Vulgar History Podcast
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (with Sean Lusk, author of A Woman of Opinion)
November 20, 2024
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster and today we are talking with author Sean Lusk, both about his recent novel A Woman of Opinion, as well as the woman of opinion herself, the main character in his book, who is a real-life historical woman named Mary Wortley Montagu. And I think it’s very fortuitous, I didn’t plan this intentionally, but last week we were talking about Princess Caraboo, who was an 18th-century white, English woman who pretended to be from an exotic faraway eastern land and part of the way she did that was to wear a sort of piece of fabric on her head pretending it was a turban. Mary Wortley Montagu was a white, British woman who actually spent some time in the Ottoman Empire in what is now Turkey. She went there and she’s like, “These clothes are great. These clothes are comfortable.” And she came back and she kind of kept dressing like that. So, kind of, two different kinds… You don’t often see a woman from the Regency era wearing this sort of turban hat. You do see people like Caroline of Brunswick would wear a sort of stylized hat. But anyway, Mary Wortley Montagu went to Turkey, came back and just kept dressing like she was in Turkey and that’s part of what I was like, “Oh, she’s interesting.”
But also, long-time listeners of this podcast might remember in early 2020, I did a series of pandemic special mini episodes, just looking at pandemics in the past and the history of how people lived in those times. And Mary Wortley Montagu came up in one of those episodes because I did an episode about the history of inoculation, which we’re going to talk about today, but it’s a predecessor or a similar thing to vaccination. And it was a practice, inoculation, that was happening in lots of places east of England, basically, all across Asia and lots of places on that side of the world. But it wasn’t known about or practiced in Western Europe until Mary Wortley Montagu went there and learned about it and was like, “It would be great if people didn’t constantly die of smallpox, let’s bring this back to England,” and she fought hard and then she did. And so, that’s part of what I knew about Mary Wortley Montagu. And then, when I saw that Sean had written this book, I was excited to learn more about her.
I wanted to say something about historical fiction in general, because I do look at historical fiction to learn about real people from real history, and I also look at nonfiction. I think it’s interesting and valuable to look at both. And just while I was thinking about this, I came across someone was quoting a 2017 essay by the late Hilary Mantel, who’s talking about why she became a historical novelist. Part of it, she says she was struggling at first when she started doing it, just thinking like, well, she wants to be historically accurate, but then like, how much space is there in that, like… If you want to write a novel, you need to make some stuff up, but she was saying what she felt comfortable making up was kind of how people thought, why they made the decisions they made, and then you kind of base it on the evidence that you have around. Like, you could look up to see, like, what colour wallpaper would they have had? And you could research maybe to find what colour wallpaper they would have had. Anyway, I’m just going to read you a quote from this article that I’m going to also link to in the show notes as well. She says, “Some readers are deeply suspicious of historical fiction.” And she says that because people often would ask her, she has passed away now, but I’m sure Sean gets asked this as well and other historical novelists, “How much is true? How much did you make up?” And she says:
Readers say that by its nature, historical fiction is misleading. But I argue that a reader knows the nature of the contract. When you choose a novel to tell you about the past, you are putting in brackets the historical accounts — which may or may not agree with each other — and actively requesting a subjective interpretation. You are not buying a replica, or even a faithful photographic reproduction — you are buying a painting with the brush strokes left in. To the historian, the reader says, “Take this document, object, person – tell me what it means.” To the novelist, they say, “Now tell me what else it means.”
The novelist knows her place. She works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dreamed, where politics meets psychology, where private and public meet.
And so, I thought that it was just so timely to read that around the same time I was talking with Sean, because he is really, as you’re going to hear, he’s so excited about Mary Wortley Montagu’s story and wanted people to know about her, and he’s doing it through historical fiction. And I think sometimes people don’t understand the importance of historical fiction to really make people care about a historical figure they might not know about already. With all that being said, please enjoy this conversation with Sean Lusk about the iconic Mary Wortley Montagu.
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Sean Lusk, whose recent novel is A Woman of Opinion, which is a novel about the real-life person, Mary Wortley Montagu. Welcome, Sean.
Sean: Oh, thank you very much, Ann. It’s lovely to be here.
Ann: I’m really excited to have you here to talk about her. We were just talking a bit before I started recording, but back in 2020 when COVID was just starting, I was sort of reassuring myself by reading about the past pandemics and epidemics and vaccinations and things, and Mary’s name came up. So, I knew a little bit about her. And then when I saw that you had this book, I thought, “Oh! I would love to learn more about her.” So, can you tell me how you first came to know about her? Do you remember?
Sean: Well, my first novel is called The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley, and it has a fictional character in it called Aunt Frances. And when my editor was asking for another book that had some kind of link to the novel, I went back and looked at where I’d got this idea of Aunt Frances from, and it was from Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish embassy letters which incredibly, is still in print, they’ve been in print for, like, 250 years. They were the letters she wrote when she was the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople between 1716 and ‘18. And they’re sensational, and her voice is there. She kind of curated those letters all her life, and they weren’t published during her lifetime. And then, we might get to talk about it, there was an incredible tussle after her death. Her daughter tried to suppress them because she thought they were scandalous, but they were published and they were an absolute sensation and sold like hotcakes because they were full of, you know, stories from the Turkish harem, not lascivious, but actually feminist. You know, she was saying ”Women have great equality when they don’t have any clothes on and they’re all together and there are no men in the room,” and talking about Islam and so on. So, they were incredibly, kind of, enlightened and progressive and I think in themselves contributed to some of the enthusiasm in the late 18th and early 19th centuries about the Orient and Orientalism altogether.
But you mentioned the pandemic and of course, her great gift to the world really was inoculation. You know, people credit Edward Jenner, quite rightly, for vaccination, but that came in the 1790s. Mary brought inoculation against smallpox back from Turkey to Britain in 1720 and then fought like hell to get it adopted, was vilified and criticized for being a woman bringing foreign practices. It almost broke her really, the degree of humiliation she was subjected to, but she was a woman who fought like crazy and eventually it was adopted. Edward Jenner himself at the age of 8 was inoculated against smallpox; he might not have lived if he hadn’t been.
Ann: Well, and in your book— Well, that’s another question I guess, the choice to make it, well you’re a novelist, so of course you made it a fictional novel but you clearly did so much research. But in the book and I presume in her life as well, like, she’s touched by smallpox, people in her family she knows die, she herself gets it, so it’s a very personal crusade for her.
Sean: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s a bit of a conceit in the novel that she secretly, she never reveals this, she’s a very courageous woman, which she was, but that she’s kind of fearful of death and she’s fearful that anyone she loves is going to die because her mother died when she was 3, her brother died when he was very young, he died at the age of 21. Her best friend Anne, who was Edward Wortley Montagu’s sister and therefore the link for her to, as she did, she eloped with Edward to get out of the prospect of a horrible marriage to a foolish man by the improbable name.
Ann: Yeah, the name. Say the name.
Sean: The name is Clotworthy Skeffington. You can hardly believe it, it was the man her father wanted her to marry, he was due to inherit an Irish viscountcy, but she thought he was foolish and had no wish to marry him. But I honestly, because it’s a novel, I thought maybe I should change this name. It sounds so, kind of, improbable and like a Dickens name, you know, I ought to change it, but in the end, I thought, “No, it’s the truth, I’ll keep it.”
But just to come to your question, but you know, why a novel? Mary kept a diary all her life and that diary must have been absolutely sensational. In the novel, I sort of imagined the things that might have been in the diary, she knew George I, George II, she knew George I’s mistresses, she knew George II’s incredible wife, Caroline of Ansbach, genuine, big 18th-century intellectual, she knew Voltaire, she had this incredible friendship coming, you know, frenemy with Alexander Pope. She knew everyone, really, that was important in the first half of the 18th century and undoubtedly wrote about them in a very frank way in her diaries.
When she was on her deathbed, she got her daughter, she had a very odd relationship with both her children, which you might come onto, but she sort of got her daughter, who was much more straight-laced, and by that time was married to the 18th century’s first, effectively, the first Tory prime minister, to swear with her life that she’d protect these diaries, which her daughter, also called Mary, did, but could not bear the thought of them ever being published. So, her daughter destroyed the diaries just before her own death. So, we don’t have her diaries, which is a tragedy for history, but is a great gift to a novelist [laughs] because I was able to, you know, invent and fill in loads of gaps, which, although there are some very fine biographies, including by a retired professor who lives in Edmonton, Canada, Isobel Grundy, who I kept in touch with closely, a wonderful, wonderful woman. Though, you know, the things I made up and any mistakes are very much my own, and Isobel sort of certainly helped me with some of the historical record and pointed me towards some of the sources as well.
Ann: Yeah, I would think— Because I have read your book, I very much enjoyed it, and I could tell how much research went into it, because well, things like the name Clotworthy Skeffington, you know, it’s like, this can’t be made up.
But I do think it’s interesting to have a story like this, where you said like the Turkish letters, those are there, you can read them, so you can get a sense of her voice and what she was like, but then these great gaps, where you know, like from these biographies, what she did or where she went, but you have to imagine, well, what did she feel about that? And why did she make that choice? So, that’s, I don’t know, kind of the best of both worlds, for you to have some facts to cling onto, but just these vast swaths where you can just make things up.
Sean: Well, those are the novels, you know, I love Ann. Obviously, I love reading historical fiction, and I love writing it, and you know, the writers I really admire, like the late great Hilary Mantel, for instance, you know, they’re very, very soundly based historically but she reimagines history, she can make us reappraise characters, as she did with Thomas Cromwell in the Wolf Hall trilogy, and you know, that’s something a novel can do; both things are important. We need really good histories written by historians who are professionals. And I think we need novels because they allow us in a way to create an empathy with those characters from the past, or you know, contemporary novels with people that are, you know, invented, but are recognizably people we can relate to, and we can get inside their thoughts. That’s what novels do if they’re good.
Ann: Yeah, so you mentioned that… So, she went to the Ottoman Empire— Actually, let’s talk about her husband. So, she was able to avoid marrying Clotworthy Skeffington by running off with Mr. Wortley Montagu, and it was because of his job that she was able to go to Turkey where she learned about smallpox, inoculation, and things like that. So, what do you know about her husband and that marriage?
Sean: Well, she and her sister, you know, as quite young girls, she loved her sister, Frances, but her sister Frances, was a much more conventional, less spirited. You know, Mary was just full of utter confidence, really, that she could do what she wanted, and she was determined not to be constrained as a woman, and she was the eldest child of, you know, her father was the Earl of Kingston and he, in fact, was promoted after Queen Anne’s death, when George I came, the Hanoverians came, you know, he eventually became the Duke of Kingston and was this very powerful figure. Now, Mary, had she been born a man, you know, she would have been in the House of Lords and she, I think, almost certainly would have been, you know, Prime Minister, maybe straight after Robert Walpole, say. So, I think she was frustrated that she couldn’t play that role, and she was also, I mean, she thought a lot of men were fools, and she wasn’t wrong. [chuckles]
Ann: I was going to say, she wasn’t wrong.
Sean: And she also thought quite a lot of men were smart and interesting. Her father, and she herself, to some extent, became part of this circle, it was called the Kit-Cat Club, which sounds a bit like the Hellfire Club or something. They were really, it was a Whig almost-conspiracy because during the James II, and Queen Mary, William and Mary rule, and so on, and Queen Anne, they were still Stuarts. The Whigs weren’t in full control anyway, until the Hanoverians came in. And so, she knew these men, Joseph Addison, and there were a number of other really prominent intellectuals in this group, and she definitely fancied herself from the age of about 14, she was writing. She taught herself Latin, and she was writing and exchanging letters with these intellectuals who were 10, and 20, and 30 years older than her. And when her father tried to marry her off to… Yes! Say it again!
Ann: Clotworthy Skeffington. [chuckles]
Sean: She was determined to escape. And as you’ve read the novel, you know, I obviously imagined quite a lot of these things though we have some evidence of them from her letters. She and her sister, I mean, I think it was mainly Mary, had created a sort of taxonomy of the male sex, that men were either hell, heaven, or limbo. So, I kind of imagine that she probably had a few liaisons, both with men and women, I think, as a young woman. How far those went, we don’t really know, and I speculate on that in the novel.
But Edward was always, I think, for Mary, a “Limbo” in the sense that, you know, she probably, she certainly admired him, and he certainly admired her. And their letters, you know, their real letters are this sort of blowing hot and cold, and I sort of try and capture some of that in the novel. But she could see that her father was going to get her married to the awful Clotworthy, and so she eloped, and it was an absolute elopement. I mean, she was ready to jump out of a window and escape, and effectively, that’s what she did, and married him.
He was already a member of parliament. He wasn’t a very skilled politician, Edward, he was a bit of a prig. And again, we have some evidence, and again, I sort of am able to sort of, you know, allow this to flow in the novel, that Mary manipulated him to some extent into trying to get a ministerial job once Walpole and that lot came to power. How far Mary maneuvered him into the job in the Ottoman Empire, I don’t know, so I’m allowed to speculate in the novel. But, you know, I like to think that she pushed him into it. She wanted to travel; she wanted adventures. She wanted it more than he did, really. And boy, did she get it! You know, she just loved travelling. She had this incredible gift of both infuriating people, and she created enemies, but also, she must have had this incredible wit and charm and intelligence, which drew people to her and she was just able to make these friendships with the rich and powerful with incredible ease, which I think she thought her husband should be able to make better use of but he didn’t. And he didn’t last very long as ambassador because he wasn’t, I think, a very good diplomat.
Ann: So, he was kind of, I mean, I don’t want to say… It’s not a full-on, like, Lady Macbeth scenario because it wasn’t murderous at all, but very much just kind of like she was kind of steering that ship, I think.
Sean: Yeah. I mean, she was such a fascinating figure — well obviously, I think so — because she was very conflicted. You know, later in life, although she always pretended she wasn’t interested in politics, it’s absolute rubbish because we know she was very interested and she definitely was always trying to sort of tell it with what he should be doing. But she always said, “No, no, no.” You know, she was conscious that although she’d married a commoner, Edward never got a title, but she was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she was the daughter of a Duke, and she was conscious of her position which is why almost everything she wrote during her lifetime, lots of poetry, plays, and so on, were published anonymously. And then, you know, in those days, a lot of stuff was pirated and stolen, which led to some terrible conflicts, especially with Alexander Pope, which we might come on to some of the arguments there.
But I mean… So, she was sort of both, you know, from her political views that we learn later, she was definitely an egalitarian, she believed in women’s rights fiercely, she believed in worker’s rights, and yet she was also quite a snob. And she also detested the way women didn’t have control of their own property. She suggested something which is so brilliant, a septennial marriage act she thought should be introduced — it was maybe slightly tongue-in-cheek — that all marriages should dissolve after seven years automatically and if the parties wanted them to continue, they had to just, you know, say they wanted it to resume. And this was her idea to get women out of unhappy and abusive marriages, which were, of course, all too commonplace. And so, you know, yeah, she had that very smart mind, she wasn’t going to be constrained.
So, her son, Edward — a limited number of names, unfortunately — so her son, Edward, when he was what he was born in 1712, so he’d be about 4 years old when they got to Constantinople and, you know, she saw what was happening with smallpox inoculation. She saw how no one, there were other diseases, the plague, particularly in Constantinople, or Istanbul, as we call it now, no one had pockmarks. And she wondered why, and she went out and found out how they did it, the inoculation. She didn’t tell Edward she was having her son inoculated, she waited for him to be out of town and then had him inoculated. And once she was sure he was okay, she wrote to Edward, who was away, and said, “By the way, I’ve had our son inoculated against smallpox.” So, she definitely had absolutely her own mind and wasn’t going to be controlled by Edward at any point in her life.
Ann: Can you talk a bit, like, we’re on the smallpox inoculation. So, she learned that she saw the success of this in Constantinople, she came back to England and started lobbying that people should do this there. So, you mentioned just briefly, but just get into how people were so mad at her but then she was able to convince the Queen to inoculate the royal children. So, like, how did she do this?
Sean: Well, she knew… So, actually, Caroline of Ansbach, who was, as I mentioned, quite an intellectual herself, was Princess of Wales at the time. So, George I was still King, and as with all the Hanoverians, generation by generation, the children hated the father and they were terrible relationships. So, George I and George II had a terrible relationship, and George II and Caroline had a terrible relationship with their son, Frederick, who actually died before he became king so George III was George II’s grandson. But she, you know, she went to court, she was known in court, and I think because she was a smart woman, she and Caroline had a good relationship. And some people in the Church of England, some people in the Royal College of Physicians were very, very disdainful of the idea of inoculation.
And Mary was, I mean, she was stubborn and fearless and took no prisoners, which is why I think she both alienated— She wasn’t always the most emollient [chuckles] in her approach. But there was a big outbreak, and smallpox outbreaks came every couple of years really and sometimes they killed a lot of older people, and sometimes they tended to kill a lot of children. And the outbreak, in I think it was 1721, so she’d actually been back for a couple years, was really killing lots and lots of young children. And at that point she thought, “Right, I’ve got to have my daughter, Mary, inoculated.” So, little Edward was the first sort of British citizen ever to be inoculated, and we think her daughter, Mary, was probably the first child to be inoculated in Britain on British soil. So, landmark cases. There were supporters in the Royal College of Physicians as well, and people had begun to hear and read about the notion of inoculation but Mary was just going ahead.
So, she was going around aristocratic houses, speaking to, you know, fellow aristocrats and persuading them to have this done. But I think she knew that she would need some royal approval. Caroline therefore got the permission of the father, because they were royal, they were princesses, got the permission of the king to have the royal princesses inoculated initially, not the princes, interestingly. But before that would be done, of course, there was always this interesting science amongst the Hanoverians. So, first of all, six inmates on death row at Newgate Prison were told that they would be pardoned if they agreed to be inoculated, which of course they did, readily. I mean, they’re going to die… [Ann laughs] And Mary, I mean, in my novel, I have Mary actually present. Now, I guess she probably didn’t go into Newgate Prison to witness it being done. But they were absolutely inoculated, there were various luminaries present. And of course, they all recovered because it was a pretty safe, not as safe as vaccination, but pretty safe procedure. And so, they walked free, which of course, has given me a great idea for another novel. [both laugh] And indeed, I’ve written it so it’ll be coming soon. But even then, the king didn’t agree to have the princesses inoculated until all the orphans of the parish, it was St. James, were inoculated. Can you imagine? I mean, the ethics committee these days might have had a problem. But of course, it was actually a great thing to do. And at that point, the princesses were inoculated and that really boosted inoculation.
But, you know, there were setbacks, there were occasional deaths because, of course, it’s a live virus and so people would be infectious for, I think, typically about 10 days to two weeks, depending. So, there were some cases of inoculation where people became infected and very ill or died. So, they were rare, but they did happen. Anyway, Mary moved on after, you know, a few years of that campaigning.
You know, her views on medicine were, again, so advanced. She always thought bleeding was a very weird thing to do. Well, of course, that carried on as a practice for another 150 years or whatever. But she always thought, you know, she thought it was ridiculous that people were being bled. So, she kind of had this instinctive idea of what were sensible treatments and what weren’t and she was easily 150 years ahead of her time, really.
Ann: Can you explain the kind of inoculation that she was advocating for? Like, the process?
Sean: Yeah. So, she’d seen it in Constantinople, Istanbul. The story is that the process of inoculation sort of came from probably China or somewhere in the Far East on the great caravan, the great, sort of, spice routes and so on that would come through Turkey. And the Circassian women were reputed to be the most beautiful women in the world and quite a lot of them were used as sort of concubines and so on. So, as usual, there’s a sort of rather deep and distasteful capitalist theory behind things and it seems that they were perhaps amongst the first to be inoculated so that their looks wouldn’t be spoiled. So, when Mary sort of heard about this or noticed that actually it had become a very widespread practice in Constantinople and beyond, and it tends to be Greek women. So, you know, in those days, Constantinople, Istanbul would be about would be probably a third Greek, a third, what we might, you know, Muslim, Turkish, and a third others as well, quite a big, big Jewish community back in those days as well. And basically, they all rubbed along pretty well alongside each other and it seemed to be Greek women who did this.
So, Mary went along and observed what happened. And these Greek women would carry live virus extracted from someone who had the smallpox pustules. They carried this live virus, they would put a cut in the arm and pour it into the cut, and that was the way. They didn’t have hypodermic needles. They weren’t invented until (inconveniently for my cover design) 1850 or so. I probably got some early cover designs where there’s a hypodermic needle. The cover is absolutely gorgeous of this book, I don’t think I’ve got one with it. But anyway, they didn’t use a hypodermic. We had to say, “Oh no, that wouldn’t be right. The hypodermic wasn’t invented for another 100, 150 years.” So, it’s just a scratch or a lancet, sort of, as we call it now
. It was done with a lancet by the surgeon that she persuaded. So, Mary then sort of hectored a poor, Charles Maitland, his name was, the Embassy surgeon to conduct the practice. He was very uneasy with it, because in those days, surgeons were, were still sort of barber surgeons, they’d emerged from the sort of barber industry of sort of beard-cutting and so on, and they were sort of below physicians. It was a long time before— You know, the Royal College of Physicians was very much on top, and the Royal College of Surgeons came along quite a bit later. So, he was quite nervous that physicians would disapprove of him carrying out this practice. But anyway, Mary got her way and so that was how it was done.
Ann: Well, and I want to talk also about her writing. You mentioned the thing with Alexander Pope. Can you explain who Alexander Pope was?
Sean: Yeah. Quite a lot of your listeners will know that Alexander Pope was, you know, an incredibly famous poet of the early 18th century, like a kind of superstar poet and one of the most famous men in England at the time. The Rape of the Lock is sort of famously his, he did a lot of the translations of The Iliad and so on. So, he was hugely admired and, you know, people that might have done a sort of, you know, English literature degree might have come— I personally always found Pope’s poetry quite, sort of… I don’t know, rather, there’s a sort of pomposity about it. But it’s very much this sort of classicist approach. He was very, very admired.
Mary and he got on; they met first in about, probably, 1715 or so, only about a year before she went off to Turkey, and they really hit it off. And she was writing poetry, he was writing poetry, they certainly wrote poetry together. But what Mary could also do is parody, you know, and I think she saw that sometimes Pope was much too pompous. He was at a disadvantage. Again, Pope was, he was probably about four-foot-six or so and he suffered from scoliosis or something very similar to scoliosis. So, he had quite a severe physical disability. He was also a Roman Catholic, which at the time restricted him somewhat and he wasn’t allowed to go to court, for instance, and things like that, being a Catholic. So, she would go out to Twickenham to see him and they got on very, very well. The Victorians, who was, she was still quite a well-known figure of Victorian times and written about a lot, implied that they must have had a romantic relationship, which I think is extremely unlikely for all sorts of reasons which we can go into. But partly because Pope was always very flirtatious with all his female friends but was always very cautious about committing. So, it’s very unlikely that he would have sort of thrown his hat, as it were, at Mary.
And then when she went to Turkey, it was a long journey and she met lots of very interesting people on the way. You know, she wrote these very, very interesting letters to him, he wrote letters to her, he’d send her his poetry. And it was, you know, in the novel I suggest that it was her parody in one of his poems that was really the cause of their falling out. Because the other theories for why they had this falling out a few years after she returned to England are to do with, you know, him declaring love for her, as to say that’s unlikely. Or also crazy stories that she borrowed bed linen from him and they were returned to him unwashed, which is ridiculous because why would, you know, they had servants, they’d never get involved in something like that. But that was a story the Victorians put around. So, I think it was almost certainly kind of an intellectual dispute and that’s how I sort of put it.
But I mean, when I say they fell out, my god, they fell out. Because they were very, very well-known figures. I don’t know, you know, I’m trying to think of a mod— But they were A-list celebrities of their time. So, if you imagine two real A-list celebrities in North America now, having some spectacular kind of clash, that’s how it was. He started writing very demeaning poetry about her. She being her, you know, she responded with very critical, rude, scurrilous poetry about him and this went on as a sort of cycle of violence. You know, he implied that she was promiscuous, slovenly, a lesbian. And, you know, it wasn’t what you’d say about a friend, let’s say anyway, not in public.
Ann: Where I first heard about her was the inoculation stuff but she lived like quite a long life after that and a lot of it was this was writing was what she was doing. This rivalry really sort of defined that era of her life.
Sean: Yeah, sort of her from her thirties, let’s say, yeah, through her thirties and early forties, she lost a lot of friends because of it. Of course, Pope had a big circle of friends and he would set people against her. So, her circle of friends was diminishing once she was, let’s say in her early forties.
She’d also had a very difficult time so her daughter… I mean, yeah, there’s so much to say about it. So, she got involved in the Jacobite risings, both in the 1715 rising and then the 1745 rising, the famous rising that finished with Culloden. Her involvement with the 1715 rising, the Jacobite rising, which was, you know, the old pretender as it was. So, that was the Stuarts who were trying to, who said they had a better claim on the throne than the Hanoverians. Her younger sister, Frances, their father, I think Frances being more malleable than Mary decided that a good marriage for Frances would be with the Earl of Mar, John Erskine, he’d been a minister in the Queen Anne government. Mary thought this was a terrible idea; he was quite a lot older than Frances, he already had a son by marriage, his first wife had died. But Mary strongly— Well, first of all, he was a Tory. Mary detested Tories. She hated Tories all her life and yet she sort of kept finding them popping up around her. She was an ardent Whig and she thought he was a Tory, and she suspected that he had Jacobite sympathies. And she was right because within a few months really of her sister’s marriage, the Earl of Mar, John Erskine, rode north to Scotland and led the unsuccessful rising against George I, trying to restore the Stuarts to the throne. So, that was the first thing. Then, of course, she went off to Turkey anyway, so she couldn’t really help her sister very much. John Erskine was sent into exile.
Roll the story on a little bit and eventually, Frances goes into exile in Paris to be with her husband and the Jacobite court moved between Paris, Rome, and Avignon, that becomes important as well later in Mary’s story. John Erskine is a terrible husband; they have no money because he’s been kicked out of the country. Erskine then stupidly decides to become a kind of double agent and betrays the Stuarts to King George I to try and get a bit of money. It’s awful. And Frances becomes really mentally ill and eventually, Mary gets her back to England to protect her. Now, women were often subjected to what they called “lunacy inquisitions” in those days and women who were determined not to be controlled by their husbands often were said by their husbands and his family to be mad. That was a way of them controlling their money. In this case, it was quite different.
Mary was determined to get her sister before a lunacy inquisition and then to speak for her and make sure, and that was to stop Erskine’s family getting Frances’s money because her father, of course, had put certain amounts of money away, which could be done in marriage contracts, both for her and for any offspring and she did have a daughter. But that too was a huge mental strain on Mary, and she got very heavily criticized. Her enemies said she was just after her sister’s money, which was extremely unfair. So, she had a pretty tough time of it, and I think was probably suffering from depression, she was probably perimenopausal, there were lots going on in her forties and then something amazing happened! [chuckles] Which is Mary being Mary.
She and Edward had lived apart pretty much their whole marriages, really, but they respected each other, they remained friends. And then Mary, at the age of 48, met a young Italian called Francesco Algarotti. He was 24 years old and she fell in love. She utterly, utterly, for the first time in her life really, threw caution to the wind. Her letters from that time, which were lost for 200 years pretty much, reveal how passionately in love she was with Francesco, who had come to Britain to meet various people who could help him write an Italian translation of Newton’s work, that’s what he was doing here. There were plenty of things that should have told Mary that Francesco was gay, but I think Mary, I mean, she wasn’t bothered. Her best friend really, Lord John Hervey, was gay and she certainly was not concerned about that sort of thing. It was tough to be gay back in the early 18th century but if you’re an aristocrat, you can get away with quite a lot more. I think Mary just, I don’t know, she just saw in Francesco the man, the love of her life.
So, eventually, when he said, you know, “Come and meet me in Venice.” So, she left the country. She went to Venice, Francesco was not there. The reason he wasn’t there was because he was in Berlin schmoozing with Frederick the Great and almost certainly was his lover by that point. [chuckles] So, there’s so much you can see, you know, you almost couldn’t… truth is stranger than fiction. But Mary loved being in Venice, she found herself a celebrity in Venice. She loved going to the opera, she loved the dance, she was quite happy there, really until Francesco reappeared on the scene and invited her to come on a spying mission with him.
So, at that point in life, when she was about 50, in her early fifties, she kind of took up spying as a profession. As far as we know. The evidence of course is thin because it’s in the nature of spying, but in my novel, I certainly suggest that that’s what she was up to. There’s a little doubt that she was. And why she went to Avignon is hard to understand why, unless she wanted to spy on the Jacobite court, which by that time was sort of most, a lot of the time in Avignon, which is a Papal State. And so, she almost certainly was trying to warn the government back in London about the gathering storm, which turned into the Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite rising of 1745. So, a rich and full life, even up to that point, and there was sort of more to come. [chuckles]
Ann: I wanted to ask a question. I was just double-checking, well, I was just scrolling through some images of her, and this reminded me. Can we talk about the way that she dressed? There are several portraits of her, she’s dressed in a very Ottoman Empire style. Can you talk about that?
Sean: She certainly found Turkish dress more comfortable. Of course, Turkish women often wear the sort of pantaloons, the baggy silk trousers, which were clearly a lot easier to wear than some of the dresses that women were expected to wear, in terms of Western 18th-century dress with great hoops and so on. So yeah, she often would dress like that. She was a woman who did as she pleased a lot of the time, as far as she could. She would absolutely put on the right performance when she needed to impress or meet a queen, or a princess, or a king, or whatever, she would dress appropriately but we know that she dressed absolutely in Turkish dress a lot. And she was quite a performer as well, so she wanted to sort of create that.
But she believed, you know, so up to that point, there’s a lot of, you know, you could call it these days, you’d say it was anti-Islamic sentiment and she really countered that saying that there’s much to admire in Islam, there’s much that’s similar in, you know, Islam and Christianity, and people should understand Islam better. She was fascinated by that. How well she taught herself Turkish or Arabic, I’m not sure, but she certainly was very interested to be able to speak and study those languages. And she, I mean, very mischievously, because she was mischievous, she thought that women who were able to wear the veil and go about, effectively not be recognized, were absolutely able to have much more interesting social lives. I think she implied that they could have affairs because no— you know, which would be unimaginable in London because, of course, everyone would see where they were going. But she said, “A veiled woman can go about freely.” So, this was, you know, for an 18th-century British audience, it’s quite sensational news, and because she wrote so engagingly, I think it changed minds, or it certainly intrigued people and made people think again about some of their prejudices, which is another thing I really admire about her.
Ann: I have a question sort of on the same line. This is more just, I’m curious to know if this was your invention, or if this was based on something you read. There’s a part in your book where she’s going on a trip, and she just grabs one of her husband’s wigs to wear instead of her own. [chuckles]
Sean: Yes. Yeah, and actually, that’s a bit I quite often read out when I’m doing events because I think it sort of says a lot about her and captures it. Yes, and she borrows her husband’s heavy— So, this would be 1716, and in those days, the wigs that people wore tended to be brown or black and quite heavy and full-bottomed, unlike the later, sort of, powdered white wigs of the later 18th century. And, of course, men tended to wear wigs, and probably a big advantage over women who would often have their own hair, often done in very, very elaborate hairstyles, whereas men quite often shaved their hair very short because, of course, the problem was lice and nits and all that stuff, which were very hard to combat in those days. So, women must have had a problem with those things as well.
But in fact, women did sometimes wear the heavy-bottomed wig. So, although I’ve suggested this was something that only Mary did, and, you know, in the novel, it sort of tells you a bit about Mary’s character and how, you know, Edward’s infuriated with her for wearing the wig, which she put on because it was a windy day and they were going on a long journey. It wasn’t unheard of for women. You’ll sometimes see portraits of that time of women wearing what one might call a man’s, sort of, heavy wig, probably because they’d shaved their heads to get rid of lice, actually. That’s probably why they did it. But otherwise, you know, women would often have their own hair but in these incredibly elaborate hairstyles. Later in the novel, I talk a bit about the absurd hairstyles, when she goes to the Austrian court in Vienna in about 1716 and meets the Empress, you know, the women there would have these six-foot high hairdos with bird’s nests and things stuck in them, which she thought was perfectly ridiculous.
Ann: But it seems a lot quicker to just pop a wig on and get going. [laughs]
Sean: Absolutely. There’s something to be said for it.
Ann: So, her legacy. You’ve mentioned a few times, just that she’s not remembered now for who she was. I’m presuming there’s a lack of statues, plaques.
Sean: Totally. You know, there’s two streets named for her in the world; they’re both in Italy, where she’s better known, I think, than in Britain. And despite the fact that there’ve been, you know, a couple of good, recent biographies about Mary, you know, when I sort of mentioned the name to the room, there’s a few people go, “Oh yeah,” sort of vaguely heard of her. A very small number of people that sort of share the passion I have for her.
To me, she’s such a symbol of the way… You know, I’m conscious I’m a man saying this, and there’s a lot of women that will say, “For goodness sakes, we know this,” but so many women have been written out of history by, you know, largely by male historians, you know, the Bluestockings who came a little bit later, Elizabeth Montagu and, you know, the other incredible women, women historians, women poets, women writers from the mid-18th century, who were, I think, at the time, more or less seen as, you know, as equals. You know, Samuel Johnson, the great writer of the dictionary and so on, admired a lot of those women’s writing.
But again, I think it’s the Victorians in particular— And one of the things I noticed, you know, haven’t gone to some of the original sources about Mary is not only that the, you know, the Victorian biographers writing about her, not only was she sort of diminished, they feminized. It was another thing that was done a lot. Mary was a thinker, and an intellectual, and a writer. But, you know, if you look at Lord Wharncliffe, he’s got a scrapbook, he cut out her letters and stuck them in the scrapbook, which the Victorians did this a lot with sort of primary sources, annoyingly. He was Mary’s great-grandson. But you can see that he picks out a letter that has interesting things about, you know, political issues or issues of war and peace in it and he picks out that she went to the theatre and met a friend or, you know, she wore a pretty dress that night or served tea. This was done a lot. I think it was a way for Victorian men to sort of just feminize and limit the sort of scope that women had. So, you know, I think all of those things, as with so many other amazing women, particularly from the 18th century, I think that’s one of the reasons they’re so forgotten.
But I am, I’m campaigning to get a blue plaque put up for a place in York called Middlethorpe Hall, where I’m going in a couple of weeks to an event. That’s really the only house that still stands that she lived in so therefore, I hope we can get a blue plaque put up for her. But I’d love to see a statue put up for her. There should be. You know, one of her close friends was Voltaire, the great French philosopher and writer. He lived in exile in London from 1726 to 1728 and he sought out Mary and, you know, she definitely helped him with some of his writing, they corresponded a lot. He went back to France, because he lived just across the border in Switzerland, because he was always in trouble with the French authorities, and he lived a very, very long, long, long life. And when Mary died, he wrote, “This was a woman for all the world.” And I thought, “Yes, absolutely. That’s true.” Voltaire admired her and to me, she’s kind of Britain’s forgotten Voltaire, I think, in a way. But she was a woman and she deserves to be better known. I feel that so strongly.
Ann: Well, and I find that well, obviously, this is a women’s history podcast but there are so many people who were so famous, or so well-known, or so regarded when they were alive, and it’s always surprising to me to think, but no one’s heard of them now. Where it’s like, but they were so famous. And it seems like she’s someone like that as well where while she was alive, people knew who she was and then it’s just the legacy afterwards… The Victorians are to blame for a lot of this erasure, I think. They really wanted to reframe, especially British English history as like, “Well, there were never really women who were like this,” because if there were women like this, then women in the Victorian era might want to emulate that and they didn’t want that. So, you just kind of have to suppress that part of history.
Sean: Yeah, I think, you know, I definitely think, you know, we, the patriarchy, we talk, but absolutely! I think women in the mid-18th century were knocking on the doors of the institutions. You know, you’ve got women, astronomers, women, scientists, so many women in the 18th century. Now, they were there in the 19th century, too, and some of them made it but boy, it was hard for them. And actually, women in the 18th century should have sort of knocked down some of the, you know, were so close to getting women into the Royal Society. I don’t know, maybe you can imagine women being in parliament, you know, at least 100 years before they were, and women getting the vote.
I think several things went on. I think there was a bit of a counter— I think the French Revolution was part of the problem, you know, that in a sense, there was so much chaos and bloodshed in the aftermath of the French Revolution, that it made it hard for radicals, whether they’re men or women. Because of course, you know, after Mary Wortley Montagu, you know, you had… Oh my, I’ve got a moment’s brain freeze, Mary Shelley’s mother…
Ann: Wollstonecraft! Mary Wollstonecraft.
Sean: Amazing Mary Wollstonecraft. But everything became a bit more difficult from about 1789, ‘90 onwards, to make that sort of progress. Although interestingly, there was definitely a swing in favour of more conservative sentiment from about the mid-18th century onwards, because when Mary came back to London, after living effectively in exile for 20 years, you know, I think she sensed that she, and I have a sense of this in the novel, she sensed that she was kind of a bit of a relic, you know, that she was a novelty, and her views, which were still very radical, had gone out of fashion. Fashion had changed, and we see, goodness knows, we see that things swing. You think there’s so much progress, and then we have this right now, don’t we, that rights are under assault again, and I think it’s not a steady sort of course of progress. So, I think that’s one thing.
The other thing, and you have this with, well, the great Catherine Macaulay, and, you know, some of those Bluestockings. If a woman was considered (particularly by Victorian moral standards, or late 18th century moral standards), to have done something scandalous, then, you know, their reputation was really, really damaged in a way that it was very unfair. So, I think Catherine Macaulay, you know, after her first husband died, married a man much younger than herself, and she was, you know, one of the greatest historians, and recognized as such in the 18th century. Mary, of course, you know, I don’t know how many people knew about her, about her affair with Algarotti, but there were certainly implications that she had other relationships with men younger than her, and that was an absolute no-no. Men could absolutely— I mean, nothing’s changed. [chuckles] Men could still marry or have relationships with women 20, 30 years younger than them, and it might raise an eyebrow. A woman does it, did it then, it was an absolute outrage. Even now, of course, if a woman has a relationship with a much younger man, it’s regarded as very strange still.
I think, you know, all these things have combined to just shroud their reputation. So, I think it’s incumbent on women writers and male writers to try and, you know, make sure some of these women from history are better remembered.
Ann: And so, your book, A Woman of Opinion, do you know, where is it available? Like, what parts of the world at this point?
Sean: Well, at this point, inconveniently, it’s Britain and the Commonwealth, and not yet in North America or Canada, which is frustrating. There are probably ways of getting it. So, my first novel is available in North America and Canada through Union Square, but this novel published by Doubleday and Penguin, and it’ll be coming in Britain in paperback in May, so it’s published in hardback in July. So, there are probably ways of finding it, but at the moment, it’s not published in North America, which is very frustrating. But maybe there will be a North American publisher listening who thinks, “Yes!”
Ann: Hopefully, hopefully! I will say as a person in Canada, like, there’s ways you can order British books online, yeah.
Sean: Yeah. So, hopefully, people will get a hold of it. And yeah, and hopefully there’ll be a North American publisher soon.
Ann: And you were saying you have this event coming up at the house or the place where you want to get the plaque. So, you have a website and that’s where you announce all your different readings and things you have.
Sean: SeanLusk.com. But it’s very easy if you just Google me and I’m on Instagram and what used to be Twitter as well. So, I could be found easily enough. There is a Canadian Sean Lusk actually, who’s a singer, but I’m the other Sean Lusk.
Ann: [laughs] The writer, not the singer, as far as I know. I mean, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. It’s just so delightful, always, for me to talk to somebody who’s so passionate about a historical figure like this. And I mean, of course, you are! Like, everything you’ve just said, what a fascinating person.
Sean: Yeah, utterly. And well, thank you for doing what you do, Ann, and you know, helping us to celebrate these great, great women. There are so many of them!
Ann: Well, I mean, best of luck with this book. I trust and hope that there is a North American publisher out there who’s going to snap up those rights any minute now.
Sean: Yeah, they need to get on my agent. [laughs]
Ann: Exactly. Thank you so much!
Sean: Pleasure. Thank you, Ann.
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Hey, it’s me again. I’m here. If you’re a new listener, actually welcome to the new listeners. I know a bunch of people just followed me on Threads and Bluesky. You might hear in the background a reassuring purring sound, that is my co-host Hepburn, who is my 18-year-old cat and she likes to purr. Anyway, what I wanted to say… So, this episode takes place in the 18th century, right? Like, there’s some overlap with what we’ve been talking about with Marie Antoinette, all the revolutions that happened in the 18th century, Mary Wortley Montagu is a bit earlier than that. But I just wanted to say, because I just came across this update.
So, one of the things I said when I first announced the season we’re in right now, the How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Antoinette?, was that she lived during this time of great societal change and crisis and chaos and all these various revolutions that happened. And we kind of are now too! I just read this on, I want to say Threads, which is suddenly a popping social media thing. Anyway, this is from somebody called @TheAscensionQueen, who is an astrology girlie. I mentioned in the very first episode of this season about Pluto moving into Aquarius but like, it’s just happened. It’s just happened yesterday. So, “Pluto moved into Aquarius on November 19th,” That’s one day before you hear this episode.
The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was around 200 years ago from 1778 to 1798 with significant historical events. The American Revolutionary War, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment era. All I’m saying is the shifts that will take place over the next 20 years are going to be monumental.
And I wanted to mention that because [stutters] … Everything! I’m recording this after the results of the American election, and a lot of people are really having some understandable feelings these days. So, it just kind of, like I said at the beginning, when COVID first started and there’s all the stay-at-home orders and stuff, I was just like, I found comfort in reading about history and people who got through extremely challenging, scary times and what that was like for them. And I find it interesting that we’re doing a whole season — and the season is going long, it’s going to go on for quite a while, not for 20 years, but we’ll see — about people who were living during also a time of great uncertainty. It’s interesting that that just happened right before this specific episode came out.
Anyway, I’m Ann Foster, this is Vulgar History. Next week on the podcast, actually, we’re going to have, could not be more timely. It’s going to be an episode with another special guest, and we’re going to be talking about the sluts and shrews who were in American history. So, stay tuned for that next week. Also, if you want to keep up with me in this podcast, I’m on Threads, I’m on Bluesky, I’m on Instagram, all @VulgarHistoryPod. On Instagram, my DMs are open so you can contact me there if you’d like. You can also contact me, if you’d like, if you go to VulgarHistory.com, there’s a contact form there and those emails go right to me as well.
Also, if you want to keep up with me and what I’m doing… First of all, I have a Substack newsletter where every other week, or sometimes more often if I’m feeling particularly motivated to write something else, that’s where I’m posting. I don’t know, the same as this podcast, but it’s written. It’s, like, feminist comedy think pieces, I guess. I’ve been writing about women who I’m defining as “difficult women” who were seen in their time as difficult women, some people think of them that way now. I think they’re people who are difficult to wrap your head around how we should think about them. Recently, I wrote about the painter, Artemisia Gentileschi and actually, there was a lot of feedback from people who were excited about that and wondering if I was going to do a podcast episode about her. And please note, I will now because that friend is into her as I am. Anyway, that’s at Substack or VulgarHistory.Substack.com. What you do there is if you subscribe, then just like every other week when I write a little piece, it shows up in your inbox, or there’s also a Substack app where you can, I don’t know, you can find that and all the other Substack subscriptions there. Allison Epstein has a Substack, Amanda Matta has a Substack, lots of people that you’ve heard me talk with have Substacks there as well.
Also, the best way to keep up with me and what’s on my mind without having to worry about algorithms, maybe or maybe not sharing it with you, is on my Patreon, which you can join for free. So, you can go there either on in your browser, you go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, or you can go to the Patreon app, either way, I’m still Ann Foster Writer. And so, if you follow me there for free, I just share articles I find interesting, value-added content about the episodes, like paintings of people that we talked about and stuff like that. If you want to get a little bit more from Patreon, what you can do is pledge $1 a month. And for that, you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History, as well as ad-free access to the whole back catalogues. You can binge all the episodes without the ad breaks in the middle.
If you pledge at least $5 or more a month, you get all that and also bonus episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre, there’s a huge archive of all the episodes of that that I’ve done with friends of the podcast, Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson, where we talk about costume dramas. And then also, So This Asshole, where I talk about men from history who are shitty. And also The Aftershow or sometimes some of the guests we go along. And so, I put the bonus content there in The Aftershow on Patreon. Anyway, so again, if you go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, you can join any of those levels. I should also mention, also at the $5 level, that’s where you can join our Discord, which is like a big group chat where we’re all just sharing memes, sharing jokes, talking about, you know, costume dramas and Vulgar History episodes and providing emotional support for each other during these unprecedented times, sharing pictures of our cats, lots of stuff like that.
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And yeah, next week, we’re coming at you with another book author talk. That’s another thing: I like to recommend books and I like to read books, and this is a time of year where people like to find books to read or books to give to each other and I’m here to recommend lots of books to you. Anyway, until next time, my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Click here to buy a copy of A Woman of Opinion.
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Hilary Mantel’s essay on the importance of historical fiction.
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