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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (15 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was an English aristocrat and writer. Lady Mary is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from Turkey, as wife to the British ambassador, which have been described by Billie Melman as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient”.

Early life


Lady Mary Pierrepont was born in London on 15 May 1689; her baptism took place on 26 May at St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden. She was a daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull, and his first wife, Lady Mary Fielding. As a pioneer of modern medicine, she was the first European who insisted on inoculation of her children of small doses of smallpox long before programmes of preventative medicine began, based on her own observational evidence of Turkish milkmaids similarly inoculated who recovered from the disease. Her mother had three more children before dying in 1692. The children were raised by their Pierrepont grandmother until Mary was 9. Lady Mary was then passed to the care of her father upon her grandmother's death. She began her education in her father's home. Family holdings were extensive, including Thoresby Hall and Holme Pierrepont Hall in Nottinghamshire, and a house in West Dean in Wiltshire. She used the library in her father’s mansion, Thoresby Hall in the Dukeries of Nottinghamshire, to “steal” her education, teaching herself Latin. Thoresby Hall had one of the finest private libraries in England, which she loved, but it was lost when the building burned in 1744. By about fourteen she had written two albums filled with poetry, a brief epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance modeled after Aphra Behn's Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684). She also apparently corresponded with two bishops, Thomas Tenison and Gilbert Burnet, who supplemented the instructions of a governess she despised. Lady Mary would later describe her governess' teachings as "the worst in the world".

References Bowles, Emily. "Barker, Jane." The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. Ed. Gary Day and Jack Lynch. Blackwell Publishing, 2015. Blackwell Reference Online 21 July 2015. Grundy, Isobel. "Barker, Jane (bap. 1652, d.1732)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. Web. Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Print. Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Print. Paston, George.Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times. London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907. Print. Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, Selected Letters, ed. Isobel Grundy, Penguin Classics, 1997. Print.

Hi Atika, This looks good. I would suggest that you include a section that lists her works (or collections of letters, like the Turkish letters, etc.). Also, could you find any images of her title pages to include? That might be nice to have. LesBrooks (talk) 02:56, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi Atika, Suggestions Kgocinsk (talk) 02:21, 28 November 2015 (UTC)kgocinsk I like that there are so many images available for the article, but, like Lesley, I would like to see an image, if possible, from an earlier publication of the letters. I also feel like some of the sections in the full article were slightly repetitive, so it may be good to make sure there is minimal overlap between each of the sections.