Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Goes Strolling

Abstract

“Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Goes Strolling” reflects on my process of writing, self-directing, and performing a forty-five-minute monologue, Lady in a Veil. The monologue foregrounds the life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her writing, and her introduction to Britain of the Turkish way of smallpox inoculation, which she championed from 1721—over seventy years before Jenner's trials with vaccination. In the following reflection, I describe the provenance and rationale of Lady in a Veil, its accidental timeliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the choices I made as a writer, an eighteenth-century scholar, a feminist, and a performer of a certain age. I also consider the effect of audiences and audience feedback on the monologue's development, along with the challenges and benefits of transferring a solo show, designed for, and performed in, historic houses and libraries, to Zoom.