The Introduction in Embassy to Constantinople is 31 pages long, much of which overlaps with the introduction in Turkish Embassy Letters1. Therefore only excerpts of this piece of work have been provided, although the whole piece is interesting as an overview of Lady Mary’s life and the social context of her works. The book also contains a variety of illustrations, the great majority of which have been taken from the Searight Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Most of these illustrations are from the century following Wortley’s embassy. However, Turkish society changed so little in those years that they can be taken as evidence of what life was like in 1717 and 1718 (Montagu 1988: 222).

“Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female” -
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey.

The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu have long been a favourite 'quote-mine' for historians, biographers, essayists and travel writers. Yet to most general readers she herself has never seemed more than an astringent commentator on the side-lines - almost a disembodied voice. In our own day, with its over-fondness for labels, she has been referred to as a 'pioneer woman traveller and/or feminist', though it is impossible to squeeze her into either category without distorting her personality. Any reader of her letters must think of her, primarily, as an individual: strong-willed, warm-hearted, keen-witted, high-spirited, often unpredictable, sometimes downright eccentric - a woman who rarely allowed her many disappointments and misfortunes to provoke recriminations or self-pity. She was at once stoical and imaginative, gullible and shrewd, childishly vain and touchingly humble, sincere and loyal in her affections but occasionally indiscriminate in her choice of friends. As the years taught her to value wisdom above knowledge she became wryly self-mocking. And nowhere in her own writings - feline as she could be in her snap judgments - is there anything approaching the scurrility with which she was repeatedly tormented by Pope, Horace Walpole and their (often anonymous) hangers-on.

'I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.' Lady Mary was not striking a pose when she wrote thus in 1758; by then she had been choosing liberty, in a variety of situations, for more than half a century. This preference was linked to her appreciation of solitude, which co-existed (as it does more often than people realize) with an equal appreciation of good company and sophisticated entertainments…Our perception of Lady Mary is restricted almost entirely to what we can see of her character as reflected in her letters and it has been suggested that we see only a flattering self-portrait. Yet much may be deduced from a copious personal correspondence with intimates, spanning fifty-four years. However posterity-conscious a writer may be, the bedrock of personality gradually emerges from beneath the carefully cultivated verbal lawn. And one of the most endearing traits revealed in Lady Mary's letters is her determination to make the best of almost all her personal relationships, unpromising though they might be. It seems she gave up only on Pope, whose

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implacable enmity for her was as abnormal in degree as it was baffling in origin.

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In April 1716, Wortley was nominated Ambassador to Turkey - a five-year appointment.

Lady Mary, elated at the prospect of 'going farther than most other people go', at once switched her attention to choosing a chaplain and a surgeon, ordering twenty suits of servants' livery and training a venturesome Yorkshire girl as her son's nurse. She had always relished books of travel and often reminded Wortley, 'I love travelling...'

The Ambassadorial party left London on 1 August and on 5 August she was writing hyperbolically from the Hague, 'The place I am now at is certainly one of the finest villages in the world... Nothing can be more agreeable than travelling in Holland'. But in the eighteenth century even Ambassadorial parties encountered considerable hardship when crossing Europe - especially in winter…

…First impressions of Vienna were also disconcerting; Lady Mary had been unprepared for that mixture of squalor and splendour surrounding the Imperial Court. Suddenly this self-possessed young Englishwoman, herself one of the ornaments of the Court of St James, sounds almost provincial. The nobility, she noted with horrified astonishment, occupied apartments 'divided but by a partition from that of a taylor or a shoemaker... Those that have houses of their own let out the rest of them to whoever will take 'em..' Moreover, five-and six-story multiple tenancy palaces shared certain problems with our own inner-city tower-blocks - 'The great stairs (which are all of stone) are as common and dirty as the street'.

Inside those apartments, however, all was 'surprisingly magnificent'; in England nothing comparable could be found. As Lady Mary lists the 'prodigious' possessions of the Viennese nobility her excited delight disarmingly recalls a Mid-West tourist trying to describe Chatsworth.

Meanwhile Wortley had embarked on the first stage of his extraordinary delicate mission. For two years Turkey had been at war with the Venetian Republic and Austria's Emperor, bound by treaty to assist Venice, was about to deflect his forces from their Mediterranean Spain-watching duties - which would, in England's view, wreck the 'European balance of power. At the end of Queen Anne's reign England had been left friendless in Europe; the Treaty of Utrecht, so strenuously opposed by the Whigs, merely alienated the Dutch and Austrians without achieving its purpose; to improve Anglo-French relations. So now Wortley's task was to mediate between Vienna and Constantinople. But unfortunately nothing in his temperament or previous experience fitted him to be a successful diplomat; and he was repeatedly double-crossed by Abraham Stanyan, England's ambassador to Vienna who longed to replace him in Constantinople. Nor did it help

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I N T R 0 D U C T I 0 N

that both he and Lady Mary soon came to sympathise strongly and openly with the Turks.

On entering the Turkish Empire Lady Mary at once effortlessly adapted to 'a new world where everything I see appears to me a change of scene'. She learned to speak the language 'passibly', took 'great pains to see evervthin ', 9

was charmed by the 'civility and beauty' of naked Turkish women in the bagnio (hamman), found the wearing of the yashmak 'not only very easy but agreeable' and made friends with educated Turks of both sexes. Her enthusiastic descriptions of Constantinople and its surroundings recall another, fictitious, English Embassy to the Porte. (Did Virginia Woolf read these letters before writing chapter three of Orlando?) Of Lady Mary, too, it could be said that 'The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before'.
Their author's enterprise, curiosity and open-mindedness partly explain why these Embassy letters bear the hallmark of classic travel-writing. Important too was the eighteenth-century expatriates' mental and emotional isolation from their own culture. Modern travellers who wish genuinely to isolate themselves - the better to absorb other cultures - must deliberately make an effort to escape from the tentacles of hi-tek communications. Of course Lady Mary did not see this particular freedom as the luxury it seems to us. Writing from her Pera home, on 4 January 1718, she complained to Miss Anne Thistlewayte that most of her friends in England assumed she 'knew everything' and so neglected to keep her up to date on London gossip. She added -
W'hy they are pleased to suppose in this manner, I can guess no reason except they are persuaded that the breed of Muhammad's pigeon still subsists in this country and that I receive supernatural intelligence.

However, future generations of readers were to benefit from Lady Mary's total immersion in Turkish life; being almost completely cut off from the familiar, she could more easily respond to and interpret the unfamiliar.

According to the terms of his appointment, Wortley should have remained in Turkey until 1721. Instead he received official letters of recall from an embarrassed Addison - recently made Secretary of State - on 28 October 1717. A soothing private letter implied complimentary reasons for this rather abrubt recall and promised Wortley a good London post as Auditor of the Imprest. This neither deceived nor consoled Wortley and his wife, who were equally reluctant to leave Turkey. In an attempt to reverse London's decision, Wortley blundered into a series of crass string-pullings which strengthened the general impression that he was singularly unsuited to be a diplomat. After much bickering about who should pay the expenses of the return journey, Wortley and Lady Mary reluctantly sailed from Constantinople in June 1718. By then they had two children; Mary, the future Countess of Bute, had been born five months previously.
In a letter to the Abb6 Conti, Lady Mary defended the Turkish way of life -

These people are not so unpolished as we represent them. 'Tis true their magnificence is of a different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion they have a right notion of life; while they consume it in music, gardens, wine and delicate eating.. we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics or studying some science to which we can never attain or if we do, cannot persuade people to set that value upon it we do ourselves.... We die, or grow old and decrepit, before we can reap the fruit of our labour. Considering what short-lived, weak ani-

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EMBASSY TO CONSTANTINOPLE

mals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasures?

On their zig-zag way home North Africa ('that barbarous country') was visited and Lady Mary contributed her mite to the evolution of what is known as 'British racist stereotyping'. Near the ruins of Carthage she paused to rest and -

W'hile I sat there, from the town many women flocked in to see me and were equally entertained with viewing one another. Their posture in sitting, the colour of thier skin, their lank black hair falling on each side of their faces, their features and the shape of their limbs, differ so little from their own country people, the baboons, 'tis hard tofancy them a distinct race, and I could not help thinking there had been some ancient alliances between them.

Lady Mary would be astonished to know that 25 0 years later such an observation - crudely ignorant but not ill-natured - could get her into trouble with the law of her native land.

Wortley's mission to the Porte - like Lady Mary's involvement in London's literary scandals - seemed more important at the time than it does today. As Robert Halsband noted -

None of the newspaper reports or official documents mentioned the Ambassador's wife, yet herpart in his Embassy was to make herfamous throughout Europe, and he rjourney to the East would be remembered long after his mission was forgotten.

After the failure of the Embassy to Constantinople Wortley, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, 'never took any conspicuous part in politics, and devoted himself chiefly to saving money'. He blamed his lack of political advancement on the fact that he had refused' to oblige Lord Sunderland on the Peerage Bill and

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after to declare himself a friend of Sir Robert Walpole'. No doubt Addison 5 s death in 1719, at the age of forty-seven, also hampered him. From this point on he becomes a shadowy figure in Lady Mary's story, only glimpsed occasionally through a haze of casual reference.

Lady Mary could plausibly be portrayed as tough, cynical, scheming: a woman with a tongue like emery paper and a heart of flint. But this image is inconsistent with the crusader who returned from Turkey vowing to' take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England'. The invention in question was inoculation against smallpox and the pains required to introduce it to England were considerable. In several Turkish towns Lady Mary had closely studied the operation and from Adrianople she wrote to a friend describing it in detail and explaining, 'you may believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of the experiment since I intend to try it on my dear little son'. In April i7i8 she did so, successfully, and back home that autumn she launched her pro-inoculation campaign. For several years it provoked public debate of extreme, almost unbelievable, ferocity. The participants were physicians, politicians, princesses, parsons, poets, apothecaries, surgeons and several members of the Royal Society. Lady Mary had her daughter inoculated in London, where numerous doubting Thomases could witness the operation and observe its after-effects. Princess Caroline, by then a close friend of Lady Mary, had two of her daughters inoculated in i722 , which prompted a further spate of sermons denouncing inoculation as a defiance of God's will.

...Despite the eighteenth century's reputation as the Age of Reason, when everybody who was anybody kept their emotions under control, objectivity was not in fact a top priority. Lady Mary's own character assessments were often more like assassinations, too witty and elegantly phrased to seem offensive (unless one happened to be the victim), yet wildly unreliable. Among the generality of pen-wielders this was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Savagery; those lacking natural good manners were restrained by no rules, no inhibitions, no standards of 'fair play'. Writing to her sister, in June 1725, Lady Mary gossiped about 'the reigning Duchess of Marlborough' and then concluded, 'we continue to see one another like two people that are resolved to hate with civility'. But hating with civility was not the norm. When Pope's Essay on Ciiticism antagonised the critic, John Dennis, his published revenge included taunts about Pope's physical deformity. (Because of severe congenital curvature of the spine he

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…One of her strongest inclinations - a veritable compulsion - was the urge to write. Her Embassy Letters are in fact a travel book rather than genuine letters, as sent to her friends. Like many another travel writer, before and since, she found the letter framework conducive to immediacy and informality. From Constantinople she had explained to her sister, Lady Mar (by then living in Paris, sharing her husband's political exile):
I am resolved to keep the copies, as testimonies of

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my inclination to give you, to the utmost of my power, all the diverting part of my travels, while you are exempt from all the fatigues and inconveniences.
Back in England she used those copies, edited and polished and interwoven with extracts from her journal, to compile one of the best narrative travel books ever written by an Englishwoman. Then she showed the manuscript to Mary Astell, the pioneer feminist, who implored her to publish at once, by way of strengthening the much-derided feminist argument that an educated woman could be the intellectual equal of any man. But Lady Mary, though she greatly admired Miss Astell's stance, was an aristocrat first and a feminist only when feminism did not clash with her primary loyalty. And so she felt bound to lock away her precious manuscript for forty years.

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1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Turkish Embassy Letters. Introduced by Anita Desai, Text edited and annotated by Malcolm Jack. 1993. William Pickering. London.