published in her lifetime, however, usually without her consent. In collaboration with Pope and poet John Gay she wroteSix Town Eclogues, satires of well-known society personalities. Montagu had no intention of publishing the work, but in 1716 three of the eclogues were pirated, with coy hints of their authorship, as Court Poems. The original grouping was later issued in Six Town Eclogues. With Some Other Poems (1747). Aside from the anonymously published pieces in The Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737-38) the only work Montagu intended for publication was Turkish Embassy Letters. The fifty-two letters in the collection are thought to be based in part on Montagu's real correspondence and in part on a journal she kept during her journey to and residence in Turkey. Due to popular demand, successive editions of Turkish Embassy Letters were augmented with Montagu's other, private, correspondence as it became available.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Montagu's letters have maintained scholarly interest both because they offer intimate biographical details and because of Montagu's ability to write witty, engaging, and informative prose. Montagu told her sister in 1726, "The last pleasure that fell in my way was Madam Sevigny's Letters; very pretty they are, but I assert without the least vanity that mine will be full as entertaining 40 years hence." Montagu's work was described by nineteenth-century critics as masculine due to the confidence, intelligence, and honesty apparent in her writing. Critics described some passages as too coarse for a woman writer, and warned that young ladies should avoid reading them. Because the letters are often so personal, Montagu herself has been the object of criticism, even into the twentieth century. Especially in the earlier part of the century, critics found Montagu's witty social gossip malicious, and interpreted their formal character as cold and lacking in genuine emotion. Feminist critics have generally embraced Montagu's concern for women's issues, as evidenced especially in her Turkish Embassy Letters.

SOURCE: Montagu, Mary Wortley. "Letter to Lady Mar (1 April 1717)." In The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. 1, edited by Robert Halsband, pp. 325-30. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

In the following letter, Montagu writes to Lady Mar about her experiences in Turkey, telling her about the Turkish dress she adopts.

I wish to God (dear Sister) that you was as regular in letting me have the pleasure of knowing what passes on your side of the Globe as I am carefull in endeavouring to amuse you by the Account of all I see that I think you care to hear of. You content your selfe with telling me over and over that the Town is very dull. It may possibly be dull to you when every day does not present you with something new, but for me that am in arrear at least 2 months news, all that seems very stale with you would be fresh and sweet here; pray let me into more particulars. I will try to awaken your Gratitude by giving you a full and true Relation of the Noveltys of this Place, none of which would surprize you more than a sight of my person as I am now in my Turkish Habit, thô I believe you would be of my Opinion that 'tis admirably becoming. I intend to send you my Picture; in the mean time accept of it here.

The first piece of my dresse is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes and conceal the legs more modestly than your Petticoats. They are of a thin rose colour damask brocaded with silver flowers, my shoes of white kid Leather embrodier'd with Gold. Over this hangs my Smock of a fine white silk Gause edg'd with Embrodiery. This smock has wide sleeves hanging halfe way down the Arm and is clos'd at the Neck with a diamond button, but the shape and colour of the bosom very well to be distinguish'd through it. The Antery is a wastcoat made close to the shape, of white and Gold Damask, with very long sleeves falling back and fring'd with deep Gold fringe, and should have Diamond or pearl Buttons. My Caftan of the same stuff with my Drawers is a robe exactly fited to my shape and reaching to my feet, with very long strait falling sleeves. Over this is the Girdle of about 4 fingers broad, which all that can afford have entirely of Diamonds or other precious stones. Those that will not be at that expence have it of exquisite Embrodiery on Satin, but it must be fasten'd before with a clasp of Di'monds. The Curdée is a loose Robe they throw off or put on according to the Weather, being of a rich Brocade (mine is green and Gold) either lin'd with Ermine or Sables; the sleeves reach very little below the Shoulders. The Headress is compos'd of a Cap call'd Talpock, which is in winter of fine velvet embrodier'd with pearls or Di'monds and in summer of a light shineing silver stuff. This is fix'd on one side of the Head, hanging a little way down with a Gold Tassel and bound on either with a circle of Di'monds (as I have seen several) or a rich embrodier'd Handkercheif. On the other side of the Head the Hair is laid flat, and here the Ladys are at Liberty to shew their fancys, some putting Flowers, others a plume of Heron's feathers, and, in short, what they please, but the most general fashion is a large Bouquet of Jewels made like natural flowers, that is, the buds of Pearl, the roses of different colour'd Rubys, the Jess'mines of Di'monds, Jonquils of Topazes, etc., so well set and enammell'd tis hard to imagine any thing of that kind so beautifull. The Hair hangs at its full length behind, divided into tresses braided with pearl or riband, which is allways in great Quantity.

I never saw in my Life so many fine heads of hair. I have counted 110 of these tresses of one Lady's, all natural; but it must be own'd that every Beauty is more common here than with us. 'Tis surprizing to see a young Woman that is not very handsome. They have naturally the most beautifull complexions in the World and generally large black Eyes. I can assure you with great Truth that the Court of England (thô I beleive it the fairest in Christendom) cannot shew so many Beautys as are under our Protection here. They generally shape their Eyebrows, and the Greeks and Turks have a custom of putting round their Eyes on the inside a black Tincture that, at a distance or by Candle-light, adds very much to the Blackness of them. I fancy many of our Ladys would be overjoy'd to know this Secret, but tis too visible by day. They dye their Nails rose colour; I own I cannot enough accustom my selfe to this fashion to find any Beauty in it.

As to their Morality or good Conduct, I can say like Arlequin, 'tis just as 'tis with you, and the Turkish Ladys don't commit one Sin the less for not being Christians. Now I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion or extreme Stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of 'em. Tis very easy to see they have more Liberty than we have, no Woman of what rank so ever being permitted to go in the streets without 2 muslins, one that covers her face all but her Eyes and another that hides the whole dress of her head and hangs halfe way down her back; and their Shapes are wholly conceal'd by a thing they call a Ferigée, which no Woman of any sort appears without. This has strait sleeves that reaches to their fingers ends and it laps all round 'em, not unlike a rideing hood. In Winter 'tis of Cloth, and in Summer, plain stuff or silk. You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great Lady from her Slave, and 'tis impossible for the most jealous Husband to know his Wife when he meets her, and no Man dare either touch or follow a Woman in the Street.

This perpetual Masquerade gives them entire Liberty of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery. The most usual method of Intrigue is to send an Appointment to the Lover to meet the Lady at a Jew's shop, which are as notoriously convenient as our Indian Houses, and yet even those that don't make that use of 'em do not scrupule to go to buy Pennorths and tumble over rich Goods, which are cheiffly to be found amongst that sort of people. The Great Ladys seldom let their Gallants know who they are, and 'tis so difficult to find it out that they can very seldom guess at her name they have corresponded with above halfe a year together. You may easily imagine the number of faithfull Wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from their Lovers' Indiscretion, since we see so many that have the courage to expose them selves to that in this World and all the threaten'd Punishment of the next, which is never preach'd to the Turkish Damsels. Neither have they much to apprehend from the resentment of their Husbands, those Ladys that are rich having all their money in their own hands, which they take with 'em upon a divorce with an addition which he is oblig'd to give 'em. Upon the Whole, I look upon the Turkish Women as the only free people in the Empire. The very Divan pays a respect to 'em, and the Grand Signor himselfe, when a Bassa is executed, never violates the priveleges of the Haram (or Women's apartment) which remains unsearch'd entire to the Widow. They are Queens of their slaves, which the Husband has no permission so much as to look upon, except it be an old Woman or 2 that his Lady chuses. 'Tis true their Law permits them 4 Wives, but there is no Instance of a Man of Quality that makes use of this Liberty, or of a Woman of Rank that would suffer it. When a Husband happens to be inconstant (as those things will happen) he keeps his mistrisse in a House apart and visits her as privately as he can, just as tis with you. Amongst all the great men here I only know the Tefterdar (i.e. Treasurer) that keeps a number of she slaves for his own use (that is, on his own side of the House, for a slave once given to serve a Lady is entirely at her disposal) and he is spoke of as a Libertine, or what we should call a Rake, and his Wife won't see him, thô she continues to live in his house.

Thus you see, dear Sister, the manners of Mankind doe not differ so widely as our voyage Writers would make us beleive. Perhaps it would be more entertaining to add a few surprizing customs of my own Invention, but nothing seems to me so agreable as truth, and I beleive nothing so acceptable to you. I conclude with repeating the great Truth of my being, Dear Sister, etc.

SOURCE: Montagu, Mary Wortley. "Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge] to her Husband." In Essays and Poems, with Simplicity, A Comedy, edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, pp. 230-32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

In the following poem, written in 1724, Montagu adopts the voice of Mary Yonge, an heiress whose acrimonious divorce and financial settlement caused a stir in London society. Mr. Yonge was a well-known adulterer, and Mrs. Yonge separated from him prior to their divorce. During the separation, she also had an affair. Mr. Yonge sued forand won damages from her lover, totaling 1,500 pounds, and in the divorce he was awarded most of Mrs. Yonge's inheritance. Montagu's poem addresses the injustice of Mrs. Yonge's penalties.

Think not this Paper comes with vain pretence
To move your Pity, or to mourn th'offence.
Too well I know that hard Obdurate Heart;
No soft'ning mercy there will take my part,
Nor can a Woman's Arguments prevail,
When even your Patron's wise Example fails,
But this last privelege I still retain,
Th'Oppress'd and Injur'd allways may complain.
Too, too severely Laws of Honour bind
The Weak Submissive Sex of Woman-kind.
If sighs have gain'd or force compell'd our Hand,
Deceiv'd by Art, or urg'd by stern Command,
What ever Motive binds the fatal Tye,
The Judging World expects our Constancy.
Just Heaven! (for sure in Heaven does Justice reign
Thô Tricks below that sacred Name prophane)
To you appealing I submit my Cause
Nor fear a Judgment from Impartial Laws.
All Bargains but conditional are made,
The Purchase void, the Creditor unpaid,
Defrauded Servants are from Service free,
A wounded Slave regains his Liberty.
For Wives ill us'd no remedy remains,
To daily Racks condemn'd, and to eternal Chains.
From whence is this unjust Distinction grown?
Are we not form'd with Passions like your own?
Nature with equal Fire our Souls endu'd,
Our Minds as Haughty, and as warm our blood,
O're the wide World your pleasures you persue,
The Change is justify'd by something new;
But we must sigh in Silence—and be true.
Our Sexes Weakness you expose and blame
(Of every Prattling Fop the common Theme),
Yet from this Weakness you suppose is due
Sublimer Virtu than your Cato knew.
Had Heaven design'd us Tryals so severe,
It would have form'd our Tempers then to bear.
And I have born (o what have I not born!)
The pang of Jealousie, th'Insults of Scorn.
Weary'd at length, I from your sight remove,
And place my Future Hopes, in Secret Love.
In the gay Bloom of glowing Youth retir'd,
I quit the Woman's Joy to be admir'd,
With that small Pension your hard Heart allows,
Renounce your Fortune, and release your Vows.
To Custom (thô unjust) so much is due,
I hide my Frailty, from the Public view.
My Conscience clear, yet sensible of Shame,
My Life I hazard, to preserve my Fame.
And I prefer this low inglorious State,
To vile dependance on the Thing I hate—
—But you persue me to this last retreat.
Dragg'd into Light, my tender Crime is shown
And every Circumstance of Fondness known.
Beneath the Shelter of the Law you stand,
And urge my Ruin with a cruel Hand.
While to my Fault thus rigidly severe,
Tamely Submissive to the Man you fear.
This wretched Out-cast, this abandonn'd Wife,
Has yet this Joy to sweeten shamefull Life,
By your mean Conduct, infamously loose,
You are at once m'Accuser, and Excuse.
Let me be damn'd by the Censorious Prude
(Stupidly Dull, or Spiritually Lewd),
My hapless Case will surely Pity find
From every Just and reasonable Mind,
When to the final Sentence I submit,
The Lips condemn me, but their Souls acquit.
No more my Husband, to your Pleasures go,
The Sweets of your recover'd Freedom know,
Go; Court the brittle Freindship of the Great,
Smile at his Board, or at his Levée wait
And when dismiss'd to Madam's Toilet fly,
More than her Chambermaids, or Glasses, Lye,
Tell her how Young she looks, how heavenly fair,
Admire the Lillys, and the Roses, there,
Your high Ambition may be gratify'd,
Some Cousin of her own be made your Bride,
And you the Father of a Glorious Race
Endow'd with Ch——l's strength and Low——r's face.

INGE E. BOER (ESSAY DATE WINTER, 1995-96)

SOURCE: Boer, Inge E. “Despotism from under the Veil: Masculine and Feminine Readings of the Despot and the Harem.” Cultural Critique 32 (winter, 1995-96): 43-73.
In the following excerpt, Boer examines Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters as a voice within a silenced subculture in a despotic society. Boer suggests that Montagu offers an alternate understanding of the power relationship between the watcher-subject (usually male), and the object being watched (usually female).

Despotism figures as a persistently dominant concept in Western representations of the Orient.¹ Because of concepts commonly related to despotism, such as polygamy, the harem, and the presumed oppressed position of women under despotism, representations of Oriental women have been affected in particular.

Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, published in 1748, has been instrumental in establishing despotism as a basically political system.² Simultaneously, through the Greek despotes, meaning “master over slaves in a domestic space,” despotism maintains a link with the domestic. This linkage between despotism and the domestic is present in various forms in De l’esprit des lois. Given the extraordinary influence of Montesquieu’s work, the specific position despotism occupies in his analysis of different forms of government, and the reproduction of his ideas in representations of the Orient, the study of representations of Oriental women necessitates an analysis of Montesquieu’s ideas on despotism. Montesquieu’s seemingly inevitable logic of oppression operates on the Western representation of Oriental women, and thus they too become defined, through his definition of despotism.

The first part of this article, therefore, focuses on three different relations between despotism and domestic space in De l’esprit des lois in order to uncover the implicit inequalities of power in Montesquieu’s system of ordering and to explore the way in which gender intersects with those relations. The three relations indicated are, first, that between the monarchy and the republic, on the one hand, and despotism, on the other; second, that between the despot and his subjects generally speaking; and third, that between the master and his slaves.

Pierre Bourdieu argues that Montesquieu is not by accident led to pose explicitly the question of the link between domestic rule and the political in De l’esprit des lois, because

it is there in fact that, in addition to sexuality and politics, the threads of conscious reasons become knotted—where it is a matter of “domestic servitude” in the sense of “control over women”—with the hidden chain of unconscious socially organized phantasms—where it is a matter of control exercised by women (with the theme of ruse, the power of the weak) and of despotism as the only means left to men to escape from the control of women.

(Bourdieu 235; originl emphases)³

I want to take the domestic in a somewhat broader sense than Bourdieu so as to bring all the connotations of the domestic into play. The domestic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, signifies that which pertains to the house(hold), that which pertains to a particular or to one’s own country, and that which pertains to what is domesticated.

The second part of my analysis foregrounds the domestic space, the term mostly silenced in Montesquieu’s investigations. My examination of Lettres persanes and of a recent analysis of the seraglio by Alain Grosrichard, La structure du sérail, is meant to show how the political and the domestic converge in the representations of the harem. Both texts hinge on a system of surveillance, which reproduces a dominant and dominating masculine perspective and whose forces work toward control of the women in the harem. The fear of a revolt by the women is countered by the regulation of their visibility. To render an account of but one aspect of the complex interaction in the harem—that is, by emphasizing the despot’s point of view—maintains women as the object of surveillance.

Therefore, in the third section, I will juxtapose these two texts with the so-called Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Montagu. Her letters, although partaking in a dominant mode of representing Oriental women, provide critical instances that arrive at a partial difference in scopic regimes. From a perspective “within” the harem, achieved through the narratological conception of a first-person embedded discourse, the letters by Lady Montagu show how surveillance also provides possibilities for resistance. My reading of the Turkish Embassy Letters proposes alternative perspectives that draw attention to a system of communication among women that goes unnoticed and that also point out the potentially threatening character of women in the harem, where they confront the despot as a group. I aim at an analysis in which the monolithical and unidirectional character of relations among despotism, the domestic, and ensuing scopic regimes are subverted. A deconstructive and feminist critique of the hierarchical ranking inherently present in Western representations of the Orient, and of women in the Orient in particular, provides possibilities for women’s empowerment and pleasure that have received very little attention until now. . . .

Reading from “within” the Harem

Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes form a stark contrast with the letters from Constantinople by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,⁴ written during the years 1717-1718. The Turkish Embassy Letters, as they were called, were published for the first time in 1763, a year after her death. They immediately won high acclaim. In his complete edition of Lady Montagu’s letters, Robert Halsband concludes that the Turkish Embassy Letters are not actual letters, but that “in the main Lady Mary compiled her Embassy letters from actual letters which she ‘edited’ by transposing sections and otherwise manipulating them to achieve a more artistic collection” (I: xvi). Therefore, I will analyze Lady Montagu’s letters as representations and focus mainly on her attention for and description of the position of women in the Ottoman Empire.⁵

It is striking to see how Lady Montagu divides the subjects of her writing among her addressees. In the letters to Alexander Pope and the Abbé Conti, for example, she addresses questions related to the organization of the Ottoman Empire and Islam, and refutes the faulty representations given by earlier travellers. Her letters to women, especially those to her sister, Lady Mar, deal extensively with the position of women and her visits to women’s quarters. The comparison of the position of English and Turkish women turns out favorably for the latter.

Contrary to travel accounts by previous writers, which kept repeating the by then familiar stereotypical tale of women’s oppression in the Ottoman Empire, Lady Montagu emphasizes the liberty of Turkish women:

Now that I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of ’em [Turkish women, IB]. Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have, no Woman of what rank so ever being permitted to go in the street without 2 muslins. . . . You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her Slave, and ’tis impossible for the most jealous Husband to know his Wife when he meets her, and no Man dare either touch or follow a Woman in the street.

(Letter to Lady Mar, I: 328)

The liberty of Turkish women finds expression, ironically, in their dress. The very dress meant to keep the women from being looked at provides possibilities for masquerade and free movement. This point of view emphasized by Lady Montagu contrasts sharply with the current interpretation of women’s dress as oppressive only. Another source for a certain freedom of action, Lady Montagu states, is the disposal Turkish women have over their dowries. “Neither have they much to apprehend from the resentment of their Husbands, those ladys that are rich having all their money in their own hands, which they take with ’em upon a divorce with an addition which he is oblig’d to give ’em” (I: 328). Taking the financial position of English women, or even worse, that of French women, into account, it must have impressed Lady Montagu that Turkish women enjoyed certain financial privileges.⁶

Lady Montagu is equally impressed by the availability of exclusively female spaces like baths, where women have the chance to meet. She perceives the baths as a women’s coffee house, where the latest news and gossips are exchanged. Rank or standing are effaced: “all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any Beauty or defect conceal’d, yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest Gesture amongst ’em” (Letter to Lady Mar I: 313). Lady Montagu cannot, however, escape from the fact that she herself proved to be an incursion in this egalitarian female domain. As she watches the women, she is fully dressed in a riding dress that she doesn’t want to take off despite the encouragement of the women present in the bath. Reluctantly, and only after repeated requests, she shows the women her stays, “which satisfy’d ’em very well, for I saw they believ’d I was so lock’d up in that Machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband” (I: 314).⁷

Although Lady Montagu takes great pains to show and subvert the presuppositions of her male predecessors, she nevertheless does not escape from common fantasies about Oriental women. No immodest gestures, she informs her addressee, were perceived by her. The fact that Lady Montagu explicitly mentions the absence of wanton smiles or immodest gestures implies that she did expect their occurrence. The fantasy that women, waiting in frustration for the attention of their master, would start sexual relations among themselves, was commonly referred to in seventeenth-century travel journals, and, as this detail suggests, it informs Lady Montagu’s discourse as well.

On some occasions she has difficulty in warding off her attraction for the women she meets or the scenes unfolding before her eyes, as Lowe (Critical Terrains 47) also argues. Writing to her sister, who always receives the most intimate details of Lady Montagu’s adventures, she relates her visit to the beautiful Fatima. She is dumb-founded with so much beauty:

I was struck with admiration that I could not for sometime speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising Harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of Body! that lovely bloom of her Smile! But her Eyes! large and black with all the soft languishment of the bleu! After my first surprize was over, I endeavor’d by nicely examining her face to find out some imperfection, without any fruit of my search but being clearly convinc’d of the Error of that vulgar notion, that a face perfectly regular would be agreable . . .

(Letter to Lady Mar I: 350; my emphasis)

Lady Montagu excuses herself for speaking about beauty in terms of such enchantment, and phrases her appreciation in the form of a defense of divine creation versus human creation. She compares her description of Fatima with the way writers speak about statues or paintings.

I think I have read somewhere that Women always speak in rapture when they speak of Beauty, but I can’t imagine why they should not be allow’d to do so. I rather think it Virtue to be able to admire without any Mixture of desire or Envy. The Gravest Writers have spoke with great warmth of some celebrated Pictures or Statues. The Workmanship of Heaven certainly excells all our Weak Imitations, and I think has a much better claim to our Praise.

(I: 351)

Lady Montagu’s claim that human beauty exceeds artistic production is substantiated and reinforced by attributing to it a divine origin. The aesthetic value of pictures and sculptures is no more than a weak imitation and is therefore less to be admired. The admiration Lady Montagu projects onto Fatima is virtuous, because not tainted, as she claims, by desire or envy.

Yet Lady Montagu has to exert herself to show distance or disinterested praise while she is captured by the obvious appeal of Fatima. The rapture about Fatima is augmented by the dance her slaves perform.

This Dance was very different from what I had seen before. Nothing could be more artfull or more proper to raise certain Ideas, the Tunes so soft, the motions so languishing, accompany’d with pauses and dying Eyes, halfe falling back and then recovering themselves in so artfull a Manner that I am very positive the coldest and most rigid Prude upon Earth could not have look’d upon them without thinking of something not to be spoke of.
(I: 351; my emphases)

Lady Montagu’s emphasis on the artful manner in which the dance was executed strives to include her audience, her sister, in the effects the dance has on Lady Montagu herself. The double-talk, alluding both to sexual desire and a tender melancholy, speaks of lack of control. The control that Lady Montagu was more or less able to sustain in her description of Fatima—a virtuous admiration without desire or envy—breaks down under the forceful impression that would have led any woman, even the coldest and most rigid prude, let alone herself, to sexually charged fantasies. But at the same time the male discourse she uses does not give her the means to talk of what she experiences. Lowe (Critical Terrains 47) phrases Lady Montagu’s rapture in terms of homoeroticism and makes explicit what in my opinion is exactly what cannot be expressed.

Clearly, Lady Montagu perceives the places where she meets women as “women’s own spaces.” To argue that the harems or baths, for that matter, are utterly controlled spaces is to forget that they can also be seen as relatively “safe” spaces where women can be among themselves. Baths and harems, without doing away completely with the fact that women were kept under surveillance, serve equally as places for exchange of information and learning by and through women. The dominant masculine representation of women waiting in agony for the master, separated from each other by their desire for him, sustains the effort to divide and rule over women and leaves out this crucial understanding of a feminine space.

Therefore, I want to take up an argument made by Lowe and carry it further. Lowe (Critical Terrains) argues that

the harem is not merely an orientalist voyeur’s fantasy of imagined female sexuality; it is also a possibility of an erotic universe in which there are no men, a site of social and sexual practices that are not organized around the phallus or a central male authority.

(48)

The practices Lowe refers to can take place in the absence of men, but that is not a necessary condition. The bonding between women might lie beyond or outside male perceptions and fantasies and might express itself in terms of female sexuality—sexuality understood in a broad sense— which is pleasurable and “autonomous.”

Notes

1. The Orient has had different meanings in the course of time and could in its most extended form signify a region including the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East. My use of the term is limited to the Islamic/Arab world as it existed in the period 1750-1850.

2. The quotes in the text are taken from the English translation The Spirit of Laws. Book numbers (in Roman numbers) and chapter numbers (in Arabic numbers) will be given in the text. At times parts remained untranslated in this edition, in which cases I used for my own translation Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris: Librairie Garnier Fréres, 1927).

3. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

4. Lady Montagu’s husband was sent to Constantinople as the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He was credited with securing the English interests during negotiations taking place between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The couple arrived in Constantinople in April 1717. In September of the same year, he was recalled from his duties by the king, and he and Lady Montagu left Constantinople in July 1718.

5. See also Billie Melman (77-98) for an analysis of Lady Montagu’s letters.

6. A full account of Lady Montagu’s own problems with her father about her dowry in relation to her suitor, Wortley, is given in the introduction by Dervla Mur-phy in Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (10-24). See also Robert Hals-band (13-17) and Billie Melman (88).

7. For a reading of Lady Montagu’s letters about her visits to Turkish bath-houses and the influence of those letters on Ingres’ paintings, see Wendy Leeks (29-38). For an analysis of Lady Montagu’s conception of liberty, see Melman (85-98).

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. “La rhétorique de la scientificité: contribution á une analyse de l’effet Montesquieu.” Ce que parler veut dire: l’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard, 1982.

Grosrichard, Alain. La structure du sérail: la fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l’Occident classique. Paris: Seuil, 1979.

Halsband, Robert, ed. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965.

Leeks, Wendy. “Ingres Other-Wise.” The Oxford Art Journal 9.1 (1989): 29-38.

Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients. English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work. London: Macmillan, 1992.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de. De l’esprit des lois. 1748. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979.

———. Lettres persanes. 1721. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964.

Pick, Christopher, ed. Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. London: Century, 1988.

KATHERINE S. H. TURNER (ESSAY DATE 1999)

SOURCE: Turner, Katherine S. H. "From Classical to Imperial: Changing Visions of Turkey in the Eighteenth Century." In Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, edited by Steve Clark, pp. 113-28. London: Zed, 1999.

In the following essay, Turner compares the correspondence of Montagu to that of Elizabeth Craven, a later letter-writer who argued that Montagu's Turkish letters were not authentic and were probably written by a man.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, written between 1716 and 1718 but published (posthumously) only in 1763, remains one of the best known of eighteenth-century travelogues, and Montagu herself was one of the most celebrated woman writers of her time. Born in 1689, she was an indefatigable and accomplished letter writer, corresponding with leading literary figures such as Alexander Pope as well as an extensive network of family and friends. She also wrote essays and poems (both romantic and satirical), and a play (collected in Montagu 1977); her participation in a wide range of genres, including travel writing, indicates her ability to transcend gender-based literary categories. Fewer than twenty British women published travel narratives during the eighteenth century, and Montagu was a pioneer of this small but highly significant cluster of women, whose works provide a fascinating, often oblique, commentary on the cultural and political trends of their time.

The attractive vision of Turkey presented in the Embassy Letters typifies a particular version of English Enlightenment culture and aesthetics. Bernard Lewis sees in Montagu's account 'the new myth, still in its embryonic form, of the non-European as the embodiment of mystery and romance' (Lewis 1993: 83). In many ways, however, Montagu's Letters are uncharacteristic of the eighteenth century of which they are so often claimed to be paradigmatic. In 1789, Lady Elizabeth Craven, England's other great eighteenth-century woman traveller to Turkey, takes issue with many of Montagu's opinions in her own travelogue, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, and pronounces indeed that Montagu 'never wrote a line of them' (Craven 1789: 105). In her later Memoirs, and in the enlarged edition of the Journey, published in 1814, Craven expands on this view, pronouncing that the Embassy Letters 'were most of them male compositions, pretending to female grace in the style, the facts mostly inventions' (Craven 1814: 289). There had in fact been a spurious 'fourth' volume of Montagu's Embassy Letters published in 1767, perhaps written by John Cleland; but by the 1780s its spuriousness, and the authenticity of the 1763 volumes were not in doubt.

Montagu's highly favourable impressions of abroad, especially of Turkey, and especially of Turkish women, are Craven's chief targets. Craven found an unexpected ally in the person of Lady Bute, Montagu's daughter, who, having failed to suppress the publication of the Embassy Letters in 1763, was later delighted to find support for her disowning of her mother's vulgar publishing activities. Ladies Craven and Bute later corresponded about the authorship of the Embassy Letters, Lady Bute agreeing heartily that most of the Letters were 'composed by men', and suggesting that Horace Walpole 'and two other wits' had written them (Craven 1826: II 116).

No one else seems to have taken these assertions seriously; yet, questions of personal grievance and arrogance aside, this curious episode suggests how uncongenial Montagu's account became to at least some later eighteenth-century readers. It therefore provides a point of entry into a wider discussion of changes in eighteenth-century perceptions of travel writing, of women travel writers, and (not least) of Turkey itself. It is worth noting here that Craven's critical observations on Turkey, which to a large extent are a reactionary engagement with Montagu's, were taken seriously by the influential reviews (the Monthly, the Critical and the Analytical), although they slyly mocked her style and arrogance. Moreover, the Monthly Review commended her liberal reflections, 'which do honour to the writer, both as a lover of her own country, and as a citizen of the world' (Monthly Review 80 [1789], 209).

There are two main reasons for the generally positive reception of Craven's text in 1789. First, little else in the way of original travel writing on Turkey had been published since Montagu's text in 1763: James Porter's Observations on the Religion, Law, Government, and Manners, of the Turks (1768) was a compilation of travellers' accounts, and the focus of Richard Chandler's Travels in Asia Minor (1775) was largely archaeological. Second, a woman travel writer was still something of a novelty in her own right, no doubt because the genre's roots in masculine erudition and experience—at least until the closing decades of the century—remained powerfully deterrent (see Turner 1995: 168-246). The Analytical Review, anticipating its readers' interest in Craven's travelogue, notes that 'The letters of this sprightly female will naturally excite curiosity' (Analytical Review 3 [1789], 176). Craven's personal notoriety—her private life was nothing if not colourful—is also hinted at here.

The Turkish aspect of Craven's account seems to have been its main source of marketable interest. The title of the travelogue places Constantinople as the climax of her journey, and the running head throughout the volume is 'Lady Craven's Journey to Constantinople'. In fact, only about 70 of the 327 pages of Craven's Journey deal with Turkey, as critics were quick to point out (e.g. Monthly Review 80 [1789], 200-1; Critical Review 67 [1789], 281; Gentleman's Magazine 59 [1789], 237); and the revised title of the 1814 edition duly read Letters from the Right Honorable Lady Craven, to His Serene Highness the Margrave of Anspach, during her Travels through France, Germany, and Russia in 1785 and 1786. In 1789, though, Craven was no doubt exploiting public interest in Turkey: not only did the harem still exert a powerful pull on the British reader's imagination, but recent political developments made the Turkish focus of the Journey topical. The increasingly aggressive behaviour of Russia and Austria towards the declining Ottoman Empire was becoming an alarming threat to British trading interests in the Levant. Craven's account was published during the Russian and Austrian war against Turkey, 1787-92 (though her journey was made earlier, 1785-86). Britain had formed the Triple Alliance with the United Provinces and Prussia against Austria in 1788; and by 1789 all parties were eager for peace between Turkey and its aggressors, not least because the Triple Alliance were anxious to direct their energies against the tide of the French Revolutionary army (Shaw 1976: i 258-60). With the turmoil, indeed even disintegration of European affairs, following a decade on from the loss of America, it seems likely that Britain was anxious to preserve trading links with a safely weak but intact Ottoman Empire, which might indeed offer itself as an arena ripe for colonial domination; by British rather than Russian or Austrian interests.

What follows is a comparison of Montagu's and Craven's accounts, which will illuminate crucial changes in representations of gender and empire, as mediated through the eyes of the woman travel writer in Turkey. An account of the publishing histories of the travelogues will lead—through the issue of gender and propriety—into an analysis of the conflicting visions of Turkish women offered by Montagu and Craven. The latter part of the chapter will probe the changing concepts of cultural politics and history which the texts illuminate. In particular, Craven's repudiation of Montagu is a significant contribution to an emergent colonial discourse, displacing Montagu's classical, tolerant and largely ahistorical stance. Craven's text exemplifies what Homi K. Bhabha has defined as 'the objective of colonial discourse', which is to construe the colonised as a 'population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction' (Bhabha 1986: 154).

The mere existence of their narratives testifies to the privileged status of Montagu and Craven. Their rank made possible nor only their access to European and Turkish high society—'The Turks are very proud, and will not converse with a stranger they are not assured is considerable in his own country' (Montagu 1763: II 131-2)—but their very expeditions. Lady Mary, who travelled through Austria and Hungary to Constantinople, with 'thirty covered waggons for our baggage, and five coaches … for my women' (vol. II, p. 110), points out that:

The journey we have made from Belgrade hither, cannot possibly be passed by any out of a public character. The desert woods of Serbia, are the common refuge of thieves, who rob, fifty in a company, so that we had need of all our guards to secure us; and the villages are so poor, that only force could extort from them necessary provisions.

(Montagu 1763: II 2)

Elsewhere, she describes her distress at the 'insolencies' of their escorts 'in the poor villages through which we passed' (vol. I, p. 152). Craven travelled with a smaller entourage but rather less sensitivity. Her Journey (1789) is peppered with name-dropping, and pervaded by a strong sense of her own importance, as in this passage: 'At Soumi I conversed with a brother of Prince Kourakin's and a Mr. Lanskoy, both officers quartered there; and to whom I was indebted for a lodging: they obliged a Jew to give me up a new little house he was upon the point of inhabiting' (p. 154).

The Critical Review concludes its account of Craven with the waspish pronouncement that the 'rest of the journey affords little subject of remark, except that whatever accommodations rank and beauty could demand, and despotic power could procure, Lady Craven enjoyed' (Critical Review 67 [1789], 286).

The circumstances under which Montagu's and Craven's texts were published testify to the critical significance not only of their rank, but also of their gender, and illuminate changing concepts of private and public identity. The Embassy Letters emerged into the literary world like the elegant ghost of their recently deceased author, appearing in 1763 in three small octavo volumes. The first of these contained a preface written in 1724 by Mary Astell, confessing herself

malicious enough to desire, that the world should see, to how much better purpose the LADIES travel than their LORDS; and that, whilst it is surfeited with Male-Travels, all in the same tone, and stuff with the same trifles; a lady has the skill to strike out a new path, and to embellish a worn-out subject, with variety of fresh and elegant entertainment.

(Montagu 1763: I viii)

Montagu is the eighteenth-century woman travel writer of whom it was most often and enthusiastically proclaimed that her gender qualified her to describe scenes 'not to be paralleled in the narrative of any male Traveller' (Monthly Review 28 [1763], 392): namely, the Turkish bath, the harem, and the lifestyles of aristocratic Turkish women. She was evidently proud of this privilege and of the distinction it guaranteed her within the corpus of travel literature; she concludes the letter describing the bath as follows: 'Adieu, Madam, I am sure I have now entertained you, with an account of such a sight as you never saw in your life, and what no book of travels could inform you of, as 'tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places' (Montagu 1763: I 164-5).

For all her contempt of authors who descended to the vulgar activity of publication (see for example Montagu 1965-67: III 37; 'it [is] not the busyness of a Man of Quality to turn Author'), Montagu was clearly anxious that the Embassy Letters eventually be published. She kept the manuscript with her wherever she travelled, and on her final journey home entrusted them to an English clergyman at Rotterdam, with instructions to publish them after her death. (See Halsband 1956: 278-9, 287-9, for an account of their journey into print.) It was her travel letters, rather than her poems or essays (some of which had been circulated in manuscript or even published anonymously during her lifetime), that Montagu was concerned to have preserved for posterity.

Astell's 'Preface' aside, the propriety of publishing is not an issue within Montagu's text, for all its prominence in her thought and activity elsewhere. Craven, however, engages vigorously with the issue. She seems to have had few qualms about the propriety of publishing; indeed, she somewhat showily published in a quarto volume illustrated with six engravings. Of the women travel writers who published in the eighteenth century, only Craven and Radcliffe (whose literary reputation was already well established) published in anything grander than octavo; and only Craven's book had plates. The Gentleman's Magazine is unimpressed, however, noting that 'What Lady C. here offers to the publick in a costly quarto might certainly have been very well compressed to the size of Lady Montague's Letters' (Gentleman's Magazine, 59 [1789], 237). The Journey is prefaced with a claim that Craven is publishing in order to satisfy friends' curiosity, and 'to show the world Where the real Lady Craven has been', her husband's mistress having for some years passed herself off as Lady Craven on her travels through France, Switzerland and England. The Monthly Review observes: 'the one great object in view, in publishing this correspondence, appears to be an effort to wipe away some unfavourable imputations at home, and to manifest the respect shewn to the writer abroad' (Monthly Review 80 [1789], 201).

The 'letters' which make up the Journey are written to the Margrave of Anspach, with whom Craven had developed 'a more than sisterly affection' on her travels in Europe following her scandalous separation from Lord Craven in 1781 (Monthly Review 53 [1789], 201). Unfortunately, his wife the Margravine was still alive, albeit in a sickly fashion, and it appears that Craven decided on a grand tour of exotic locations in order to remove the embarrassment to the Margrave created by her continued residence at Anspach, and to kill time until both the Margravine and Lord Craven had expired; he in fact held out until 1791, at which point she promptly married the Margrave. She and the Margrave then returned to England, but her long absence and widely publicised adultery had enabled Lord Craven to turn their children against her: all six refused to acknowledge her (J. Robinson 1990: 87). Moreover, she was no longer received at court, which must have been a serious blow to a woman of her pretensions. In 1814, Craven, now the Margravine of Anspach, reissued the Journey with minor alterations and additions. The new title blazons the name and rank of her correspondent, and celebrates their relationship: Letters from the Right Honorable Lady Craven, to His Serene Highness the Margrave of Anspach … Their relationship and Craven's virtue are indignantly defended in several additional letters, and in the new preface, where we are informed that she 'constantly refused estates and titles' offered by foreign potentates lest she be called suddenly home by her husband and children:

my husband had all his [sic; for 'my'] fine property in his own power, and therefore I could not consent to take any duties on me, when I felt, that my first duty, that of a mother, must make me forsake those duties my gratitude and pride might have made me take elsewhere—my duty as a mother lay in England.

(Craven 1814: v)

The 1814 edition also inserts references to her marital problems with Lord Craven and her deepening friendship with the Margrave; he is presented as a saintly refuge from the callous Lord Craven, who had prevented their children from writing to her, and whose appalling behaviour is clearly intended to exonerate her from any accusations of unwifely conduct. Craven casts herself in the role of restless exile, happy neither at home nor abroad, whose journeying is less a violation than a proof of propriety. The changes made to the 1814 edition engage with the increasingly severe moral climate of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, and negotiate the difficult no-man's-land between public propriety and private affairs which the earlier Journey had, perhaps naively, opened up for public inspection.

Craven capitalises (in both editions) not only on her personal notoriety but also on the increasingly autobiographical scope of travel writing in the later eighteenth century. While Montagu's reasons for travel and her personal affairs are largely absent from the Embassy Letters, Craven's private dramas provide, quite publicly, a moral justification for her travels, as well as an almost novelistic source of semi-scandalous interest. This expanding narrative scope within travel writing could create problems for women travel writers, for whom the acts of publication and indeed travel might appear morally questionable, and for whom autobiographical frankness might be problematic. Craven's text and apologetic signals her awareness of these issues, but her aristocratic self-importance permits her to rise above bourgeois anxiety. When it comes, however, to describing Turkish women, Craven's moral sensibility is closer, as we shall see, to the middle-class propriety of the 1780s and 1790s than to any aristocratic largesse. Moreover, the emphasis she increasingly places on her submissive married relationship (Montagu, by contrast, barely mentions her husband, although she does briefly describe her experiences of childbirth in Turkey) can be related to an emergent imperial sensibility, within which visible domestic affection in the Christian institution of marriage testifies to the moral superiority of the coloniser. Craven and Montagu present strikingly different accounts of Turkish women. Montagu's approach is poetic and aesthetic, Craven's moral and economic. Robert Halsband has observed that while in the courts of western Europe Montagu mingled with princes and diplomats, at the Ottoman court her sex deprived her of this privilege (Halsband 1956: 71). Craven is similarly excluded, but with chagrin; at one point she resorts to spying on the Sultan through a telescope. This exclusion partly explains the absence of political and diplomatic material in both women's accounts and their focus instead on the status of Turkish women. Both writers commend the respect and apparent liberty granted to Turkish women, but Montagu's account of their grace and beauty is vigorously contradicted by Craven. Montagu describes the women of the harem with admiration:

They have naturally the most beautiful complexions in the world, and Generally large black eyes. They generally shape their eye-brows, and both Greeks and Turks have the custom of putting round their eyes a black tincture, that, at distance, or by candle-light, adds very much to the blackness of them. I fancy many of our ladies would be overjoyed to know this secret; but 'tis too visible by day.

(Montagu 1763: II 31-2)

Craven is less favourably impressed:

I have no doubt but that nature intended some of these women to be very handsome, but white and red ill applied, their eye-brows hid under one or two black lines—teeth black by smocking, and an universal stoop in the shoulders, made them appear rather disgusting than handsome … The frequent use of hot-baths destroys the solids, and these women at nineteen look older than I am at this moment.

(Craven 1789: 225-6)

'Nature' here is implicitly associated with British standards of beauty; Craven frequently equates it with western, and usually British, behaviour. The Critical Review notes the prevalence of the adjective 'ugly' in her account (Critical Review 67 [1789], 282). More recently, Montagu has also been accused of forcing Turkish women into a western frame of reference, most notoriously in this famous description of the Turkish bath:

They walked and moved with the same majestic grace, which Milton describes our General Mother with. There were many amongst them, as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn, by the pencil of a Guido or Titian,—And most of their skins shiningly white, only adorned by their beautiful hair, divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or ribbon, perfectly representing the figures of the graces.

(Montagu 1763: I 161-2)

Such aestheticising strategies, Isobel Grundy (1992) and Cynthia Lowenthal (1990) have argued, allow Montagu simultaneously to appreciate the exotic otherness of Turkish women and to evade the more problematic issues of freedom and happiness within the harsher realities of Turkish women's experience. Elizabeth Bohls (1995), however, has recently presented a more radical version of Montagu's aestheticising strategies, arguing that she presents herself, daringly, as an aesthetic subject (a privilege usually reserved for males) in order to neutralise orientalist stereotypes of women, and to re-present them as aesthetic rather than erotic objects: statues and paintings rather than the lascivious harpies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century male-authored travels by the likes of Paul Rycaut and Aaron Hill.

Craven's strategy, by contrast, is simultaneously to de-aestheticise the oriental female, and to render her morally dubious once more. Where Montagu celebrates the steamy beauty of the Turkish bath, Craven (1789) is appalled by the baths at Athens, 'full of naked fat women; a disgusting sight' (p. 264). Craven's account of a 'Turkish' bath in fact occurs in Athens. This displacement testifies not only to Craven's tendency to lump together Greeks, Turks, Tartars and Cossacks as eastern and primitive, regardless of politics or national identity—and indeed to use the term 'Turk' as a term of abuse for any objectionable eastern individual—but also to the distance which Craven strenuously constructs between herself and the eastern other, especially in Turkey and its dominions, where the pernicious influence of Islam is stressed. The Critical Review observes that Craven is interested not only in 'the stupidity and indolence of the Turks', but also in 'the effects of their despotism on the conquered Greeks' (Critical Review 67 [1789], 285).

Craven's horror at the Turkish bath is similar to her 'disgusted' reaction to a Cossack belly dancer, 'who never lifted her feet off the ground but once in four minutes, and then only one foot at a time, and every part of her person danced except her feet' (Craven 1789: 173). A description in Montagu's earlier account of a similar entertainment had, by contrast, employed the term 'proper' in an aesthetic sense devoid of moral implication, and envisaged a neutralising coalescence of art and eroticism which would cast the insensitive western prude as the villain of the piece:

This dance was very different from what I had seen before. Nothing could be more artful, or more proper to raise certain ideas. The tunes so soft!—the motions so languishing!—Accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half-falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner, that I am very positive, the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth, could not have looked upon them without thinking of something not to be spoke of.

(Montagu 1763: II 89-90)

In the more proper climate of the 1780s, Montagu's aesthetic oriental women are re-becoming lascivious. Craven's reintroduction of moral judgement signals a germinating imperial ideology, as potent as had been previous moral assaults on Turkish sexuality (see Bohls 1995: 28-31 on the 'sexualised Orient' constructed by earlier male travel writers), but further bolstered, as we shall see, by a broader sense of Turkish cultural degeneracy. This new grounding permits Craven to claim what Norman Daniel (1966) has described as 'imperialism's perceived "moral right" to civilise any alien people which comes to replace the legal right that had characterised the Crusading impulse' (p. 67).

Craven treats with prurient disapproval what Montagu had appraised with amused tolerance in their respective accounts of Turkish women's 'liberty'. Both mention the freedoms offered by the anonymous garb of Turkish women, but Craven dwells repeatedly on its possibilities for intrigue and licentiousness, even imagining sexual assignations being conducted during services at Santa Sophia, by figures 'wrapped up like a mummy' (Craven 1789: 218). Montagu herself exploits the liberty which Turkish dress affords, wandering the streets of Constantinople 'every day, wrapped up in my Feriae and Asmak' (Montagu 1763: III 26). Craven would not countenance such assimilation:

As to women, as many, if not more than men, are to be seen in the streets—but they look like walking mummies—A large loose robe of dark green cloth covers them from the neck to the ground, over that a large piece of muslin, which wraps the shoulders and the arms, another which goes over the head and eyes … If I was to walk about the streets here I would certainly wear the same dress, for the Turkish women call others names, when they meet them with their faces uncovered—When I go out I have the Ambassador's sedanchair, which is like mine in London, only gilt and varnished like a French coach, and six Turks carry it; as they fancy it impossible that two or four men can carry one; two Janissaries walk before with high fur caps on—The Ambassadors here have all Janissaries as guards allowed them by the Porte—Thank Heaven I have but a little way to go in this pomp, and fearing every moment the Turks should fling me down they are so awkward.

(Craven 1789: 205-6)

Montagu's experience of Turkey stands in opposition to the restrictive idea of gendered space which was becoming a fact of life in eighteenth-century England, and London especially (see Lew 1991: 445-6). The trappings of Turkish femininity offer unlimited access to public spaces (and Craven also notes that 'as many, if not more' women than men occupy the streets). Craven's text rewrites the concept of separate spheres so that space and activity are divided along racial lines. Her 'if I was to walk about the streets here' is purely rhetorical. The Englishwoman is resolutely opposed to the anonymity of Turkish feminine costume (perhaps here the developing discourse of English individuality and strong character is an influence). Consequently, her evident difference opens up perceptible hostility between the women of different races, which can only be contained, quite literally, within a sedan chair borne by Turkish males. And yet this too poses a threat, Craven 'fearing every moment the Turks should fling me down they are so awkward'. For her journey out of Turkey, Craven is given as an escort another threatening male, 'a Tchouadar, that is to say, a kind of upper servant, or rather creature of the Visir' (Craven 1789: 285). This 'yellow looking Turk' (p. 286) is a constant source of irritation to Craven, competing with her for the servants' attention and for the lion's share of the party's provisions. At one point she finds that he has used her kettle to make himself coffee:

If any travellers were to meet us, they would certainly take him for some Grand Seigneur, and that I am of his suite, by the care taken of him, and the perfect indifference all, but my two companions and my servants, show for my ease and convenience … I thought it right to point to two most excellent little English pistols I wear at my girdle, and assure him they would be well employed against any offence I met with. And when the interpreter had done I could not help calling him a stupid disagreeable Turk, in English, which he took for a compliment, and bowed his head a little.

(Craven 1789: 291)

Turkish degeneracy and luxury here emerge as sexual savagery, barely containable through the brandishing of English pistols worn in a highly defensive position, 'at my girdle' (and through the futile yet cathartic effect of English insults). The 'moral right' of the English over the Turk is again asserted.

In 1763, the Monthly Review praises the Embassy Letters in gendered terms: 'There is no affectation of female delicatesse, there are no prettynesses, no Ladyisms in these natural, easy familiar Epistles' (Monthly Review 28 [1763], 385). Paradoxically, Montagu is celebrated as a writer because she is not typical of her gender, even though it is her gender which makes possible her most novel observations (her descriptions of the harem). In 1789, by contrast, the Critical Review notes archly that Craven saw objects 'in the true female view' (Critical Review 67 [1789], 282). If this is true, then Craven is doing so partly in response to the increasing cultural and ideological separation of male and female fields and abilities. Similarly, her highly restrictive notions of sexual propriety are very much of her time. If we recall Craven's aspersions on the authorship of Montagu's text, moreover, it becomes clear that narrowing concepts of female activity colour Craven's reading of Montagu's text to the extent that the Embassy Letters' tolerant view of Turkish manners evinces their spuriousness.

Montagu's broader cultural tolerance is if anything still more offensive to Craven than her views on women. Jill Campbell (1994) has described how Montagu imagines Turkish culture as 'outside history, as a place where past and present, the literary and the natural, coexist' (pp. 74-5). She relates this to the anthropological phenomenon observed by Johannes Fabian (in Time and the Other), by which western travellers deny the contemporaneity of different cultures, co-existing in the same historical moment, and instead imagine the alien cultures they encounter as inhabiting the distant past of their own culture's history or prehistory (p. 75).

A letter to Pope, written at Adrianople, shows Montagu adopting precisely this position:

I read over your Homer here, with an infinite pleasure, and find several little passages explained, that I did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of: Many of the customs, and much of the dress then in fashion, being yet retained. I don't wonder to find more remains here, of an age so distant, than is to be found in any other country, the Turks not taking that pains to introduce their own manners, as has been generally practised by other nations, that imagine themselves more polite.

(Montagu 1763: II 44)

This is to Pope, and about poetry, and is therefore consciously idealistic. This letter invokes a cultural continuity which dissolves national boundaries and represents difference as innocence from the ravages of civilisation: 'I never see half a dozen of old Bashaws (as I do very often) with their reverend beards, sitting basking in the sun, but I recollect good King Priam and his counsellors' (vol. II, p. 45). The Embassy Letters as a whole strives to articulate an innocence of history and politics, which are barely mentioned, and also of cultural judgement. Crucial to this project is the fragmentation of narrative identity which occurs within the Embassy Letters. Montagu's text differs markedly from Craven's in being addressed (rather unusually, in eighteenth-century travel literature) to a wide range of correspondents (fifteen in all, twelve of whom are women), ranging from her depressed sister, Lady Mar, to the Abbe Conti, to Alexander Pope, and including assorted female friends. All of Craven's letters, by contrast, are addressed to the Margrave (which may partly account for their celebration of her virtues and of the esteem in which she is held throughout Europe, Russia and Turkey). This formal difference makes for a greater stylistic variety within the Embassy Letters than in Craven's Journey. Montagu uses different literary and conversational registers for different correspondents, and deploys a range of descriptive topics. She addresses one letter to the Princess of Wales, writing as ambassadress for Christendom as well as Britain: 'I have now, Madam, finished a journey that has not been undertaken by any Christian, since the time of the Greek Emperors; and I shall not regret all the fatigues I have suffered in it, if it gives me an opportunity of amusing your R. H. by an account of places utterly unknown amongst us' (vol. I, p. 151).

To Lady Mar, Montagu writes anecdotal, humorous accounts of social and sexual customs and visits to exotic notables like the Grand Vizier's 'lady' and the Sultana Hafiten. With assorted Ladies, she is chatty and occasionally risqué. All her detailed (and celebrated) accounts of Turkish women, in harem or public bath or private audience, are addressed to women.

With the Abbe Conti and with Pope, not surprisingly, Montagu is most scholarly and philosophical. To the Abbe she writes 'of manners and religion' (vol. II, p. 1), government and welfare, antiquities and architecture, commerce, military parades, and Islam. To Pope she addresses witty and sometimes flirtatious letters, writing about poetry and pastoral; she resolutely denies Pope the almost erotic satisfaction which her letters to women friends offer, in accounts of her Turkish costume and luxurious lifestyle. One detects a distinctively plaintive note to Pope's declaration: 'I long for nothing so much as your Oriental Self. I expect to see your Soul as much thinner dresed as your Body' (Pope 1956: I 494). Through this dazzling variety of subjects and styles, Montagu refracts her narrative identity into a prismatic multiplicity. The Letters' observing self becomes, quite literally, an embodiment of Enlightenment pluralism. Their multifaceted narrator was no doubt an important factor in the enthusiastic reception of the Critical Review which itemises the narrator's separate attractions, declaring that the letters will display, 'as long as the English language endures, the sprightliness of her wit, the solidity of her judgement, the extent of her knowledge, the elegance of her taste, and the excellence of her real character' (Critical Review 15 [1763], 435).

The freedom of the Embassy Letters from opinion, judgement, or 'vulgar prejudice' (to use a frequent eighteenth-century criticism of travel writing) seems to have made them peculiarly attractive to the critical and reading public of the 1760s. Montagu must have seemed a true citizen of the world. The Embassy Letters were published in the year of the cessation of the Seven Years' War in Europe; the war had in some ways undermined the viability of Enlightened ideals and seen them compromised by political contingency and nationalistic feeling. Montagu's visions of a distant and not immediately threatening foreign world perhaps reassured the reading public that Enlightened tolerance was still, albeit remotely, alive and possible. Alternatively, the confidence-boosting territorial gains made at the Peace of Paris may have fostered a relaxed and culturally tolerant mood among the reading and critical public. Furthermore, remarks like 'Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women, as the only free people in the Empire' (Montagu 1763: II 35) must have offered a pleasurable alternative to the bitter resonances of 'liberty' in its domestic context in 1763. The Embassy Letters were published and reviewed in May of 1763; the anti-government North Briton edited by John Wilkes had published its incendiary issue 45 in April; and 'Wilkes and Liberty' was becoming a rallying cry.

For all the enlightened pluralism of the Embassy Letters, one might argue that there are letters in which Montagu's narrative persona is more emphatically English and where, correspondingly, things Turkish are presented in a more ambivalent light. The first is in a letter (her only) to the Princess of Wales, in which (as mentioned earlier) she writes as spokeswoman for Christendom. She describes her arrival in Turkish territory:

The country from hence to Adrianople, is the finest in the world. Vines grow wild on all the hills, and the perpetual spring they enjoy, makes every thing gay and flourishing. But this climate, happy as it seems, can never be preferred to England, with all its frosts and snows, while we are blessed with an easy government, under a King, who makes his own happiness consist in the liberty of his people, and chooses rather to be looked upon, as their father than their master.

(Montagu 1763: I 155)

This is a striking passage in Montagu's text; all the more so in that it sounds, almost parodically, like a great deal of other eighteenth-century travel writers who draw such comparisons so frequently as to make them at best a trope, at worst a cliché, of the genre. It is, however, hardly xenophobia; the same could not be said for a letter to Pope, describing Austro-Turkish atrocities in the battle for Belgrade, which contains a virulent diatribe against the Turks:

You see here that I give you a very handsome return for your obliging letter. You entertain me with a most agreeable account of your amiable connexions with men of letters and taste, and of the delicious moments you pass in their society under the rural shade; and I exhibit to you in return, the barbarous spectacle of Turks and Germans cutting one another's throats. But what can you expect from such a country as this, from which the muses have fled, from which letters seem eternally banished, and in which you see, in private scenes, nothing pursued as happiness but the refinements of an indolent voluptuousness, and where those who act upon the public theatre live in uncertainty, suspicion, and terror.

(Montagu 1767: 27-8)

This letter implicitly rejects the classical idealising of Turkey which dominates most of the Embassy Letters, and declares indeed: 'I long much to tread upon English ground, that I may see you and Mr. Congreve, who render that ground classick ground' (Montagu 1767: 32). These passages are almost worthy of Smollett's Smelfungus, and disrupt the tolerant pluralism of the other letters. Or, I should say, would disrupt; although a recent editor of Montagu (Clare Brant, Montagu 1992: 148-50) includes this letter, it did not in fact appear in the 1763 edition of Embassy Letters. It was first published in the spurious 'fourth volume', containing five fake letters and some genuine material (an essay, a letter, some verse), which appeared in 1767. Robert Halsband, in his definitive edition of Montagu's letters, has documented the inauthenticity of most of the 1767 volume (Montagu 1965-67: I xviii and I 371). Discredited by the time Craven was writing, this literary imposture had nevertheless 'deceived even … the critics' in 1767, as the Monthly Review (70 [1784], 575) ruefully admits. The 1767 volume is a fascinating hoax, and reveals the extent to which Montagu's pluralistic tolerance is already nostalgic, indeed outdated, by the later 1760s; or at least is co-existing somewhat uneasily with a more xenophobic, politically defensive sensibility. Revealingly, Lady Bute was convinced that the volume published in 1767 must be 'genuine' (Montagu 1965-67: I xviii). In the genuine volumes of the Embassy Letters, by contrast, Turkish indolence is invested with a complex philosophical value, embodying both classical (specifically, Elysian) tranquillity, and the possibility of a modern epicureanism:

I am almost of opinion they [the Turks] have a right notion of life. They consume it in musick, gardens, wine and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politicks, or studying some science to which we can never attain … Considering what short liv'd weak animals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure? I dare not pursue this theme.

(Montagu 1763: III 52-3)

Elsewhere, Montagu surrenders to the 'wicked suggestions of poetry', and observes 'the warmth of the climate, naturally inspiring a laziness and aversion to labour' (Montagu 1763: II 40-2). For Craven in the 1780s, however, indolence is anything but 'naturally' inspired: her 'nature' favours industry and (where such industry is not indigenous) colonisation. And her version of pastoral, as in this description of the valley of Baydar in Turkey, is decidedly imperial: 'a most enchanting and magnificent spot, intended by nature for some industrious and happy nation to enjoy in peace—A few Tartar villages lessen the wildness of the scene, but, in such a place, the meadow part should be covered with herds, and the mountainous with sheep' (Craven 1789: 190-1).

Craven's response to Turkish languor is one of prosaic disapproval: 'The quiet stupid Turk will sit a whole day by the side of the Canal, looking at flying kites or children's boats … How the business of the nation goes on at all I cannot guess' (p. 207). Her visions of commercial imperialism are couched in the language of emancipation and vision:

Can any rational being, dear Sir, see nature, without the least assistance from art, in all her grace and beauty, stretching out her liberal hand to industry, and not wish to do her justice? Yes, I confess, I wish to see a colony of honest English families here; establishing manufactures, such as England produces, and returning the produce of this country to ours—establishing a fair and free trade from hence, and teaching industry and honesty to the insidious but oppressed Greeks, in their islands—waking the indolent Turk from his gilded slumbers, and carrying fair Liberty in her swelling sails … This is no visionary or poetical figure—it is the honest wish of one who considers all mankind as one family.

(Craven 1789: 188-9)

This passage is especially commended by the Monthly Review for its 'liberal reflections, which do honour to the writer, both as a lover of her own country, and as a citizen of the world' (Monthly Review 80 [1789], 209). This judgement testifies to the ideological gulf not only between Montagu and Craven, but between the values of mid-century and those of later eighteenth-century culture, which looks forward to a new world of imperial expansion. The East is no longer merely an exotic playpen, but a land ripe for the type of colonial appropriation already well under way in India.

Although the reviews criticise Craven's arrogant style, her ideological stance is congenial, and she represents an important strand in travel literature (and much else) of the 1780s and 1790s. P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams (1982: 67) have claimed that, despite continuing interest in the Near East, the growth of British influence in India was rapidly eclipsing Near Eastern concerns. Craven's account and its reception would suggest otherwise; or, indeed, might suggest that the Turkish experience was providing a paradigm for British attitudes towards India in the following century. As Norman Daniel puts it:

It was in Turkey that the imperial attitude developed most rapidly, and not in India, where empire was further advanced. The mood of the conquerors of Bengal was as humble culturally as it was active, even aggressive, in war and commerce. Warren Hastings was a great patron of the study of Persian culture. The serious-minded servants of the Company contributed learned notes and translations and adaptations of Persian verse to specialised periodicals. The forms of the Mogul Empire were carried on, and diplomacy in India still used the Persian language. The significant change in the European attitude came in relations with the Ottoman Empire, a change that soon affected India.

(Daniel 1966: 71)

The years separating Montagu and Craven show quite graphically the disappearance, as far as Turkey is concerned, of such cultural interest and humility. Montagu transcribes Turkish poetry, pronounces herself 'pretty far gone in Oriental learning' (Montagu 1763: II 46-56), and is enormously impressed by Turkish cultural traditions. Craven displays no such interest, and represents the Turks as barbaric philistines. Admittedly, she has some justification for this view, given that the Turks are bombarding Athens during her journey; however, her concern is less with the destruction of the Parthenon per se, and more with the British failure to get in on the act: 'ruins, that would adorn a virtuoso's cabinet, are daily burnt into lime by the Turks; and pieces of exquisite workmanship stuck into a wall or fountain' (Craven 1789: 221). She is particularly chagrined when the Turks forbid any of her party to remove any fragments of sculpture: 'alas, Sir, I cannot even have a little finger or a toe' (p. 256).

The sense of Turkey as a degenerating culture which is expressed only in the spurious letter from Montagu to Pope dominates Craven's account, and chimes with contemporary opinion, which was coming to view the Turks not only as 'idle and effete under the influence of despotism, but as worse than savages' (Burke, speech on 29 March 1791; cited Marshall and Williams 1982: 165). Montagu combines a respect for Turkish cultural history with a poetic imagining of Turkish culture as existing outside history and indeed politics; Craven constructs an alternative history, within which Turkish culture is erased, and the Turks are instead configured as almost pre-historic in their barbaric indolence. Craven's travelogue looks forwards, not back, to the assimilation of the East into British imperial history. And the forceful narrative personality projected by Craven's text foreshadows the emergence of the moral centre which the colonial woman is to provide for the colonial project.

Bibliography

1. Primary

Craven, Elizabeth, Lady (1789) A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. In a Series of Letters from the Right Hon. Elizabeth Lady Craven, to his Serene Highness the Margrave of Brandebourg, Anspach, and Bareith. Written in the Year MDCCLXXXVI, London: G. G. J. Robinson.

——Margravine of Anspach (1814) Letters from the Right Honorable Lady Craven, to His Serene Highness the Margrave of Anspach, during her Travels through France, Germany, and Russia in 1785 and 1786, London.

——(1826) Memoirs of the Margravine of Anspach, Written by Herself, 2 vols, London: Henry Colburn.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1763) Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M——y W——y M——e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, & c. in different Parts of Europe. Which contain, among other curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks; drawn from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers, 3 vols, London: T. A. Becket and P. A. de Hondt.

——[spurious] (1767) An Additional Volume to the Letters Of the Right Honourable Lady M——y W——y M——e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, & c. in different Parts of Europe, London.

——(1965-67) The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols, Oxford: OUP.

——(1977) Essays and Poems, and 'Simplicity, a Comedy', ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

——(1992) Letters, ed. Clare Brant, London: Dent.

Pope, Alexander (1956) Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

2. Secondary

Bhabha, Homi K. (1986) 'The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism', in Francis Barker et al. (eds), Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976-84, London: Methuen, 148-72.

Bohls, Elizabeth A. (1995) Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716-1818, Cambridge: CUP.

Campbell, Jill (1994) 'Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity', in Beth Fowkes Tobin (ed.), History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 64-85.

Daniel, Norman (1966) Islam, Europe and Empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press.

Halsband, Robert (1956) The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lew, Joseph W. (1991) 'Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio', Eighteenth-Century Studies 24: 432-50.

Lewis, Bernard (1993) Islam and the West, Oxford: OUP.

Lowenthal, Cynthia (1990) 'The Veil of Romance: Lady Mary's Embassy Letters', Eighteenth-Century Life 14: 66-82.

Marshall, P. J. and Glyndwr Williams (1982) The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment, London: Dent.

Robinson, Jane (1990) Wayward Women: a Guide to Women Travellers, Oxford: OUP.

Shaw, Stanford (1976) History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2 vols, Cambridge: CUP.

Turner, Katherine S. H. (1995) 'The Politics of Narrative Singularity in British Travel Writing, 1750-1800', unpublished D Phil dissertation, University of Oxford.

SOURCE: Montagu, Mary Wortley. "Number VI (Tuesday, January 24, 1738)." The Nonsense of Common-Sense, 1737-1738, edited by Robert Halsband, pp. 24-28. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1947.

In the following essay, taken from Montagu's anonymous periodical The Nonsense of Common-Sense, Montagu makes a characteristically witty attack on men who lampoon women as weak, irrational, and faithless.

I have always, as I have already declared, professed myself a Friend, tho' I do not aspire to the Character of an Admirer of the Fair Sex; and as such, I am warmed with Indignation at the barbarous Treatment they have received from the Common-Sense of January 14, and the false Advice that he gives them.—He either knows them very little, or like an interested Quack, prescribes such Medicines as are likely to hurt their Constitutions.—It is very plain to me, from the extreme Partiality with which he speaks of Operas, and the Rage with which he attacks both Tragedy and Comedy, that the Author is a Performer in the Opera: And whoever reads his Paper with Attention, will be of my Opinion: Else no Thing alive would assert at the same Time the Innocence of an Entertainment contrived wholly to soften the Mind, and sooth the Sense, without any Pretence to a Moral, and so vehemently declaim against Plays, whose End is, to shew the fatal Consequence of Vice, to warn the Innocent against the Snares of a well-bred designing Dorimant. You see there to what Insults a Woman of Wit, Beauty, and Quality, is exposed, that has been seduced by the artificial Tenderness of a vain, agreeable Gallant; and, I believe, that very Comedy has given more Checks to Ladies in Pursuit of present Pleasures, so closely attended with Shame and Sorrow, than all the Sermons they have ever heard in their Lives.—But this Author does not seem to think it possible to stop their Propensity to Gallantry, by Reason or Reflection: He only desires them to fill up their Time with all Sorts of Trifles: In short, he recommends to them Gossiping, Scandal, Lying, and a whole Troop of Follies, instead of it, as the only Preservatives for their Virtue.

I am for treating them with more Dignity, and as I profess myself a Protector of all the Oppressed, I shall look upon them as my peculiar Care. I expect to be told, this is downright Quixotism, and that I am venturing to engage the strongest Part of Mankind with a Paper Helmet upon my Head. I confess it is an Undertaking where I cannot foresee any considerable Success, and according to an Author I have read somewhere,

The World will still be rul'd by Knaves,
And Fools contending to be Slaves.

But however, I keep up to the Character of a Moralist, and shall use my Endeavours to relieve the Distressed, and defeat vulgar Prejudices, whatever the Event may be. Amongst the most universal Errors, I reckon that of treating the weaker Sex with a Contempt which has a very bad Influence on their Conduct. How many of them think it Excuse enough to say, they are Women, to indulge any Folly that comes into their Heads? This renders them useless Members of the Common-wealth, and only burdensome to their own Families, where the wise Husband thinks he lessens the Opinion of his own Understanding, if he at any Time condescends to consult his Wife's. Thus what Reason Nature has given them is thrown away, and a blind Obedience expected from them by all their ill-natured Masters; and on the other Side, as blind a Complaisance shewn by those that are Indulgent, who say often, that Women's Weakness must be complied with, and it is a vain troublesome Attempt to make them hear Reason.

I attribute a great Part of this Way of thinking, which is hardly ever controverted, either to the Ignorance of Authors, who are many of them heavy Collegians, that have never been admitted to politer Conversations than those of their Bedmakers, or to the Design of selling their Works, which is generally the only View of writing, without any regard to Truth, or the ill Consequences that attend the Propagation of wrong Notions. A Paper smartly wrote, tho' perhaps only some old Conceits dressed in new Words, either in Rhime or Prose: I say Rhime, for I have seen no Verses wrote of many Years. Such a Paper, either to ridicule or declaim against the Ladies, is very welcome to the Coffee-houses, where there is hardly one Man in ten but fancies he hath some Reason or other to curse some of the Sex most heartily.—Perhaps his Sister's Fortunes are to run away with the Money that would be better bestowed at the Groom-Porter's; or an old Mother, good for nothing, keeps a Jointure from a hopeful Son, that wants to make a Settlement on his Mistress; or a handsome young Fellow is plagued with a Wife, that will remain alive, to hinder his running away with a great Fortune, having two or three of them in love with him.—These are serious Misfortunes, that are sufficient to exasperate the mildest Tempers to a Contempt of the Sex; not to speak of lesser Inconveniences, which are very provoking at the Time they are felt.

How many pretty Gentlemen have been unmercifully jilted by pert Hussies, after having curtisied to them at half a Dozen Operas; nay permitted themselves to be led out twice: Yet after these Encouragements, which amount very near to an Engagement, have refused to read their Billets-Doux, and perhaps married other Men under their Noses.—How welcome is a Couplet or two in scorn of Womankind, to such a disappointed Lover; and with what Comfort he reads in many profound Authors, that they are never to be pleased but by Coxcombs? and consequently, he owes his ill Success to the Brightness of his Understanding, which is beyond Female Comprehension.—The Country 'Squire is confirmed, on the elegant Choice he has made, in preferring the Conversation of his Hounds to that of his Wife; and the kind Keepers, a numerous Sect, find themselves justified in throwing away their Time and Estates on a Parcel of Jilts, when they read, that neither Birth nor Education can make any of the Sex rational Creatures; and they can have no Value but what is to be seen in their Faces.

Hence springs the Applause, with which such Libels are read; but I would ask the Applauders, if these Notions, in their own Nature, are likely to produce any good Effect, towards reforming the Vicious, instructing the Weak, or guiding the Young?—I would not every Day tell my Footmen, if I kept any, that their whole Fraternity were a Pack of Scoundrels; that Lying and Stealing were such inseparable Qualities to their Cloth, that I should think myself very happy in them, if they confined themselves to innocent Lies, and would only steal Candles Ends. On the contrary, I would say in their Presence, that Birth and Money were Accidents of Fortune, that no Man was to be seriously despised for wanting; that an honest faithful Servant was a Character of more Value than an insolent corrupt Lord; That the real Distinction between Man and Man lay in his Integrity, which in one Shape or other generally met with its Reward in the World, and could not fail of giving the highest Pleasure, by a Consciousness of Virtue, which every Man feels that is so happy to possess it.

With this Gentleness would I treat my Inferiors, with much greater Esteem would I speak to that beautiful half of Mankind, who are distinguished by Petticoats.—If I was a Divine, I would remember, that in their first Creation they were designed a Help for the other Sex, and nothing was ever made incapable of the End of its Creation. 'Tis true, the first Lady had so little Experience that she hearkened to the Persuasions of an impertinent Dangler; and if you mind, he succeeded by persuading her that she was not so wise as she should be.

Men that have not Sense enough to shew any Superiority in their Arguments, hope to be yielded to by a Faith, that, as they are Men, all the Reason that has been allotted to human Kind, has fallen to their Share.—I am seriously of another Opinion.—As much Greatness of Mind may be shewn in Submission as in Command; and some Women have suffered a Life of Hardships with as much Philosophy as Cato traversed the Desarts of Africa, and without that Support the View of Glory offered him, which is enough for the human Mind that is touched with it, to go through any Toil or Danger. But this is not the Situation of a Woman, whose Virtue must only shine to her own Recollection, and loses that Name when it is ostentatiously exposed to the World.—A Lady who has performed her Duty as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother, raises in me as much Veneration as Socrates or Xenophon; and much more than I would pay either to Julius Cæsar or Cardinal Mazarine, tho' the first was the most famous Enslaver of his Country, and the last the most successful Plunderer of his Master.

A Woman really virtuous, in the utmost Extent of this Expression, has Virtue of a purer Kind than any Philosopher has ever shewn; since she knows, if she has Sense, and without it there can be no Virtue, that Mankind is too much prejudiced against her Sex, to give her any Degree of that Fame which is so sharp a Spur to their greatest Actions.—I have some Thoughts of exhibiting a Set of Pictures of such meritorious Ladies, where I shall say nothing of the Fire of their Eyes, or the Pureness of their Complexions; but give them such Praises as befits a rational sensible Being: Virtues of Choice, and not Beauties of Accident. I beg they would not so far mistake me, as to think I am undervaluing their Charms: A beautiful Mind in a beautiful Body, is one of the finest Objects shewn us by Nature. I would not have them place so much Value on a Quality that can be only useful to One, as to neglect that which may be of Benefit to Thousands by Precept or by Example.—There will be no Occasion of amusing them with Trifles, when they consider themselves capable of not only making the most amiable but the most estimable Figures in Life.—Begin then Ladies, by paying those Authors with Scorn and Contempt, who, with a Sneer of affected Admiration, would throw you below the Dignity of the human Species.

SOURCE: Grundy, Isobel. "The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Reaction to the Printing of Her Poems." The Book Collector 31, no. 1 (spring 1982): 19-37.

In the following essay, Grundy reviews Montagu's personal annotations of Dodsley's Collection of Poems, which included poems printed without her permission. In the marginalia, Montagu claims some poems and vehemently denies writing others, revealing her thoughts on the controversies of her publication. Grundy suggests that the annotations add to the portrait of Montagu as a reluctant writer, with mixed emotions about being published.

In the stormy career of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu the ambition of authorship played a large but mostly secret part. One of the earliest controversies to involve her was Edmund Curll's illicit publication of three more or less scandalous poems which she had been quietly circulating in manuscript among her friends; one of the latest was the feud that developed between her and the British Resident and British Consul in Venice,1 about which new information has recently come to light. Each episode brings out the period's feeling that it was not fitting for a well-born woman to publish verses except in circumstances of the most careful decorum and discretion. When Curll scooped the three eclogues which appeared as Court Poems, 1716, various aristocratic women had already published their poems; Lady Winchilsea had put her name on title-pages, though Lady Chudleigh had not. But in Curll's pamphlet the first poem satirized the Princess of Wales—and must have appeared, to those readers who failed to appreciate Lady Mary's irony, to satirize her a good deal more heavily than it in fact did—and the resulting furore was such that Pope felt justified in taking the emetic vengeance he described in A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, on the Body of Mr Edmund Curll, Bookseller, and in A Further Account of the Deplorable Condition of Mr Curll.2 By the time Lady Mary, now settled in Italy, encountered John Murray in the late 1750's, something of a revolution was occurring in England, with a flood of books, mostly novels, issuing from the pens of women. Lady Mary had already remarked that the Italians, unlike her own countrymen, respected literary or learned women; she had also received evidence of the revolution at home, in the boxes of books sent her by her daughter; but she probably felt as much differentiated by her class from the new ranks of writing Englishwomen as she felt by nationality from the female professor of mathematics at Bologna.3 Among the English at Venice, to be known as an authoress was still a liability. So when she discovered, apparently for the first time, that an appreciable number of her poems had been for ten years in print in the century's most popular anthology, she does not seem to have been pleased. Her enmity with Murray and his satellites, though political in foundation, was exacerbated by the natural antipathy between a rake praised by Casanova as 'prodigieusement amateur de beau sexe' and as having always 'les plus jolies filles de Venise', and an old woman, one of the 'most despicable creatures alive', as she wrote bitterly during an early phase of the quarrel, whose penchant for writing provided the readiest handle for attack and derision.4

New information on these affairs, albeit rather sparse and dubious is contained in a set of Robert Dodsley's A Collection of Poems … By Several Hands, annotated by Lady Mary in Venice in 1758. Each of the six volumes, handsomely bound in contemporary vellum, bears the engraved book-plate of 'Joseph Smith British Consul at Venice'.5 This is odd for two reasons. Firstly, Smith's then existing collection of books was bought en bloc by George III in 1765 and now 'form[s] an important part of the king's library in the British Museum', so that his set of Dodsley's Collection must somehow have separated itself from the rest, if only to join those books which Smith continued to amass after the King's purchase, and which were sold after his death.6 Secondly Lady Mary had disliked Smith even during her first stay in Venice 1739-40, and disliked him more strongly since he had married in 1757 at past the age of eighty, the sister of John Murray the Resident.7 She wrote satirically about the marriage in May 1758; she said nothing in her letters, then or later, about the Collection. Her motives for annotating volumes owned by Smith therefore remains matter for speculation. Whether he gave her the set while they were still on speaking terms, whether she borrowed it and never returned it as a consequence of their growing hostility, or whether some other person was responsible for Smith's loss of it, we cannot now know. Very many of Lady Mary's own books were scattered before her surviving library was offered for sale at Sotheby's on 1 August 1928, so the non-appearance of the set in the catalogue of that sale tells us nothing.

Dodsley's Collection of Poems had begun in three volumes published on 15 January 1748.8 The third volume included twelve poems by 'L. M. W. M.', all except three of them from Six Town Eclogues. With some other Poems. By the Rt. Hon. L. M. W. M., which Horace Walpole had printed without her permission the previous year. Walpole wrote in his set of the Collection that Dodsley had printed Lady Mary's poems (which he found 'too womanish') 'from my Copy', and another owner wrote in his that 'Dodsley affirms the Collection was pict out by Mr. Spence'.9 Evidence of both these statements, insofar as the second refers to Lady Mary, is provided by a transcript, apparently made in Rome in 1741 from Lady Mary's own holograph album, in a scribal hand with corrections in that of Joseph Spence, who met Lady Mary at the same time as Walpole, and who recorded information about her both in his Anecdotes and in his letters, where his dazzlement with her comes through most engagingly.10 The transcript of her poems which he had made is endorsed in a late 18th-century hand 'The Book of Ly M's Verses at Dodsley's?'11 Lady Mary liked both Walpole and Spence, with a liking which she might well have modified if she had seen them as not only admirers but also potential publishers of her poems.

The success of Dodsley's Collection was such that he issued a 'Second Edition' in December of the same year, 1748.12 Lady Mary's poems seem to have been associated with his success, since he transferred them in the second edition from volume III to volume I. Joseph Smith acquired his first three volumes of the Collection in their fourth edition, 1755, presumably together with the fourth volume, which came out that year. Volumes V and VI were published in March 1758,13 the year that Lady Mary made her notes. Smith's copies of these last volumes contain no notes by her, and since letters seem to have taken anything from a month to four and a half months to make the journey from England to Venice, though 'all the Shops are full of English Merchandize',14 it seems probable that the set which she annotated consisted of four volumes only.

When the Collection first appeared, Lady Mary had already been nine years resident abroad—if 'resident' is the word to describe her unsettled sojourns, first in Venice, then (after a year-long tour of Italy and a winter in Geneva and Chambéry) in Avignon, then in the remote village of Gottolengo near Brescia in North Italy. This last move cut her off, more than the War of the Austrian Succession had already done, from English travellers. She was not cut off, however, from all news from home. She had been exchanging increasingly brief and dull letters with her husband since her departure from England, letters—equally far from her best—with Lady Oxford since 1744, and was by 1748 well launched on the much livelier correspondence with her daughter, from whom as recently as 1740 she had been still estranged.15 Lady Bute had moved from Scotland to London, where news was more readily available, in 1746; her husband began his rise to power not long afterwards, meeting the Prince of Wales in 1747 and becoming Lord of the Bed-chamber to him on 30 September 1750.16 It seems, however, that if Lady Mary's correspondents in England noticed the appearance of her poems, first in Walpole's publication and then in Dodsley's, they thought it better to keep silent. Lady Mary's first note in Consul Smith's set claims, implicitly, that she had remained ignorant of her appearance in print for ten years. Beside the title 'An Epistle from a Lady in England, to a Gentleman at Avignon' (I.63) she wrote 'I renounce and never saw till this year 1758.'17 Apparently someone had spoken of this poem as hers. If the second part of her note is true, it follows that she had not seen either the anthology or her own verses until after her move, in 1756, back from Gottolengo to Venice and Padua.

It is another oddity that she did not know this 'Epistle'. It was in fact by Thomas Tickell, and in Dodsley's Collection firmly associated—as 'By the Same'—with other well-known poems of his, and quite separate from the poems identified by Lady Mary's initials. It had been published anonymously in 1717 (during another of Lady Mary's absences from England) and reached five editions that year.18 Whoever accused her of writing it probably did so as a joke, perhaps a hurtful one; but they did so not without apparent evidence: that of a London and Dublin reprint, also 1717, of Tickell's epistle 'To which is added Court Poems. Part II. The second edition.'19 So something which Curll's piracy had by implication attributed to Lady Mary had once appeared between the same covers as Tickell's poem.

Lady Mary's need to 'renounce' this poem shows how vulnerable she was to the campaign of Murray the Resident, now Smith's brother-in-law, to bring her into mockery and disrepute. Real political differences existed between them: William Pitt had formed a joint Ministry with Newcastle in October 1756 (another Minister in it was Holdernesse, the relation to whom Murray owed his position), and Lady Mary, though she compared the resulting coalition to 'Arlequin's Coat', looked on Pitt as the chief hope for peace and national renewal, while Murray was full of 'zeal for the contrary faction'.20 But the real issues were overshadowed by exaggeration and fantasy. Lady Mary's attitude progressed rapidly from an affectation of amusement that she should be taken for a politician (in February 1758), through admission that Murray's 'political Airs' made her wish she had 'settled in some other part of the World' (in April), to writing of his contempt and low malice. Three years later she self-mockingly resolved to perish if necessary in maintaining her ground 'with the true spirit of old Whiggism'.21 Murray almost immediately expanded his basic charge against her—that of] supporting Pitt—into the larger and vaguer one of being 'in the Interest of Popery and Slavery' because of the friendship which she struck up, on their arrival in Venice in May 1758, with Sir James and Lady Frances Steuart, exiles on account of Sir James's Jacobite politics whom Murray refused to receive. It was an intellectual friendship, with Lady Mary reading and discussing Sir James's works, including part of the important but as yet unpublished Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy.22 Her letters throw out many dark jesting hints that she was suspected of witchcraft—traditionally the accusation levelled at undocile old women—but this may have been chiefly because Sir James was interested in the supernatural.23 To her daughter she shows a touching defensiveness: 'I am afraid you may think some imprudent behaviour of mine has occasion'd all this ridiculous persecution', and again

Do not tell your father these foolish squabbles; it is the only thing I would keep from his knowledge. I am apprehensive he should imagine some misplac'd Railery or vivacity of mine has drawn on me these ridiculous Persecutions. 'Tis realy incredible they should be carry'd to such a height without the least provocation.24

The modern reader, instinctively sharing the 18th century's low opinion of old women, is likely to wonder at first how much Lady Mary is exaggerating. One answer is provided by Lord Bute's kinsman General Graeme: although a friend of Murray's, he nevertheless wrote 'I do think the resident ought to show some more respect than he has done of late to a woman of her birth and country.'25 Her birth and country, precisely the things which forbade her to be a published female writer, were her only possible hope for enforcing respect in the face of sneers about her excessive reading and writing.26

In this atmosphere it would not be difficult to make an insinuation that would rankle about Tickell's poem, in which an imaginary lady laments her banished Jacobite lover with insurrectionist fervour which transforms itself gradually but not very convincingly to acceptance of the status quo and to the hope that her lover will after all follow her in submitting to prosperity-bringing 'Brunswick'. At about the time that she read it, Lady Mary was writing, 'It is very remarkable that after having suffer'd all the rage of that Party at Avignon for my attachment to the present reigning Family, I should be accus'd here of favoring Rebellion, when I hop'd all our Odious Divisions were forgotten.'27 Though Tickell's poem voices Jacobite sentiments at its beginning, it is clear to the least literate reader that the author must be a Whig; nevertheless I think it likely that Lady Mary's indignant repudiation of it had something to do with the scandal given by her welcome to the Steuarts.

Lady Mary then came to her own poems. Beside the heading of the Six Town Eclogues28 she noted 'mine wrote at 17'. The first word of her note was a response to a long-standing controversy about their authorship. Curll, by prefixing to his piracy a quibbling identification of the writer either as 'a LADY of QUALITY', or as John Gay, or as given as the opinion of a thinly-disguised Addison—as Pope himself,29 had drawn public attention to a recent and no doubt indiscreet literary friendship of the young Lady Mary. Gay reinforced his association with the eclogue series by including in his Poems on Several Occasions, 1720, a poem called 'The Toilette. A Town Eclogue', 106 lines long, of which 43 lines are precisely the same as in Lady Mary's 'Friday. The Toilette' in her 78-line holograph copy.30 His version makes something light, whimsical and wistful out of Lady Mary's more embittered heroine. It is easy to appreciate the quality of Gay's additions but impossible to tell how much he contributed to the lines common to his and Lady Mary's copies, or indeed which of the two friends conceived the poem's original idea. Pope, who continued to believe 'Friday' to be 'almost wholly Gay's', also kept among his own papers a manuscript copy of 'Thursday' which caused some later editors to ascribe this eclogue to him; and in the beautiful handwritten transcript of the 'Eclogs' which he made for Lady Mary31 he gave the concluding lines of 'Wednesday' in an entirely different form from that of her own manuscript. No wonder, then, that the 67-year-old Lady Mary should wish to establish her authorship of all six eclogues, for any readers of Consul Smith's volumes, with 'mine'. Her 'wrote at 17' is harder to justify. The earliest eclogue, 'Monday', dates from 'the coming over of the Hanoverian family' in 1715; the last, 'Satturday' describes Lady Mary's own recovery from smallpox, which was complete by January 1716. She was born on 26 May 1689. One can only hope that '17' (which it is not possible to misread) was a slip of the pen for '27' rather than a deliberate untruth.

Beside the first couplet of 'Epistle from Arthur Grey, the Footman after his Condemnation for attempting a Rape', printed as 'By the Same',32 Lady Mary wrote 'I confess it'. She was indulging in a touch of self-dramatization, for there is little in this romantic, Ovidian poem that calls for confession, nothing to embarrass the victim of the assault, her erstwhile friend Mrs Griselda Murray (no relation)—except an erotic passage, which six years later Lady Mary's old flame Francesco Algarotti was to imitate in Italian in a poem of his own.33 What Mrs Murray had indignantly charged upon Lady Mary thirty-six years before were 'vile ballads' on the same subject, and these Lady Mary had, by implication, denied writing, though one of them is almost certainly by her and has now been printed as such.34 At this moment the scornful gossip about her 'sudden liking' for Sir James Steuart made it particularly unsuitable for her to be known as an erotic poet.

Dodsley printed Lady Mary's 'The Lover: A Ballad' as 'To Mr. C——',35 no doubt following Horace Walpole, who believed, with Spence, that this description of the ideal lover was addressed to Richard Chandler (1703?-69), with whom Lady Mary was supposed to have had an affair. The identification says more for Walpole's nose for gossip than for his ear for literature. The speaker of this poem explains, to a friend who has blamed her for 'stupid Indifference', that she is not kept back from loveaffairs by 'Nature, [by] fear or [by] Shame'; she can imagine a combination of qualities that would win her love, but has not yet found it: and 'till this astonishing Creature I know / As I long have liv'd Chaste I will keep my selfe so.' The amorous advances of 'Lewd Rake' and 'dress'd Fopling', she says, push women into a metaphorical experience of Ovidian metamorphosis: 'We harden like Trees, and like Rivers are cold.' The whole tone of the poem (confidential complaint of the inadequacies of modern men as lovers) suggests, what the 'We' of the last line reinforces, that it is written by a woman to a woman, about a lover but to a friend. This impression is borne out by Lady Mary's holograph in her album, where the second line of the poem reads 'Molly'—the nickname of Maria Skerrett, mistress of the Prime Minister and a close friend of hers. In Consul Smith's copy Lady Mary altered 'C——' in the second line to read 'M', and expanded this in the margin to 'Molly'. The subtitle 'To Mr. C——' she replaced with 'to a Lady, to the Tune of My Time O ye Muses'—a ballad by John Byrom which had been printed in Spectator No. 603.

Next in order Lady Mary found a poem of hers which had first appeared in print in a newspaper (Aaron Hill's The Plain Dealer) on 27 April 1724 and was titled there 'The Lady's Resolve'. Since she claimed in her album that it was 'Written ex tempore in Company in a Glass Window', it might have reached Hill by various routes. In any case the printed version substituted 'He comes too near, that comes to be deny'd' for Lady Mary's manuscript 'Too near he has approach'd who is deny'd.' All Lady Mary's subsequent editors followed Hill instead of her holograph, even W. Moy Thomas in 1861, though he noted 'that this very line occurs in Ben Johnson's conversation with Drummond'.36 (It is actually in Sir Thomas Overbury's A Wife, Now A Widowe, 1614). In Smith's copy Lady Mary crossed out the Overburean line and wrote in her own, but did nothing about the other considerable textual corruptions of the printed version. She added to the printed title, 'wrote 2 months after my marriage'; her own album puts it 'the first year I was marry'd.' To an answer printed by Dodsley (and earlier by Hill) as 'The Gentleman's Resolve' she added the note 'Sir W.Y.'—a useful piece of information, since it has been attributed to Pope as well as to Sir William Yonge.37

Lady Mary claimed the next two poems, 'An Epistle to Lord B——t' and 'An Epilogue To Mary, Queen of Scots', with 'mine' in the margin by each title.38 In line 67 of the 'Epistle' she altered 'the' to 'has'—a change bringing the printed text into line with her manuscript, which reads 'O how unlike has Heaven my Soul design'd!' Lady Mary was remarking how differently Heaven had designed her soul from Bathurst's—not, as Dodsley's reading suggests, that Bathurst was unlike some ideal of manhood which she had designed as her heaven. 'A Receipt to Cure the Vapours' was Dodsley's (and earlier Spence's) title for the next poem, which Lady Mary's album calls simply 'Song'.39 We know from the letters of Lady Mary's friend Lady Irwin that the song was addressed to her impromptu: nevertheless Lady Mary (shunning publicity?) has here heavily obliterated the sub-title 'Written to Lady J——n', as well as adding, 'to the Tune of, do not ask me charming Philis'. Perhaps it was to this tune that the verses, a witty argument against eternal constancy, were later (1781) sung at Ranelagh.

Having made some mark of annotation by each of her own poems in this volume, Lady Mary went on to comment on four poems which W. P. Courtney notes as all written by Lord Chesterfield to Lady Fanny Shirley.40 Lady Mary annotated 'Advice to a Lady in Autumn' with 'To Lady F. Sh. by Chester', 'Verses written in a Lady's Sherlock upon Death' with 'Chesterfield to Lady Tankerville', and two 'Songs' (beginning respectively 'When Fanny blooming fair' and 'Whenever, Chloe, I begin') with 'The same to F. Shirly' and 'The same to Miss Poultney'. Lady Mary had written mockingly about Chesterfield in the 1720s but admired his essays.41 She kept copies of the first of these poems by him, and another more risqué one to Lady Frances Shirley, in an album of miscellaneous verse.42 Lady Frances (1706-78), with whom Bonamy Dobrée says Chesterfield had 'a romantic attachment which went on for some years', was a former neighbour of hers (and still of her husband's) at Twickenham, and had played an important part (though probably unknown to Lady Mary) in Lady Bute's reconciliation with her parents.43 Of the other ladies to whom Lady Mary wished to reassign two of Chesterfield's verse tributes, one was Camilla (Colville) Bennet (1698-1775), Countess of Tankerville and Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline in 1737, whom Robert Walpole apparently described as 'a very safe fool' for the purpose of a possible affair with the King.44 The other is harder to identify. In one of her albums of poetry Lady Mary obliterated six lines (those following line 56 of her epistle 'Miss Cooper to———')45 with an odd hotchpotch of scribbled words and names: what she wrote over the last line was apparently 'Poultney to [?] Lord Chesterfield I am not'. Since at least one other scribble on these lines seems to refer to a love-affair, Lady Mary was very likely associating Chesterfield here with the same Miss Poultney, rather than with either of the political Pulteneys, Daniel or William. The poem in question dates from 1723, but the scribblings from some time later than that.

At the beginning of Dodsley's volume II Lady Mary added the writer's name, 'Ld Lyttleton', on the divisional title-page of his 'The Progress of Love. In Four Eclogues.' She had in the past disputed with George, later 1st Baron Lyttelton, on political subjects; he was now politically on the same side as her rising son-in-law. She seems not to have thought highly of his 'fine things wrote … for the good of Mankind', but she kept copies of his 'Jealousy. The Third Eclogue' and 'Advice to a Lady.'46 The latter poem, which in Dodsley occupies five pages, she had summarized in a satirical couplet:

Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet;
In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.47

Beside its title she noted 'to Mrs Pit'—that is, Anne Pitt (1721-81), sister of the Pitt whom Lady Mary admired. Lyttelton's instructions to Miss Pitt included the prohibition:

Make not dang'rous Wit a vain pretence,
But wisely rest content with modest Sense;
For Wit, like wine, intoxicates the brain,
Too strong for feeble woman to sustain.

Despite her naturally strong desire to protest against this, Lady Mary seems to have shared Lyttelton's opinion of Anne Pitt, whose promotion at Court in 1751 she deplored without fully stating her reasons 'She has Wit but——'.48 Beside Lyttelton's song beginning 'Say Myra, why is gentle Love' (p. 57), she wrote 'To Lady Buck'. It is not easy to know who she meant. Possible candidates are the widow of Sir Charles Buck, Bt (Anne, née Sebright, c. 1701-64); the sister-in-law of George II's mistress Lady Suffolk, who was from 1746 Countess of Buckinghamshire (whose family house in Norfolk Lyttelton visited);49 or even Mary Boughton, née Greville (d. 1786), who was however Mrs not Lady, and who is generally identified as Lyttelton's Delia, now Myra. Lady Mary made and kept a copy of this poem, labelled as by Lyttelton, in which she writes 'Delia' for 'Myra', so it is possible she knew the facts.

In volume IV Lady Mary found three more poems ascribed to 'Lady M. W. M.'.50 In line 24 of her 'An Answer To a Love-Letter' she altered 'love' to 'Truth', eliminating a repetition of the idea already conveyed in 'fondness', emphasising that a return of sincerity is what the writer seeks, and of course restoring her original text. 'In Answer to a Lady Who advised Retirement' called from her the unimportant correction of 'court' for 'courts' in line 3. She also deleted 'my' in line 8, which read 'And wait for my dismission without fear', an insufficient change which left a halting line without restoring the way it should have read: 'And wait Dismission without painfull Fear'. She found nothing to change in 'Verses written in a Garden.' Nor, disappointingly, did she make any comment on what Dodsley printed as 'Answer to the foregoing Lines. By the late Lord Hervey',51 following 'Elegy to Miss Dashwood. In the Manner of Ovid' by James Hammond. Although Dodsley so confidently ascribed it to Hervey, it had already appeared in print as 'By a Lady, Author of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace'. Since the balance of evidence tends to make Lady Mary chief author of the Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace, published the same month as this poem, March 1733,52 and in view of the 'Answer''s pithy style and feminist approach to its subject, it is far more likely to be by Lady Mary than by Hervey. Her failure to claim it as her own in Consul Smith's Dodsley is disappointing, but can perhaps be accounted for by the general atmosphere of defensiveness in which she made her notes. It would not have helped her position to become known as the author of one more poem of feminine complaint against men and against society.

She made only one more comment in the set. On p. 227 of the fourth volume she noted that 'On Sir Robert Walpole's Birth-day' is 'by Dr Young'—although it is printed as 'By Mr. D——ton' and accepted by Courtney (p. 39, following the DNB) as by Bubb Dodington. She might have been misled by memory of Edward Young's several other poems extolling Walpole; but she must have been familiar with his works, since she had been his patron in the 1720s;53 her attribution at least needs to be seriously considered.

I have already concluded from the lack of notes by Lady Mary in Smith's fifth and sixth volumes that these, published in March 1758, were probably not available to her at the time when she saw the others. One reason for thinking this is the presence in volume VI of another of her poems, printed in circumstances calculated to cause her extreme annoyance, and unlikely to have been passed over in silence.54 A burlesque rejection of an older woman by a younger man, which she said she herself had written to put into the mouth of Lord William Hamilton, whom Lady Hertford was indecorously pursuing, appeared here as the work of the William Yonge mentioned above, and as a riposte on his part to advances from none other than 'Lady Mary W*****' herself. The misattribution was richly ironical. If Lady Mary's account of the story is true then she, so often a literary champion of her own sex in its dealings with the other, had for once permitted herself, in verse, the kind of tough-minded and brutal put-down of feminine foolishness which was not uncommon in her conversation.55 She had attacked not only a woman, but a woman who was, like herself, subject to attack for intellectual interests; pure chance (presumably) not only put her at the receiving end of her own attack, but put at the delivering end a man who had particular cause to seek poetical revenge upon her. Yonge (c. 1693-1755), a man universally and it seems with good reason disliked by his contemporaries, had in 1724 divorced his wife for her adultery, notwithstanding his own notorious extramarital affairs, and had recovered costs and damages of £1500 from her lover and the bulk of her considerable fortune for himself. Lady Mary had on that occasion voiced her indignation in an 'Epistle From Mrs Y[onge] to her husband'.56 All this past history must have made more bitter the picture given in Dodsley's sixth volume of Yonge rejecting advances from herself. She wrote furiously to her daughter about this 'new story' in November 1758; it seems to have touched off further teasing from Murray's circle and more remarks about witchcraft.57 The same incident probably provoked her to label the verses concerned, and some other questionable ones in her album which contained poems both by herself and others, with the possessive initials MWM, and to add more detail to some titles and ascriptions elsewhere in the album (Harrowby MS 255).

Lady Mary was not, at the time she discovered herself figuring in Dodsley's earlier volumes, a virgin muse. Her experience included reacting with indignation at Curll's Court Poems in 1716 and at Anthony Hammond's inclusion of her 'Constantinople, To——' in A New Miscellany, 1720, and probably at various newspaper printings of single poems.58 On her own account, however, she had contributed to the Spectator and published nine numbers of her own political journal, The Nonsense of Common-Sense, in 1737-38. She may at least have connived at the printing of her two outrageous lampoons, Verses to the Imitator of Horace, 1733, and The Dean's Provocation For Writing the Lady's Dressing-Room, 1734.59 She must have known about her friend the Abbé Conti's inclusion of seven of her poems in Italian versions in his Prose e Poesie, 1756, though she probably did not know that the London Magazine had been printing poems by her, in ones and twos to the number of ten, in 1749, 1750 and 1754. Dodsley's was, however, the most considerable body of her verse that she had ever seen in print. It came to her notice at a time when her friendship with Sir James Steuart and her enmity with Murray made her especially conscious of her poetic ambitions and acutely aware of the way in which they made her vulnerable to mockery. To the Steuarts she recalled how her poem on Constantinople had been 'miserably printed', though in terms which suggest covert boasting; she repeatedly alluded to herself as a poet, but in a sinister manner: she is haunted 'by the Daemon of Poesie', or by those 'real Devils', the nine Muses. Even to the Steuarts she emphasizes that 'All my works are consecrated to the fire for fear of being put to more ignoble uses, as their betters have been before them'; she never refers to Dodsley but with contempt and disapprobation; and to her daughter she comments revealingly on Horace Walpole's inclusion of Queen Elizabeth I in his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors. If Walpole has treated the Queen's character with disrespect, she writes, 'all the Women should tear him to pieces for abusing the Glory of their Sex.' But even without intending disrespect it seems he has done the Queen an injury: 'Neither is it Just to put her in the list of Authors, having never publish'd any thing, thô we have Mr. Cambden's Authority that she wrote many valuable Pieces'.60 Walpole wished to serve Queen Elizabeth's reputation, just as he, Spence, and Dodsley wished to serve that of Lady Mary; unhappily the battles in which she was involved as an old woman made her too insecure to accept willingly the role of published poet.

Notes

1. The Resident was John Murray (c. 1715-75); the Consul was Joseph Smith (c. 1675-1770), famous as a collector of art and of books.
2. See Robert Halsband, 'Pope, Lady Mary, and the Court Poems ', PMLA, 68 (1953), pp. 237-50; and The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1956, pp. 53-4.
3. Complete Letters, ed. R. Halsband, 1965-7, iii. 39.
4. Letters, iii. 127 n.4, 189.
5. Each bears also the same note: '15s/6d: for six Volumes—C. Hurt jun: Winksworth: May 6-1830—'.
6. DNB. The Bibliotheca Smithiana …, Venice, 1755, does not mention Dodsley's Collection, nor does it appear in the Catalogue of the Remaining Part of the Curious and Valuable Library of Joseph Smith, issued by James Robson in 1775. The set's most recent resting place was the Pforzheimer Library, New York
7. Letters, iii. 18, 146-7.
8. R. Strauss, Robert Dodsley, 1910, p. 334.
9. Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al, xiii, 1948, p. 234; his copy of Dodsley, BL C.117, aa. 16; Notes and Queries, 2nd Series, i. 1856, p. 237.
10. Spence (1699-1768), Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn, 1966, i. 303-12; Letters from the Grand Tour, ed. S. Klima, 1975, pp. 356-62.
11. Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.: MS E6004.
12. Straus, p. 337.
13. Gentleman's Magazine, p. 134.
14. Letters, iii. 115.
15. Mary (Wortley Montagu) Stuart (1719-94), Countess of Bute. Lady Mary began writing to her in 1740, but only two letters survive from before 1748, and nine from that year (Letters, ii. 162-3, 200, xvi.)
16. Letters, ii. 369 nn., 397 n. 4, 470 and n.1.
17. In transcribing Lady Mary's hand I have expanded abbreviations and lowered raised letters. Her annotations have been printed, in their catalogue A1115, Autumn 1978, p. 9, by Blackwell's Rare Books, to whose staff I am indebted for much help and kindness.
18. W. P. Courtney, Dodsley's Collection of Poetry, Its Contents and Contributors, 1910, p. 8; David Foxon, English Verse 1701-1750, 1975.
19. Foxon, English Verse, T280.
20. Letters, iii. 113, 116, 137 and n.5, 140.
21. Letters, iii. 140, 142, 277.
22. Letters, iii. 145-6, 149, 181 and n.4.
23. Letters, iii. 157, 188-9.
24. Letters, iii. 151, 160.
25. Letters, iii. 206.
26. Letters, iii. 216-17.
27. Letters, iii. 146.
28. One for each day of the week except Sunday: Dodsley, i. 84-106; Lady Mary Essays and Poems, ed. R. Halsband and I. Grundy, 1977, pp. 182-204.
29. Court Poems, 1716, pp. i-ii.
30. Harrowby MSS Trust, Sandon Hall, Stafford, 256 ff. 35-7.
31. Reproduced in facsimile as Court Eclogs Written in the Year, 1716, ed. R. Halsband, 1977.
32. Dodsley, i. 107-11; Essays and Poems, pp. 221-5.
33. Opere, Leghorn, 1764-5, viii. 134.
34. Essays and Poems, pp. 216-21.
35. i. 111-13; Essays and Poems, pp. 234-6.
36. Lady Mary, Letters and Works, 3rd ed., ii. 431 note.
37. P. 114. For Yonge see further below.
38. Dodsley i. 114-19; Essays and Poems, pp. 242-4, 240-1.
39. Dodsley, i. 120-1; Essays and Poems, pp. 257-8.
40. Dodsley, i. 334-8; Courtney, pp. 15-16.
41. Letters, ii. 37-38, iii. 146.
42. Harrowby MS 255, [ff. 62-4].
43. Chesterfield, Letters, 1932, i. 76; Lady Mary, Letters, ii. 369 and n.2.
44. Lord Hervey, Some Materials Towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. R. Sedgwick, 1931, ii. 490-1.
45. Essays and Poems, p. 229; Harrowby MS 81, f.42.
46. Letters, ii. 481, iii. 232; Harrowby MS 81, ff. 32-3, 210-13.
47. Dodsley, ii. 43-8; Essays and Poems, p. 264.
48. Letters, ii. 490.
49. Rose Mary Davis, The Good Lord Lyttelton, 1939, p. 179.
50. Dodsley, iv. 196-8; Essays and Poems, pp. 300-1, 244-6, 258-9. The hand which identified 'An Epistle from S. J. Esq' as by Soame Jenyns (iii. 125) was not hers.
51. Dodsley, iv. 79-82; Essays and Poems, pp. 270-2.
52. See I. Grundy, 'Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace: A Skirmish between Pope and Some Persons of Rank and Fortune', SB, xxx, 1977.
53. Letters, ii. 34-6, 61.
54. 'Sir W***** Y*****'s Answer', vi. 230-1; Essays and Poems, p. 263.
55. E.g. Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1956, p. 119.
56. Essays and Poems, pp. 230-2. See also I. Grundy, 'Ovid and Eighteenth-Century Divorce: An Unpublished Poem by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu RES, n.s. xxiii, 1972, pp. 417-28.
57. Letters, iii. 186-91.
58. The Plain Dealer, 17 April 1724; The Weekly Journal or Saturday's-Post, 26 December 1724; The Gentleman's Magazine, June 1735, and others which were merely reprints.
59. Essays and Poems, pp. 69-74, 105-49, 265-70, 273-6.
60. Letters, iii. 169, 170, 183, 190, 191, 185.

Biographies

Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 680 p.

Considers Montagu's life as a series of struggles.

Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956, 313 p.

Offers a modern scholarly biography of Montagu.

Criticism

Campbell, Jill. "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity." In History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Beth Fowkes Tobin, pp. 64-85. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Focuses on the Turkish Embassy Letters as a demonstration of Montagu's use of cultural difference to discuss feminine pleasure and desire.

Cooley, Emily. "Proto-Feminism and Ethnography in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters." Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (2002): 8-15.

Critiques Montagu as an amateur anthropologist, including her attitude toward the otherness of foreign cultures.

Darby, Barbara. "Love, Chance, and the Arranged Marriage: Lady Mary Rewrites Marivaux." Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 9, no. 2 (winter 1994): 26-44.

Studies Montagu's comedy Simplicity in terms of her revisions to the original French play and the attitudes towards women reflected in those revisions.

Dobie, Madeleine. "Embodying Oriental Women: Representation and Voyeurism in Montesquieu, Montagu, and Ingres." Cincinnati Romance Review 13 (1994): 51-60.

Compares Montagu's depiction of Turkish women to Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. "An Early Ethnographer of Middle Eastern Women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 40, no. 4 (October 1981): 329-38.

Discusses Montagu's role as an ethnographer of the status of women in Middle Eastern life in her letters from Turkey.

Halsband, Robert. "'Condemned to Petticoats': Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Feminist and Writer." In The Dress of Words: Essays on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature in Honor of Richmond P. Bond, edited by Robert B. White, Jr., pp. 35-52. Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1978.

Surveys a variety of Montagu's works in terms of her feminism, addressing topics including marriage and divorce, politics, and the propriety of women's writing.

Lew, Joseph W. "Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio." Eighteenth-Century Studies 24, no. 4 (summer 1991): 432-50.

Studies the Turkish Embassy Letters as a critique of Ottoman and British culture, and as an anticipation of modern feminism.

Looser, Devoney. "Scolding Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? The Problematics of Sisterhood in Feminist Criticism." In Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood, edited by Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, pp. 44-61. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Questions critical attempts to describe Montagu as a feminist and apply her concerns to modern feminist issues.

Lowenthal, Cynthia. "The 'Spectatress': Satire and the Aristocrats." In Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, pp. 114-52. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Suggests that Montagu's letters explore the intersections of class and gender, and public and private, emphasizing her satirical writings on the aristocracy.

Sherman, Sandra. "Instructing the 'Empire of Beauty': Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Politics of Female Rationality." South Atlantic Review 60, no. 4 (November 1995): 1-26.

Discusses those works by Montagu that are potentially antifeminist, including "A Satyr."

Snyder, Elizabeth. "Female Heroism and Legal Discourse in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge] to Her Husband." ELH 34, no. 4 (June 1997): 10-22.

Argues that Montagu subverts the legal term submission to create a powerful and authoritative female hero.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. "Female Rhetorics." In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, pp. 177-91. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Uses Montagu's correspondence as a basis for considering the conflict between the drive for self-expression and the social requirement for restraint.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Montagu's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 95, 101; Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, Vols. 9, 57; Literature Resource Center; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 16; and Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2.