Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M-y W-y M-e

Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M-y W-y M-e gathers Lady Mary Wortley Montagu‘s celebrated correspondence from her travels through Europe and the Ottoman Empire, especially Constantinople, during her husband‘s embassy. Combining epistolary intimacy with classical learning, social satire, and ethnographic attention, the book revises eighteenth-century travel writing by replacing inherited Orientalist fantasy with acute observation. Its accounts of women‘s spaces, dress, ceremony, and smallpox inoculation are at once literary performances and interventions in Enlightenment debates about manners, medicine, and empire. Montagu (1689-1762), aristocrat, poet, wit, and one of the most formidable female intellects of her age, wrote from a position both privileged and marginal. Scarred by smallpox and alert to the constraints placed upon women, she found in travel and letter-writing a medium for authority unavailable in many public genres. Her experience in Ottoman society, and her determination to introduce inoculation to Britain, shaped the letters‘ unusual blend of curiosity, advocacy, and self-fashioning. This volume is essential for readers interested in women‘s writing, travel literature, Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, or the history of medicine. It offers the pleasure of brilliant prose while challenging assumptions about gender, cultural difference, and the making of modern knowledge.