Anita Desai

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

"The Turkish Embassy Letters chronicle the encounters of a curious mind with numerous aspects of a foreign culture in frank and witty language. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote enthusiastically to her friend, Alexander Pope, about the beauties of Turkish poetry, and set herself the task of learning Turkish grammar so that she could translate poems. To other correspondents, she wrote that she was impressed by the liberties given to women by Turkish cultural institutions, such as the veils that rendered a woman incognita in the street (the better, she thought, to conduct secret love affairs). She was struck by the unpretentious behavior of women in the Turkish baths, which she compared to English coffeehouses because of the freedom of conversation they promoted. Likewise, as a small-pox survivor -- she had succumbed to the disease in 1715, and hid her smallpox scars under makeup, or paint, as it was called -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was intrigued by the Turkish method of inoculation against this disease, and later introduced these methods into England with the help of the physician Charles Maitland."--Www.wwnorton.com.

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