How Libels Take Hold

“Pope Makes Love To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu” – William Frith (1852). Google Art Project.

My mother used to relate, with relish, that when Lady Mary was scolded at some London social occasion for having dirty hands, she replied, “You should see my feet.”

Like all scandalous statements, this one is impossible to prove or disprove. Hearsay, sometimes passed down for three hundred years, sticks—especially if it is negative, and especially if it adheres to a woman. I have seen a good deal of it when writing my latest, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke. The stories that stick to her legacy are almost always petty, vindictive and negative.

Interesting…

As the biographer Stacy Schiff answered Thursday night when asked about her latest, a biography of Cleopatra, “What did Cleopatra look like?” (the predictable question): “She wasn’t beautiful. She was extremely intelligent and competent, running her enormous kingdom. Intelligence is much more frightening in a woman than beauty.” I’ve seen this borne out on many occasions.

I might have said, had I been older when my mother launched her comment about Lady Mary, “Why does it matter if her hands or her feet were dirty? Look at what she accomplished”—a revelatory series of letters, and the introduction into Europe of a successful inoculation for smallpox.

My monologue, based on her account of this achievement, is included here, read by an extraordinarily accomplished actor.

But, as I contemplate writing more about Lady Mary, it’s not the inoculation that fascinates me but her withstanding of decades of abuse from the well-recognized British poet, Alexander Pope. Her flight from England and all her friends and family to spend her old age in Italy was at least partly the result of his persecution.

The account of the pivotal scene is contained in this painting by Alexander Firth. Pope, who was disfigured by a humpback, miscalculated when he began to try to make fervent love to Lady Mary—and she laughed.

From this sprang his verses of vilification.

I’m interested in this painting. Lady Mary is in the bloom of her youth, before she was disfigured by smallpox, at that time in England without a cure. And she is really laughing, while Pope, bent with humiliation and nascent anger (his hump discreetly hidden) is bitterly offended and will soon seek revenge.

Was her laughter such a dire mistake? And even today, are we women in danger when we laugh at men?

In Women, My Family 20 Favorites of 2020 Lady Mary Wortley Montague