by Mary Wortley
Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu, a beautiful, frankly spoken liberal feminist, would probably have fitted better into the late twentieth century than the early eighteenth, which was when she lived.
She wrote the Turkish Embassy Letters (1716–1718) in Istanbul and on the vast de facto European Grand Tour she was obliged to make with her husband en route to and from Turkey, where Lord Wortley served as George I’s ambassador to the Sublime Porte. In Istanbul she bore a daughter, became a pioneer of inoculation against smallpox, adopted local dress (including the veil) and made a study of Ottoman culture and upper-class customs, becoming the first Christian woman ever to gain social éntrée to a Turkish harem.
Her journeys in Europe carried her through Holland, Germany, Bohemia, Austria and war-ravaged Hungary, the last of which she traversed in the dead of winter before passing with her husband and their entourage into the Ottoman-occupied Balkans. Her return to England, three years later, was made by sea via the Dardanelles, the Troad and Tunis to Genoa, and thence by land through Italy and France. As an ambassador’s wife, she was introduced at court in every country they passed through.
Lady Mary’s letters are fascinating travelogues, each given over to matters she thinks suited to that particular friend or relation, yet of far more general interest to modern readers. They are informative (at times scholarly), full of mature perception and judgement, often sardonic yet always amusing and agreeable. Interleaved with them in this edition are a few letters from one of her correspondents – none other than Alexander Pope. The poet and Lady Mary were at first friends (he admired her writing, among other things) and later enemies (after she laughingly refused his advances; the Victorian painter William Frith later painted the scene as he imagined it). I don’t know whether it was before her departure for Istanbul or after her return to London that Pope thus made a fool of himself, but her letters to him are friendly if mildly sarcastic, while his are importunate, though only for her attention and approval, and somewhat bitter.
The volume in which I read this book also contained a number of Lady Mary’s poems. I only read a few of these. They were very accomplished from a technical and aesthetic point and display clearly the personality and values of the woman who wrote them. One or two, I thought, were very good. On the whole, though, I preferred the letters.
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