Once, and but once, his heedless youth was bit, And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.
—Alexander Pope

“A passionate man,” said Stendhal, “is seldom witty.” Building on that aphorism, one might go on to say that a witty man is rarely handsome. A beautiful woman who, along with being witty, is also commonsensical is rarest of all. They do, however, turn up, perhaps every century or two. Such a woman was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She lived (1689–1762) in a cold and hard age, where beauty helped immensely, wit was a useful weapon, common sense a necessity, and only passion an embarrassment.

Lady Mary was born with every advantage, real and artificial, and a number of true disadvantages. One distinct advantage was that she was an aristocrat, the daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, Marquis of Dorchester, afterwards Duke of Kingston. Her secure place among the well-born was a fact she never forgot, nor was she above using it against her social, if not intellectual, inferiors. Of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, with both of whom she had had a falling out, she remarked that they were “entitled by their birth and fortune to be only a couple of link-boys”—that is, boys hired to carry torches to light the way for others.

In later years, writing to her daughter, Lady Bute, whose husband was prime minister under George II, she noted that English writers, being generally low-born themselves, attempt to “represent people of quality as