Nathanael Mathaeus von Wolf and Johanna Henrietta Trosiener (Schopenhauer). Variolation in the 18th century on the Polish lands according to the guidelines of a doctor and the memoirs of his patient.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was known as an innovator during her lifetime. Montagu’s conception of herself as living an experimental life was particularly invested in her writing. She wrote poetry and prose; however, her most experimental contribution to English literature was arguably her innovative use of epistolary form in manuscript and print. She wrote a handful of anonymous letters addressing public events for publication, but most of her letters were not published during her lifetime. In her manuscript letters, she experimented with the idea that women’s letter writing could offer a counter history to the public historical record. She prepared a selection of her letters, documenting her travels through Europe to Turkey, known as the Turkish Embassy Letters, for posthumous publication. In it Montagu uses the epistolary form to make cross-cultural comparisons of the customs, fashions and routines of women’s lives in different locales, and to develop fresh ideas about women’s decorum for a new age. She suggests that the epistolary form itself posits new ways of thinking about women’s history.

Experiment in Prose: Authority and Experience in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters

Since the publication of Robert Halsband's biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1956 and his later edited collection of her letters, modern scholars have been fascinated with the network of critical discourses in Montagu's writing in the Turkish Embassy Letters. Analyzing her work on multiple axes – religious, political, scientific, and gendered – contemporary critics have made this classic text accessible to new generations of readers and thinkers. Yet as scholarship on these letters continues to flourish, certain trends persist, often at the expense of new avenues of inquiry. This article proposes that several recent threads in the scholarly conversation surrounding the Turkish Embassy Letters have the potential to be expanded in three promising new directions to more fully explore Montagu's religious identity and its relationship to her discussions of religious belief and practice; her unique role as a mother while traveling; and her place in the smallpox variolation controversy and its relationship to disability.

Anna K. Sagal

Papers

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Turkish Embassy Letters: A Survey of Contemporary Criticism