Lady Mary Wortley Montague

Mary Pierrepont was born in May of 1689, and she was baptized a few days later on the
26 of May at the St. Pauls Church in Convent Garden. She had 3 siblings before her mother
passed away in 1692. After her mother died Mary and her siblings went to stay with their
grandmother. She lived there until she turned nine years old. It was at this time that she began to
educate herself since girls were not allowed a classical education. She was teaching herself Latin
which was reserved for only men at that time. When she was 15 years old she had wrote two
albums full of poetry, an epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance novel. When Lady
Mary was about 21 she had two suitors to pick from, Edward Wortley Montagu and Clotworthy
Skeffington. Marys father pressured Mary to marry Clotworthy Skeffington, after refusing
Montagu. Mary in order to avoid marring Skeffington, Mary ran away with Edward Wortley
Montagu to secretly get married in August 1712.
In the early years of Mary and Montagus marriage, Lady Mary spent most of her time in
the country. On May 16th 1713, Mary gave birth to her first child Edward Wortley Montagu the
younger. Mary moved to London when her husband got a job there. In December of 1715 Mary
contracted smallpox, she survived. In 1717 Lady Marys husband became the ambassador to
Turkey, the whole family packs up and leaves for Constantinople. It was here that she wrote
Turkish Embassy Letters which were about Ottoman way of life and the inoculation of
smallpox. After this she moved back to London and tried to campaign for the inoculation of
smallpox. On April, 172l, the smallpox epidemic hit England. Before they left for Constantinople
Mary meet Alexander Pope. They wrote letters back and forth while she was away. When Pope
confessed his love, she laughed in his face, this started a bitter rivalry between the two of them.

After she went traveling different place talking to her daughter about the importance of
women education, she had died in England in January of 1962, just after her husband passed
away in 1761.