Life on the Golden Horn by Mary Wortley Montagu

One of the Penguin Great Journeys series this is a collection letters written by Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, during their journey across Europe and, what turned out to be, their fairly short time in Constantinople. 

From my school boy history the Ottoman Empire appeared as the “sick man of Europe” in the late 19^th and early 20^th Century, but here in the early 18^th Century it is still in full health. 

That it takes Mary Wortley Montagu the best part of a year to cross Europe gives you a sense of the epic nature of the journey while the bright and lively style of her letters perhaps acts to conceal the same.   These are really engaging letters full of personality.

Her attitude to the Turkish culture is highly enlightened, and in most of the letters from Constantinople and other places within the Ottoman Empire she is deeply critical of most other western writers who have reported on life and culture there before her.  In particular her account of the lives of women act to over turn all that has been said before – the former writers being male would have had no access to the private spaces of Turkish women and so their reports were hear say or simple fabrication.  The contrast could not be clearer than that between the public veiling and the “private” nakedness of women in there bath houses.

The status of women within Islamic cultures remains contested, and this gives these 300 year old letters a real contemporary feel.  The wearing of the veil is often a flash point, as much, if not more so, in modern Turkey as in the “West”.