Biography
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English writer, poet, letter writer, and intellectual of the eighteenth century. Born Mary Pierrepont in 1689, she developed a strong interest in classical learning from an early age. In 1716 she accompanied her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, to Constantinople, where he served as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Her experiences there inspired her celebrated Turkish Embassy Letters and the poem Constantinople, written in Pera in January 1718. While in the Ottoman Empire, she witnessed the practice of smallpox inoculation and later became an important advocate for its introduction in Britain. Her writing is marked by wit, independence, social observation, and criticism of social conventions. She died on August 21, 1762.
