Lady Mary Pierrepont had contracted smallpox in December 1715; she survived, but while she was ill someone circulated the satirical “court eclogues” she had been writing.
One of the poems was read as an attack on Caroline, Princess of Wales, in spite of the fact that the "attack" was voiced by a character who was herself heavily satirized.
Disgraced and unable to return to court, Lady Mary leaves London in August 1716 to accompany her husband on his embassy to Istanbul.
Mary was born in London on May 15, 1689; her baptism took place on May 26 at St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden.
She is a daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull, and his first wife, Lady Mary Fielding.
Her mother had had three more children before dying in 1692.
The children were raised by their Pierrepont grandmother until Mary was nine.
Lady Mary was then passed to the care of her father upon her grandmother's death.
She began her education in her father's home.
Family holdings were extensive, including Thoresby Hall and Holme Pierrepont Hall in Nottinghamshire, and a house in West Dean in Wiltshire.
She used the library in her father’s mansion, Thoresby Hall in the Dukeries of Nottinghamshire, to “steal” her education, teaching herself Latin.
Thoresby Hall has one of England's finest private libraries, which she loves; it will be lost when the building burns in 1744.
Lady Mary had by fourteen written two books filled with poems, a brief epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance modeled after Aphra Behn's Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684).
She also corresponded with two bishops, Thomas Tenison and Gilbert Burnet, who supplemented the instructions of a governess she despised.
Lady Mary will later describe her governess' teachings as "the worst in the world".
By 1710, she had had b two possible suitors to choose from: Edward Wortley Montagu and Clotworthy Skeffington.
Mary's father, now Marquess of Dorchester, had rejected Wortley Montagu as a prospect because he refused to entail his estate on a possible heir.
Her father had pressured her to marry Clotworthy Skeffington, heir to an Irish peerage.
Although Lady Mary had fallen in love with another unidentified man, in order to avoid marriage to Skeffington, she had eloped with Wortley.
They were married on August 23, 1712 in Salisbury.
The early years of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's married life had been spent in seclusion in the country.
She had a son, Edward Wortley Montagu the younger, on May 16, 1713, in London.
Her husband had become Member of Parliament for Westminster in 1715, and shortly afterwards had been made a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury.
When Lady Mary joined him in London, her wit and beauty soon made her a prominent figure at court.
She is among the society of George I and the Prince of Wales, and counts among her friends Molly Skerritt, Lady Walpole, John, Lord Hervey, Mary Astell, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Antonio Schinella Conti.
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