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 argueing 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 whalebonepetticoats 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'.)
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (I)
Date: 2020-09-07 05:56 pm (UTC)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 argueing 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 whalebonepetticoats 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'.)