This is is the first critical study of one of the most important women writers of the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), who produced a body of erudite and entertaining correspondence that spanned more than fifty years. Lady Mary's letters illuminate the difficulties encountered by a sensitive, intelligent, and gifted woman writer living through an era of significant cultural change. These letters display the tensions inherent in the competing demands of public and private life, revealing Lady Mary's own discomfort about the problems of authorship and authority in an age that held publication to be an improper activity for respectable women. Through the discourse of supposedly “private” letters, Lady Mary was able to find an avenue for her talents that brought her “public” stature without violating the imperatives of her position as a woman and an aristocrat. Cynthia Lowenthal argues persuasively that Lady Mary's letters, themselves central to the establishment of the familiar letter as an important eighteenthcentury genre, were self-consciously constructed as literary artifacts and crafted as part of a larger female epistolary tradition. Moreover, Lowenthal contends, the works of Lady Mary are essential to the feminist recuperation of women's writing precisely because she provided an aristocratic critique—a voice often ignored—of the class and gender codes of her day.

In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Montagu accompanied her husband to Turkey and wrote an extraordinary series of letters that recorded her experiences as a traveller and her impressions of Ottoman culture and society. This Broadview edition includes a broad selection of related historical documents on Turkey, women in the Arab world, Islam, and “Oriental” tales written in Europe.

The second volume of Lady Mary's Complete Letters includes the brilliant series to her sister Lady Mar, now for the first time edited entirely from the original manuscripts; the long, varied series to Lady Pomfret, from England as well as the Continent; the dutiful letters, many previously unprinted, to her husband about her travels and about her children; and the series to Lady Oxford, annotated from Lady Oxford's own manuscripts. Of the new correspondences, the most significant are her letters to Francesco Algarotti, which reveal new aspects of her personality and of her art as a letter-writer, and me ample series (in French) to Madame Chiara Bragadin Michiel, a Venetian lady, which displays her graciousness sparked with flashes of wit.