In 1716, Mary Wortley Montagu travelled across Europe to take up residence in Istanbul as the wife of the British ambassador. For two years she lovingly observed the Ottoman society around her with an astonishing lack of prejudice. Her wide-ranging letters — about the life of Turkish women behind the veil, Arabic poetry, contemporary medical practices such as inoculation — remain as fresh as the day they were penned. A self-educated intellectual, a free spirit, a radical and a feminist as well as an aristocrat, she was one of the first modern travel writers, studying and recording the culture around her on its own terms and through its own language.
