Book Review: Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Title: Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Author: Mary Wortley Montagu and Robert Halsband

Publisher: Penguin

Date: 1970

ISBN: 0-14-057026-8

Length: 301 pages plus index

Quote: “I don’t enjoin you to burn this letter, I know you will. ’Tis the first I ever writ to your sex and shall be the last.”

Rarely if ever has a resolution been so well broken. Lady Mary Pierrepont (daughter of the Earl of Kingston) defied her father to elope with Edward Wortley Montagu, to whom she “writ” the letter containing this famous falsehood. They travelled extensively together, and Lady Mary wrote vivid descriptions of their travels to everyone she knew, male and female.

I’ll admit that, much as I enjoy dipping into one of Lady Mary’s letters, I’m eager to part with the Penguin edition because of its cover. Penguin’s “trade” paperbacks include many fine books, but they are not well bound. The cover long ago detached itself from the book, and the cover drawing is probably accurate, though not particularly lifelike, and embarrassing in its frank ugliness. In any case, given a choice between a collection of anything “selected” by someone else and a complete collection, I’ll take the complete collection any day.

But the letters are fine examples of letter-writing as an art; most were written as thoughtfully as chapters in a book, so that, when printed in a book, they read very much like a book. We could all benefit from taking eighteenth century letter collections as role models.

In other ways Lady Mary was not much of a role model. After the drama of her elopement, she didn’t stay with Wortley Montagu after all. Observing local customs of adultery in the countries they visited, she quietly informed a few dozen of her best friends, including Wortley, all about how much she fancied a younger man, who was from Italy, and she thought she’d go to Italy for a few years and spend more time with him. She didn’t stay with the young Italian very long, but she did stay in Italy for more than twenty years. She was Europe’s first and best known promoter of vaccinations. She ate a high-fat, high-carb, low-fibre diet on which it was a wonder anyone survived, let alone a woman late in middle age who described herself as old. She was generous with praise of her friends’ good qualities, and equally generous with wisecracks about everything from their clothes to their personal secrets. She was vain, and spent a lot of her early-middle-age years expressing fear of being old. In short, like most writers, she was an imperfect mortal whose letters were fun to read.

Even in the eighteenth century most people’s letters are not much fun to read; they form the bases for the biographies of people who accomplished interesting things, but they’re too personal to have much meaning for anyone but the people to whom they were written. Lady Mary was of course capable of writing the lines of which ordinary letters are made, “My compliments to A, and blessing to B. I wrote to C. Have you received…?” but she had the unusual gifts, both of noticing and calling attention to things other than her and her reader’s selves—landscapes, people, fashions, books, philosophy—and of incorporating the personal details into letters in such a way that, three hundred years later, the personal passages in her letters make sense.