Remember my unalterable maxim, where we love we always have something to say; consequently my pen never tires.
-A letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her daughter.
{Rotterdam, 1761.}
A weary and unusually dressed woman gives two large, leatherbound albums filled with handwritten pages to the Reverend Benjamin Sowden. I am dragging my ragged remnant of life back to England,1 she says, dispose of these however you see fit…}
The woman was returning to her homeland after receiving news of her husband’s death. She hadn’t seen him for 22 years - not since moving to the Continent in 1739 in pursuit of a dashing and much younger Italian man. But she had children in England, and things to take care of.
She was 72 years old, and dying of breast cancer.
