[4] She was the eldest child of Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull (c.1655–1726), and his first wife Lady Mary Feilding (died 20 December 1697),[5][6] the only daughter of the third Earl of Denbigh (1640–1685).

"[7] Members of the newly formed Kit-Cat Club, a group of fashionable men, nominated her when she was seven years old, as the subject of their toast to the beauty of the season, and they had her name engraved on the glass goblet used for this purpose.

"[11] By 1705, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Mary Pierrepont had written two albums entitled "Poems, Songs &c" filled with poetry, a brief epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance modelled after Aphra Behn's Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684).

[16] Keeping up with their communication became harder when Lady Mary's father bought a house at Acton, a suburban village famous for its mineral springs.

[16] There, he left a note, revealing his love: "I should be overjoyed to hear your Beauty is very much impaired, could I be pleased with anything that would give you displeasure, for it would lessen the number of Admirers.

[16] Consequently, in order to convince Lady Mary's father, Edward thought of publishing the marriage contract in the Tatler, a British journal.

[18][clarification needed] However, Lady Mary broke her promise to tell Wortley about her rights and duty: "Had you had any real Affection for me, you would have long go applied yourself to him, from whose hand only you can receive me.

In a letter to Wortley, she wrote, "He [my father] will have a thousand plausible reasons for being irreconcilable, and 'tis very probable the world will be on his side...I shall come to you with only a night-gown and petticoat, and that is all you will get with me.

"[30] She also recorded a particularly amusing incident in which a group of Turkish women at a bath in Sofia, horrified by the sight of the stays she was wearing, exclaimed that "they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.

[34] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu defied convention, most memorably by promoting smallpox inoculation to Western medicine after witnessing it during her travels and stay in the Ottoman Empire.

[35] In the Ottoman Empire, she visited the women in their segregated zenanas, a house for Muslims and Hindus, making friends and learning about Turkish customs.

[34] Lady Mary was eager to spare her children, thus, in March 1718 she had her nearly five-year-old son, Edward, inoculated there with the help of Embassy surgeon Charles Maitland.

"[40] On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure, but encountered a great deal of resistance from the medical establishment,[3] because it was a folk treatment process.

"[41] Subsequently, Edward Jenner, who was 13 years old when Lady Mary died in 1762, developed the much safer technique of vaccination using cowpox instead of smallpox.

[1] Before starting for the East, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had met Alexander Pope, and during her Embassy travels with her husband, they wrote each other a series of letters.

[43] In response, Lord Gower tried to console Lady Mary: "I hope by her future conducts she will atone for her past, and that choice will prove more happy than you and Mr. Wortley expect.

"[43] In the same year, Lady Mary met and fell in love with Count Francesco Algarotti, who competed with an equally smitten John Hervey for her affections.

[35] She had a self-imposed exile because of her strained relationship with Edward[clarification needed], but her return made sense because she wanted to see her daughter and her grandchildren before she died.

[1] After arriving in London, Lady Mary rented a house in Great George Street, Hanover Square, and her daughter and grandchildren often visited her.

"Constantinople", written in January 1718, is a beautiful poem in heroic couplets describing Britain and Turkey through human history, and representing the states of mind "of knaves, coxcombs, the mob, and party zealous—all characteristic of the London of her time".

[59] In 1737 and 1738, Lady Mary published anonymously a political periodical called the Nonsense of Common-Sense, supporting the Robert Walpole government.

[35] Lady Mary wrote notable letters describing her travels through Europe and the Ottoman Empire; these appeared after her death in three volumes.

[71] Montagu, along with many others, including the freethinking scholar Henry Stubbe, celebrated Islam for what they saw as its rational approach to theology, for its strict monotheism, and for its teaching and practice around religious tolerance.

[72] In short, Montagu and other thinkers in this tradition saw Islam as a source of Enlightenment, as evidenced in her calling the Qur'an "the purest morality delivered in the very best language"[73] By comparison, Montagu dedicated large portions of the Turkish Embassy Letters to criticizing Catholic religious practices, particularly Catholic beliefs around sainthood, miracles, and religious relics, which she frequently excoriated.

In particular, Montagu staked a claim to the authority of women's writing, due to their ability to access private homes and female-only spaces where men were not permitted.

The letters themselves frequently draw attention to the fact that they present a different, and Montagu asserts more accurate description than that provided by previous (male) travellers: "You will perhaps be surpriz'd at an Account so different from what you have been entertained with by the common Voyage-writers who are very fond of speaking of what they don't know.

"[35] In general, Montagu dismisses the quality of European travel literature of the 18th century as nothing more than "trite observations...superficial...[of] boys [who] only remember where they met with the best wine or the prettiest women".

Montagu wrote many letters with positive descriptions of the various enslaved people that she saw in the elite circles of Istanbul, including eunuchs and large collections of serving and dancing girls dressed in expensive outfits.

[79] In one of her letters written back home, famously from the interior of a bath house, she dismisses the idea that slaves of the Ottoman elite should be figures to be pitied.

Such writers cited Montagu's assertion that women travellers could gain an intimate view of Turkish life that was not available to their male counterparts.