In aligning Lady Mary with Aaron Hill and David Jones, I just want to suggest that they all had an openness to Ottoman culture that isn’t present in all of their contemporaries.
There is too much talk about clothes and childbearing and not enough about food and politics, but I can't expect everyone to be interested in exactly the things I am.ĮDIT: Per my review of Irene, I am copypasting in a little bit of something I write for class that deals with Turkish Embassy Letters in greater detail than my review above. I like all the classical tidbits as well. Also her efforts with the language and poetry, the way she always gets in a dig at the Catholics, and her fulsome descriptions of the ladies she visits,their banquets and joie de vivre. Lots to like here: her generous attitude toward the oriental Other, extending even to "they might actually be doing things a lot better than us in many ways" (inoculations freedom of womanity-this has obviously changed, but it is certainly worth pointing out to the people who think there is something intrinsically anti-woman about Islam). This selection contains sixteen of Lady Mary's Turkish Embassy Letters, as they came to be known, addressed her sister, Lady Mar (letters 1-5, 8, 9, 13, and 16), to Lady Rich (letters 6, 12 and 14), to the Abbot of _ (letters 7, 10, and 11), and to the Abbé (letter 15).Adventurous minx that she was, Lady Mary took off from England and spent a year in the Sultan's court with her husband, the new ambassador-or more accurately, she gallivanted around the whole Ottoman Empire while he was doing ambassador stuff. They were praised by Voltaire, and the Scottish author Tobias Smollett opined that they were "never equaled by any letter-writer of any sex, age or nation". Their posthumous publication in 1763 presented to the public the first secular work written by a European woman about the Muslim Orient. Lady Mary told the story of their voyage in a series of private letters full of vivid descriptions and unconventional commentary. In 1716, she accompanied her husband to Vienna, and thence to Adrianople (Edirne) and Constantinople, where he took up his post as the new British ambassador. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont) was an English aristocrat and woman of letters.
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