Despite discouragement from friends that feared for her safety, she accompanied her husband to Turkey and wrote an extraordinary series of letters that recorded her experiences as a traveller and her impressions of Ottoman culture and society.
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). In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. 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. The Turkish Embassy Letters essays are academic essays for citation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont) was an English aristocrat and woman of letters.
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