SOURCE: “Aesthetics and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 23, 1994, pp. 179-205.

In the essay below, Bohls declares that the Turkish Embassy Letters“are perhaps most valuable for their apparent aspiration, however partial and intermittent, to actual cultural exchange—a condition of intersubjectivity whose necessary precondition is an acceptance of the ‘other’ as an intelligent, sensitive, acting self.”

As a woman traveller, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was uniquely privileged. When she went to Turkey in 1716 as the wife of the British Ambassador, she was assured access to the upper echelons of Ottoman society. Her gender, in addition, gained her entry to distinctive institutions of that society which were off limits even to privileged men. Harems and women's bathhouses had already provided topics for prurient speculation by male travel writers, several of whom claimed to have visited them, although as Montagu pointed out...