Literary Experiment and Female Infamy: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu fictionalizes her life

This article relates to one entitled “Medical Advance and Female Fame,” which also originated as a CSECS plenary paper in St. John’s, NL (1992). That dealt with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s role in a great public event, the arrival in western medicine of the practice of securing immunity against smallpox by inoculation with the actual virus (technically called variolation). This was the first time that scientific medicine, as distinct from folk practice, had produced immunity through antibodies: a significant step in the Whig narrative of progress which is the history of western medicine. For Montagu inoculation brought celebrity as the saviour of hundreds of lives. She was hailed in print by such luminaries as Voltaire and honoured with a memorial plaque in Lichfield Cathedral. The mark she made in the public sphere was just the highest point in a high-profile career. She had been toasted by the male elite of the Kit-Cat Club at eight and had repeatedly made the newspapers: with her elopement, her court satires, and her choosing to share her husband’s ambassadorial journey to Turkey instead of waiting for him at home. Apart from headline moments, she became well-known for unpublished writings. On her last return to England from abroad she was lionized by upper-class Londoners anxious for a glimpse of her. Female fame indeed. But Montagu’s moment of glory also luridly highlighted the downside of female fame. Hailed as a saviour by some, she was attacked by the anti-inoculation faction as more or less a mass murderer. She feared that the medical witnesses inspecting her recently-inoculated small daughter might sabotage the experiment by secretly harming the child. She was badgered for support by nervous parents who faced family opposition in their desire to inoculate their children. She was abused in print in viciously gendered language by those who believed inoculation to be against nature or against the will of God. Female infamy, indeed. The glittering thread of fame in Lady Mary’s life story is interwoven with a darker one of concealment, secrecy, willed invisibility. Her actual life was full of concealments, from anonymous and pseudonymous publication to her humiliating, unrequited love for Francesco Algarotti. This secret apparently remained unsuspected by any except her friend Lord Hervey. From her and this one confidant the secret evoked extraordinary riddling dialogues, in which these two love-rivals hold the pen alternately and discuss with startling frankness their mutual attempts to hide the truth about themselves while extracting the truth about the other. Secrets and writing went together in Montagu’s life as in her literary output. This article, in contrast to that of 1994, addresses the darker strand, the dread of ill fame. It centres on one of Montagu’s finest literary works: an anti-romance, a philosophic tale in the style of Candide or Rasselas, a coded autobiography, an experimental fiction which would surely have altered the course of the English novel if it had been as widely read as her travel letters or her poetry. I shall read it in terms suggested by Nancy K. Miller as something which is “there, but in opposition to the ‘already read’, [the] ‘sous lu’, cut off from the kind of historical and metacritical life that characterizes the works of dominant [traditions]” – traditions in the plural, that is: those of early prose fiction both in English and in French. This work of Montagu’s was and is almost unknown. It’s untitled, composed not in her native language but in French, not in one of the genres she admired (like poetry, history, drama) but in the low-status form of romance, apparently written in …