Her father was Evelyn Pierrepoint, later Duke of Kingston; her mother, Lady Mary Fielding, died when she was young; educated by a governess, but taught herself Latin. In 1706 met Edward Wortley, a politician eleven years older; when her father tried to marry her off (to the Hon. Clotworthy Skeffington) the couple eloped on the wedding eve (1712). Lived in London, where they had Court connections; had two children, but the marriage faded away. Knew ‘everybody’; Pope’s Eloise to Abelard was directed at her, though he later turned against her (reputedly because she mocked his advances) and attacked her viciously – ‘From furious Sappho scarce a milder fate, / P—x’d by her love, or libell’d by her hate’. In 1715 small-pox ruined her beauty, leaving her no eyelashes and a deeply pitted skin. Visited Constantinople (and the Sultan’s seraglio) as Ambassador’s wife; wrote verses and a political periodical. In 1736 became infatuated with a bisexual 24-year-old Italian, Francesco Algarotti, pursuing him (unsuccessfully) to Europe, travelling with thirteen cases, including furniture and some five hundred books. For the next twenty years lived abroad, returning only on her husband’s death. Horace Walpole described her as ‘not handsome, had a wild staring eye, was much marked with the smallpox, which she endeavoured to conceal by filling up the depressions with white paint’.
Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (eds.), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems, and Simplicity, a Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977); Robert Halsband, The Life of Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956).