I am going to tell you a thing, that will make you wish yourself here. Mary was particularly impressed by the local community’s attentiveness to smallpox. While some contemporaries dismissed her work as “trite observations,” scholars today regard her writing as some of the most important text written solely for a female audience. She wrote of all-female spaces in the Ottoman Empire and the conversations she overheard there. While living in Turkey, Mary chronicled life within the Ottoman Empire in 52 letters of scenes and conversations as recorded from her own diaries. Soon enough, Mary had an audience for her wit and insight. Her travel letters described vivid scenes of people outside London and pages circulated amongst her women friends back home. When the King appointed her husband ambassador, Mary joined him on his excursions. She spent tons of time alone, satirizing London society in a series of long poems (Alexander Pope thought they were hilarious, especially her skewering of Jonathan Swift) and planning epic travels around the word. She survived the disease, but the experience forever scarred her - physically and emotionally.įollowing the illness, Lady Mary and her politician husband drifted apart - him, into his courtly society of polite pleasantries her, into a world of books and poetry and, later, travel writing. In 1705, then just a 16-year-old newlywed, an attack of smallpox destroyed Lady Mary Montagu’s legendary beauty.
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