SOURCE: “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4, Summer 1991, pp. 432-50.

In the essay below, Lew maintains that Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters are “powerful critiques of both Ottoman and British culture” and anticipate by over two centuries the work of modern feminists.

In 1717, the Whigs sent Edward Wortley to Holland, the petty states of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. His mission foreshadowed the goals of English foreign policy in the Levant until World War I: he was to negotiate peace between Austria and a declining Ottoman Empire and to protect British naval and commercial interests in the Levant. He expected to remain in Istanbul as long as twenty years; in fact, his ineptitude combined with reshufflings in the English Cabinet led to his recall after only fifteen months.

With him travelled his beautiful and brilliant wife, Lady Mary Pierrepont, who claimed to have been...