented Stepmom and hated Lady Mary as her bff, which ensured she'd be vilified by one of the two main memoirists of the era (the other being Hervey, who adored her). She - Lady Mary - also copied one of Hervey's "Lesbian" poems for her collection, and one of her "Embassy Letters" became sensational because it describes a visit to a Turkish bath, celebrating the unabashed and relaxed nudity of the Turkish women. So Grundy thinks "maybe", but points out we don't have more than that, and again, there's the Algarotti case for how Lady Mary behaved when she was unquestioningly in love.
She quickly moved in not just fashionable but literary circles and gained the reputation of a wit, as well as a lot of colorful friends. She was one of the few people who managed to get along with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (yes, the very one from The Favourite, now in disgrace; also Winston's ancestress) and with Sarah's daughter, both of whom were famous for arguing with almost everyone (including each other). Incidentally, when Grundy establishes the Georgian background as Queen Anne dies and Georg Ludwig von Hannover becomes George I. of England, things get very Anglosaxon, as in her explanation to her readers what an "Elector" was: "He had the right to vote for the Austrian Emperor in Vienna." I suppose technically that's one way to describe it, but really, being Elector in the HRE had once been a crucial thing in the Middle Ages, and it was still important enough to be a bargaining tool in the 18th century. Also: not the Austrian Emperor. The Emperor, who is an Austrian at this point, but he was reigning Archduke of Austria and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. Who was crowned in Frankfurt, not Vienna, for that reason.
Both Grundy and Halsband repeat without qualifying the English aristocratic dig that George I., speaking little to no English when he ascended to the throne, was something of a blockhead. Now, an intellectual he wasn't, but as a typical high-ranking continental aristocrat of his time and the son of the very clever Sophie of Hannover and brother of Sophie Charlotte, he was bilingual in German and French, and good in Italian and Latin, with some Dutch. Meanwhile, Grundy without noting the irony states that Wortley was hoping to get the King's favour because among the four gentlemen working in the Treasury (the ministry, that is), he was the only one able to speak French. (And no other foreign language.) (It didn't work, because George I. wasn't interested in the Treasury.) Halsband, writing in the 1970s, still makes the mistake Horowitz mocks in his book, repeating the contemporary assumption that George arrives with two German mistresses (Katte's sort of aunt Melusine von Schulenburg and Sophia Charlotte (yes, another one) von Kielmansegg), while Grundy is more up to date and knows Kielmansegg was, in fact, George's illegitimate half sister, daughter of his father Ernst August, which the British aristos with their lack of German and evidently none too fluent French did not get. This Anglocentric world view continues; these biographies (of Lady Mary and Lord Hervey, respectively) are the first ones I've seen the Diplomatic Revolution described as England's daring and revolutionary decision to ally with Prussia instead of Austria. Bless.
Back to Lady Mary, earning a reputation as a wit with literary gifts and at this stage adored by Alexander Pope. Because his later hate of her was so fateful, there's a lot of Pope in the book. When he enters the tale, Grundy points out he himself was someone who rose against the odds: Not only was he excluded, as a Catholic, from full civil rights; he suffered a serious disability. Pott's disease (tuberculosis of the bone) had stopped his growth at about four foot six, and he was gradually and inexorably becoming more hump-backed. Side-effects included severely impaired sight, almost constant headache, muscle pains, and respiratory troubles. These he faced not merely with courage but with gallantry and panache; but the years 1715-16 were among his healthiest. (....) Hampered in or barred from most of the usual social expressions of his masculinity, he was now, in his twenties, eager to declare himself intensely and outrageously attracted by witty women, while his chosen ideal of femininity was one of muted and attentive docility.
Another fateful event of those years was that Lady Mary's sister Frances was married off to a future Jacobite, Lord Mar, likely because her father wasn't sure the Hannovers could carry the day and wanted to have a foot in both camps. This turned out to be a be a disaster for poor Frances, because her husband, at least as described by Grundy, proved to be an utter bastard. He first led the first Jacobite rebellion more out of spite than belief, than turned turncoat and sold out his comrades. She spent most of the subsequent years in exile in France (and we have Mary's letters to her and many of hers to Mary), and ended up going from depression to nervous breakdown to complete mental collapse. Cue ugly family quarrel about who got to have custody of Frances.
But back to earlier times. After not really getting anywhere in government, Wortley worked for an embassy post and got one. Not too long before their departure, Lady Mary contracted the small pox, which ravaged her. She maintained a scarred face and scars all over her body, and her eyelashes never grew back, which made her previously praised "very fine eyes" looking very intense. Now, the portraits painted of her after this show no more scars than the portraits painted before, when she had the reputation of a beauty. This seems to have been the usual policy (you don't see any small pox scars on Mozart portraits, either, or on Katte's, for that matter) for painters, but as Grundy points out, it's noticeable that the compliments for Lady Mary's beauty continue after an interlude of about a year as if the small pox never happened. She did use makeup, but still. Charm and allure of personality or the victory of trope over reality?
Once she was healthy, she, her husband and their kid sum took off to Turkey, the long way around. This meant they visited a lot of European countries and met a lot of people before ever getting to Turkey. Including Prince Eugene at his prime, fresh from his most famous victory over the Turks, giving travel advice (he told them to wait for the spring, when the Danube would have thawed), and Mt's parents in Vienna:
The high point of Lady Mary's visit, described early in the Vienna Embassy Letters, was reception at court. The requisite costume was not only formal but 'more monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason than tis possible for you to imagine'. She addressed her embassy account of it to sister Frances (her chosen recipient for almost all her accounts of exotic clothes),and did her level best to realize it for her mind's eye. The headdress had a foundation 'about a yard high', covered in both false and natural hair,' it being a particular beauty to have their heads too large to go into a moderate Tub ... Their whalebone petticoats out-do ours by several yards Circumference and cover some Acres of Ground. You may easily suppose how much this extrordinary Dresse sets off and improves the natural Uglyness with which God Allmighty has been pleas'd to endow them all generally.'
Despite this robust resistance to Viennese fashion, Lady Mary was thoroughly charmed with the empress, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel: with her beauty, her sweetness, her favour to her English visitor, her pregnancy, and later by her grief at the death of her previous child, five months old, long desired, and male. (Lady Mary did not hesitate to blame his death on bad management, saying he was ‘kill’d by ... weaning him in the beginning of the Winter'.)
Lady Mary in general was no fan of anything old fashioned on the continent, but she admired more modern stuff, like the use of china on stoves which she witnessed in Dresden, and hoped she'd have the chance to use it back home. During the obligatory stop at Hannover - where George I. was in residence - she made much of little Fritz of Wales, then a nine years old kid who impressed her with his "sprightliness and understanding". Once the Wortley Montagus have reached Serbia, Lady Mary shows a very unusual reaction for the era to being shown Eugene's last great battlefield against the Turks:
The last topic Lady Mary found for her pen in Christian Europe was the battlefield of Peterwardein, scene of Eugene’s ‘last great Victory' , when the Turkish cavalry fled towards Belgrade, leaving perhaps 30,000 janizaries to be slaughtered and some impaled or decapitated . An English officer wrote, 'We took no more than twenty prisoners because our men wanted their blood and massacred them all . ' All this had happened almost as the Wortley Montagus left England. ' No attempt was made to bury the dead ' ; they must have been badly decomposed, though now , with snow lying on the ground, they no longer stank. Lady Mary's first response was emotional shock and outrage — sharpened , no doubt, by her personal acquaintance with the victor, who had been fresh from this triumph when she met him . But these painful feelings quickly modulated into intellectual analysis of the human systems which permit struggle and slaughter for the sake of small spots of earth , even while fertile tracts lie unoccupied.
"The marks of that Glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strew'd with the Skulls and Carcases of unbury'd Men, Horses and Camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled humane bodys, and reflect on the Injustice of War, that makes murder not only necessary but meritorious."
The entrenched acceptance of such a harmful custom, she thought, plainly proved 'the irrationality of Mankind (whatever fine claims we pretend to Reason)'. In her Embassy Letters she addressed this impassioned argument to Pope.
What shows up here gets more of a theme when Lady Mary actually arrives in Turkey; she very much rejected the contemporary view of the Turks (and Muslims in general) as inferior or barbaric. Whether it was the comfort of sofas ("I shall never endure a chair again") or the baths:
The women's beauty delighted her: the ‘shineingly white 'skins, with no ornament but ‘their Beautiful Hair divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulders'. The good order, good humour, and friendliness of the naked assembly — the freedom from 'surprize or impertinent Curiosity', immodest gestures, disdainfull smiles or satyric whispers '-—impressed her even more . So did the egalitarianism (you could hardly tell the great lady from her slave). As usual,Lady Mary was alert to what was and what was not different. The female body was the standard of beauty in her own culture; the Turkish women's grace and charm were what she might have expected (though their freedom from smallpox scarring, and from the red marks left by tight lacing, were unfamiliar). It was like an artist's fantasy, and Lady Mary ‘had wickedness enough to wish secretly ' that her friend Jervas might have been there invisible to represent it on canvas. But to find unadorned ,
unimproved femininity free from lewdness or narcissism or rivalry: this was a most happy denial of what her own culture had led her to expect. From now on she had two separate models of the admirable in Turkish culture: the male library and this ‘ Women's coffee house'.
She learned Turkish, and during her time there tried to learn as much as she could about local literature and music, too. The most lasting legacy of her time in Turkey was the inoculation performed on her son Edward, though, which when she had it repeated on her daughter - who was born in Turkey - years later when they were back in England started the big fight for inoculation there. Very importantly to Lady Mary, the Turkish style of inoculation differed from what European doctors later tried first - which included enormous bloodletting and big amounds of infected matter transfer instead of a "small prick" done in Turkey.
For all her openness to another culture, though, Lady Mary, and Grundy doesn't hide this, was utterly typical of her time when it came to a) slavery and b) racism against black people. Whom she saw very differently to how she saw Turks and Arabs; imagine all the usual vile slanders and prejudices, and yes, she said and wrote them. (Including even speculation that surely there miust have been some "cross breeding" with animals.) This sadly isn't a paradox when compared to her admiration for Turkish culture; I remember reading the memoirs of Emily Huete, born Salmé bin Osman, a Sansibar princess, which include a whole rant on how slavery is right because "negroes" are just that inferior and only happy when employed in service etc etc etc; this from a woman who herself endured a lot of anti-Arab prejudice when living in Europe.
Wortley when being called back to England just about had it with civil service; he want private, and became a coal magnate in the north of England. Lady Mary remained in London, became bff with Hervey, conducted her inoculation campaign... and then the feud with Pope started. Grundy doesn't think the story about her rejecting a direct pass is true because she doesn't think Pope would have made himself vulnerable like that. But whether or not it happened, Pope, who in his letters to her during her time abroad had built her up and up and up in his imagination, could not cope with the real deal, and started to attack her. After that "poxed by her love, and pillored by her hate" quip, she had enough, and enlisted Hervey (also attacked by Pope as "Sporus", an allusion to the dancer Nero had castrated and then dressed up as a woman he could marry); together, they wrote a counter satire on Pope, which was just as vicious, and then the literary feud began in earnest. Unlike Fritz/Voltaire, this one isn't funny, because with Fritz and Voltaire, you think they both could take it (and deserved it). Pope - again, the poet of the age - really cut loose, no holds bared, and threw everything at "the furious Sappho" (i.e. Lady Mary) he could think of, from sexual license and STD (of course) to financial greed (he accused her of starving her by then mentally ill sister so she could enjoy their father's money, which was completely untrue) to being physically repellent and dirty. This proved so effective a portrait that young Horace Walpole, a Pope fan and predisposed to dislike Mary anyway (due to her friendship with his stepmother), later when he met her in Italy described her in terms identical to Pope's without (and only very late in life admitting that well, okay, all that "dirt" talk was maybe a bit of an exaggaration), with some additional horror of the middle aged (by then) female body because he'd heard (or claimed he did) that she'd gotten her menses so strongly that she bled into the inn where she was passing through and had to pay the innkeeper for a new linnen. That she at age 51 still menstruated was to him the epitome of monstrosity. He also couldn't believe she still danced and called it utterly shameless and again repellent; a woman of 50 going through physical activity that made her sweat was disgusting, and so forth.
There's a lot of inner English politics in the book as well - Lady Mary was a Whig and friends with some key Whigs, Hervey included, after all - and I thought all the manouevres and counter manouevres were somewhat more lucidly explained in the Hervey biography. Then Algarotti arrives, and the two biographies work very well as completing each other. He couldn't have shown up at a worse time in terms of Lady Mary being extremely vulnerable. She was becoming exhausted with all the literary pilloring and the struggle about her sister Frances. Her son Edward (who was Algarotti's age) had turned out to be an increasingly rotten character, a scoundrel of the unfun kind and a cheat. Her daughter, with whom she had gotten along very well when said daughter was still a child, and would get on very well again once she was married and a mother herself, was now a teenager in love butting heads with Mom. And presto, here's this young, charming, dazzling Italian. She must have thought this was finally a break, something new and good in her life. And for the first time - if there were previous times before - she threw caution in the wind and allowed herself to utterly and completely fall for someone, not holding anything back. :(
Well, we know what happened. Grundy's description of Fritz showing up in Algarotti's life works as an amusing antidote (she notes Algarotti must have thought he hit the jackpot - a princely patron who was young, smart, charismatic and sexually compatible! - and with some Schadenfreude reports how that turned out). Lady Mary herself never met Fritz, but she did tease Algarotti about him when they were resuming relations in their final years, during the 7 Years War in the later 1750s:
The balance of power had shifted between them. Lady Mary was no longer emotionally nor Algarotti financially grasping. She was a self confessed old woman, and he a scholar- critic in his early forties, retired from public life. Their minds still struck sparks. (...)n She told him that Graeme was piqued at having laid siege for months to a citadel (herself ) which Algarotti had once taken by storm in a fortnight. On the other hand she freely mentioned her age. She had turned soft and sentimental, she said, and was recklessly squandering her short remaining time when she enjoyed the pleasures of Carnival. As before, she sought to charm him by her wit. The earliest of these letters, written at the end of 1756, showed off by imitating Homer (as she put it) in combining different dialects: that is, in her case, by shifting from English into Italian and thence into French. It also flattered him and sniped at his former ‘Roial Patron' by exalting the wisdom of retirement and attacking the destructive, even demonic, pleasures of the military hero. She sounded and resounded this anti-war motif, playing it both for strong feeling and for airy paradox. She suggested that killing innocent beasts for sport is more culpable than killing human beings who mostly deserve no better. The butcher-hero thus becomes the hunted animals avenger, less guilty than meat- eaters like herself. She blended her Enlightenment reformism with impish play.
The story of Lady Mary's years in Italy (and some in France) have their drama quite apart of the Algarotti epilogue; one of the local gangsters named Palazzi managed to first trick, then threaten her (to the point where she wasn't allowed to go anywhere without his "protection") , helping himself to a considerable part of her money, until she finally managed to get free and rid of him. (He later ended up imprisoned and executed for murder; this really could have ended lethally.) But on the bright side, she still was a fascinated traveler and explorer of other societies, and a voracious reader, who was very glad when her daughter kept sending her new books from England (which she always reviewed and wrote comments on). As mentioned, relations with her daughter became very well again; by contrast, her son - who showed up once or twice in the hope to get some money - went from bad to worse. The war stories worried her from afar; she had retained her atypical dislike of war, was a stranger to Fritzmania and didn't think England should stay involved. When she returned just as the war was ending, as mentioned, she left her "Embassy Letters" manuscript with a Dutch printer en route, figuring, probably correctly, that if she brought it to England her family would not let it get published, or at least not the way she wanted. As it was, it turned into a bestseller - an international one; Heinrich read it in Prussia and recced it to Fritz, remember - , and awoke an appetite for more letters and writings of hers. But that was after she had died, with her daughter and grandchildren, her husband (with whom she'd kept in contact throughout their lives) having died already at that point. An edition of her work beyond the Embassy letters was published in 1803, but by then, the climate had been changing, and not in a way friendly to controversial women. Grundy just gives a quick epilogue, covering the publication history of Lady Mary's works, which is a telling difference of emphasis to Halsband's epilogue for Lord Hervey with its "where are they now?" story. Hervey was a hobby poet, a courtier and a memoirist, and his biographer put the main emphasis on his life; Grundy always tries to balance Montagu the writer with Lady Mary the person, and makes the case that it's as a writer she has become immortal.
Useful for Enlightenment crossovers: like Hervey, Lady Mary met and befriended Voltaire when he was in England. (Neither of them was uncritical of Voltaire as a writer, but they kept up good relations from a distance, and Voltaire wrote a glowing review for the French papers when the Embassy Letters got published.) Depressingly, she didn't meet (that we know of) Émilie - her travels didn't coincide - but that's where fiction could come in. Incidentally, while Halsband in the 70s knows so little of Émilie that he thinks Voltaire was the only one writing about Newton and that Émilie was "catty" to Algarotti the second time he visited because his work about Newton was a rival to Voltaire's, Grundy knows just a little more and thinks Émilie was annoyed that Algarotti didn't dedicate his "Newton for Dummies" to her. Neither mentions Émilie's own work on Newton, or Émilie's work in general. Anglocentrism to the end.
However: Lady Mary and Wilhelmine were in Italy at the same time! And they definitely could have met. (If they have, I don't recall it from the letters posted at the travel letters website, but I could easily have missed it - I haven't read every single one. If they haven't, well, maybe they kept it secret for Reasons!)
Supplements
1) Lady Mary and Algarotti in Italy:
The recent context of Lady Mary's waiting and of Algarotti's pursuing other goals, both sexual and careerist, might lead one to expect that he rejected her expeditiously even if not unkindly.
A newly noticed clue to their meeting is a poem lodged in Lady Mary's copy of Marie Madeleine de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves. This novel ( about a married woman who heroically resists illicit love) dated from 1678 , but this was a new edition, printed at Paris in 1741. Pinned inside it --probably by the owner - is a scrap of paper bearing fourteen lines of Italian verse in Algarotti's hand. The poem is clearly original and occasional. It essays a definition of love : learnedly, mock -scientifically, personally. It opens , ' True love is , my fair lady, if you don't know it — myself I learned it from you - the child of who knows what ...' It ends , ' True love , Maria, is what one guesses it to be.'
2) BTW, the Hervey biography ends thusly, after our main character is dead, in an "where are they now?" epilogue about the rest of the cast:
Lady Mary, after her four-year sojourn in Avignon , settled in the Venetian province of Brescia ; and in 1756 she moved to Venice and resumed her correspondence with Algarotti, this time as a witty bel esprit instead of a lovesick matron . “When we meet,' she wrote to him in 1758 (four years before her own death ), ‘the Memory of Lord Hervey shall be celebrated ; his Gentle Shade will be pleas'd in Elysium with our Gratitude . I am insensible to every thing but the remembrance of those few Freinds that have been dear to me.' Perhaps, then, Hervey enjoys eternity in the company of the enchanting Algarotti and the witty Lady Mary.
Last line of the biography. Leaving aside the part where this might indeed be Hervey's idea of paradise, and even Lady Mary's, but probably not Algarotti's, it's a neat note to go out on. Both Halsband and Grundy agree that the Lady Mary & Lord Hervey friendship was one of the most important in their respective lives to them. It surviving the crisis to it which the initial triangle situation with Algarotti was (when Hervey did see Lady Mary as a rival and wasn't yet sure which way Algarotti would go) was a great relief to both biographers.
3) On Lady Mary and Lord Hervey remaining friends despite the love triangle:
They were among each other's favourite people and loyal through a great number of ordeals (among other things, being attacked by the foremost English poet of their age, Alexander Pope, who first praised Lady Mary to the skies and then turned against her - whether or not it was because he finally did dare a pass and she laughed at him is debated - with a vengeance), and it would have been a shame to lose this over the most fickle of swans. Something remarkable: Lady Mary got attacked not just by Pope but later Horace Walpole wiht every accusation misogyny can inspire, including, of course, sexual licence. And yet neither of them when accusing her of having lovers, including younger lovers, names Algarotti. Her unrequited love for him and Algarotti ending up with Hervey (for a while) would have been a gift to satirists hating both her and Hervey. And Algarotti was such a prominent figure at that point: the story would have been eaten up with relish by a wide audience, especially since it ended up with Lady Mary humiliated. And yet - neither Pope, who accuses Lady Mary of "poxing her lovers" (which is a nasty pun on her inoculation work against small pox, mixing it with the accusation of inflicting STD) nor Walpole, who when she returned near the end of her life to die in England said she shold be quaranteened because she was sure to be so dirty, ever caught wind of the Algarotti situation. Which must mean that both Hervey (who usually loved to gossip) and Algarotti kept absolutely mum.
4) Algarotti's Il Newtonianismo per le Dame:
Lady Mary's biographer Grundy, btw, argues that Lady Mary as well as Émilie might have influenced Algarotti's depiction, and points out that lacking erotic enthusiasm for her or not, he did take her serious as an author and did learn from her (not the other way around):
Of the poems of hers which he kept, in her handwriting or his own, several are not original but extemporary adaptations, either from others or from herself. This does not mean that he sapped her originality but that she was thinking and writing on the spur of the moment, as she often did in topical writing. Now she was mediating for him the English poetic tradition. Among other things this was a tutor-pupil relationship, with the woman, unusually, as tutor. Algarotti kept the erotic addresses, from woman to man and from man to woman, which she crafted out of Lansdowne or Addison ( who in turn was just then drawing on Horace). He also kept a political epigram which she had already adapted and updated , and a dramatic speech she wrote for Brutus, justifying
his murder of Caesar. (...)
During his months in England Algarotti was finishing his version of Newton's Optics ( published at Milan, late 1737). Lady Mary (an experienced collaborator) and Hervey listened , praised, and offered linguistic and other finishing touches. Algarotti set the scientist - narrator's dialogues with his noble, brilliant, and beautiful female pupil in an arbour or private Parnassus, which reflects both Lady Mary's Twickenham garden and Voltaire's Cirey.
The pupil is a marchesa (Emilie du Châtelet's title). She speaks strongly against war, and is called a citizen of the world (as Lady Mary called herself). Early in volume ii comes a more unmistakable allusion. To prove the utility of science to women, the narrator cites inoculation, which now preserves the charms of English as well as of Circassian beauties.
On the scale of tributes to Lady Mary's inoculation work, this ranks somewhere between The Plain Dealer's gallantry and Voltaire's heroinizing. Algarotti does not name her; he stresses the saving of beauty, not of life; and he takes no note of her engagement in social struggle. However, his treatise won from her a commendatory poem which he placed first in the volume when the Newtonanismo was reprinted at Naples, 1739 .
