The Turkish Embassy Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ed. by Teresa Hefferna (review)

This edition of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters has solved a problem for me. I have always wanted a solidly researched and well annotated paperback edition of the letters, with notes at the bottom of the page (rather than those cumbersome endnotes), a good introduction, and a wide-ranging bibliography. Not only does this edition have these, it offers an excellent apparatus that includes a chronology of events related to the life of Montagu, and more than one hundred pages of additional information, ranging from selections of other letters by her, to a discussion of her role in the history of smallpox inoculation, and brief excerpts illustrating European views of Islam. There are also selections from the letters of Pope and from various “Orientalist Fictions” that help to situate her work in the larger framework of European-Ottoman encounter and exchange.

Montagu’s letters can be studied in the context of “intercultural” relations between a well-educated and wealthy woman from the British upper class and Ottoman women, who were actually seen and subsequently described by her (unlike Paul Rycaut in the previous century who never saw the women but still went ahead and gave a detailed description of the harem).

The letters can also be looked at for their place in the history of English writings about the East, in the light of the numerous allusions that Montagu makes to earlier travelers (George Sandys in particular) and to the whole Graeco-Roman tradition that informed such writings. In their introduction, the editors raise the important question about her Orientalistic strain: she owned a copy of the Arabian Nights and although she invoked classical authors widely, she could not resist the influence of that fantastical world of medieval Arabic imagination. Her letters also open up the investigation of the place of epistolary writings by English women—and male novelists who wrote letters by women (Richardson’s Pamela, 1740).

At the same time, the letters present a “modern” woman, breaking away from traditions, venturing out into the world on her own, and then writing about her experience. Few earlier English women had written about an adventure that took her away from the comfort of her home into foreign regions and cultures, both of which were nearly always described in elite and popular culture in an adversarial fashion. Long before, there had been Margery Kempe and her pilgrimages, and in seventeenth-century New England, there were Mary Rowlandson and other women captives among the Indians, and there were the women writers who were captured in North Africa (see Khalid Bekkaoui’s collection of White Women Captives in North Africa). It would be fascinating to juxtapose Montagu with these travelers—and to examine the way in which a woman of wealth and status saw the world differently from women of low social status and limited financial means. Social class is crucial in reading The Turkish Letters—as Ms. Heffernan and Mr. O’Quinn correctly emphasize.

I will use it in my courses.