Extracted from Dervla Murphy’s afterword to Eland’s new edition of The Turkish Embassy Letters
The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu have long been a favourite ‘quote-mine’ for historians, biographers, essayists and travel writers. Yet to most general readers she herself has never seemed more than an astringent commentator on the sidelines – almost a disembodied voice. In our own day, with its over-fondness for labels, she has been referred to as a ‘pioneer woman traveller and/or feminist’, though it is impossible to squeeze her into either category without distorting her personality. Any reader of her letters must think of her, primarily, as an individual: strong-willed, warm-hearted, keen-witted, high-spirited, often unpredictable, sometimes downright eccentric – a woman who rarely allowed her many disappointments and misfortunes to provoke recriminations or self-pity. She was at once stoical and imaginative, gullible and shrewd, childishly vain and touchingly humble, sincere and loyal in her affections but occasionally indiscriminate in her choice of friends. As the years taught her to value wisdom above knowledge, she became wryly self-mocking. And nowhere in her own writings – feline as she could be in her snap judgements – is there anything approaching the scurrility with which she was repeatedly tormented by Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole and their (often anonymous) hangers-on.