Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Wortley Montagu

Calling reading "cheap" sounds, at first, like a backhanded compliment. Montagu is being sharper than that. In an era when leisure was a class marker and "entertainment" often meant spectacle, salons, cards, theater, or gossip - all social, all performative, all costly in money or reputation - she praises a pleasure that quietly resists those economies. "Cheap" here isn't crude; it's radically efficient. A book delivers transport, intimacy, instruction, and provocation for a fraction of what polite society pays to be amused.

The line’s real argument sits in the pairing: cheap and lasting. Montagu, a worldly aristocrat who moved through courts and capitals, knew how quickly fashionable thrills decay. Reading, by contrast, keeps accruing value. You can return to it, re-argue with it, grow past it, or find it newly relevant because you have changed. The pleasure isn't just in the story or the information; it's in the ongoing relationship between a mind and a text. That’s why it lasts: it’s renewable.

There's also a sly, almost moral edge. By framing reading as entertainment rather than duty, she rescues it from piety and pedantry - then outperforms both. The subtext is aspirational but pointed: if you claim refinement, here is the most accessible way to earn it. Montagu is selling literacy as a kind of quiet independence, especially potent for women whose freedoms were otherwise curated and constrained. Reading costs little, and it answers to no host.