Guest Post: Best Friends Turned Enemies by Jo Willets

Today it is a pleasure to welcome author Jo Willet to the blog. Jo has just released the biography The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu: Scientist and Feminist. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is remembered for her pioneering advocacy of smallpox inoculation – her 3 year-old daughter being the first westerner to be inoculated against the killer disease.

Mary Wortley Montagu and Alexander Pope – Best Friends turned Enemies

A friendship between a woman and a man which starts off as just that but develops into something altogether more dangerous – despite #MeToo heightening our awareness, these kinds of problems have been with us since time immemorial. The aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the poet Alexander Pope had just such a relationship. For both of them, it was one of the most powerful and ultimately the most damaging of their lives.