Adventures made me admire these women even more
Inspired by the lives of the 18th century female travellers she had studied for her thesis, author August Thomas took a trip across Europe, following in the footsteps of her favourite, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
In atime that set tight limitations on women’s liberty and creativity, Lady Mary pushed hers beyond all expectations
On a dark cliff over the Danube, the cold wind howled around the Serbian fortress of Petrovaradin, jingling the crystal chandelier over my canopied bed. For the first and only time in my life, I had the intense, almost queasy sensation that I was about to see a ghost.
Torn between hope and terror, I thought, Lady Mary?
Months earlier, over a pot of Earl Grey in my student flat in Edinburgh, I had mapped out this journey. My plan? Eight hundred miles across Europe on a shoestring budget, following the route of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (16891762) toward Constantinople, present-day Istanbul.
Before I moved to Scotland, I spent almost a decade studying Turkey. I’d written my Master’s thesis on lady travellers in the Ottoman Empire – observant, strong-willed women who rode into the unknown with surprisingly open minds. My first, and favourite, was Lady Mary. For the past three weeks, I had walked in Lady Mary’s footsteps from fairy-tale Austrian palaces to bullet-hole-pitted Balkan backwaters. Her words coloured every street and forest I wandered through. She was funny, insightful, a delightful travelling companion.
Pulse racing, I flipped on the light. No ghost. But Lady Mary’s letters continued to haunt me. Lady Mary who?
A daring traveller, literary darling, and vaccination pioneer, Lady Mary was a feminist almost two centuries before the word was coined. Having eloped against the wishes of her father, the Duke of Kingston, Lady Mary became a prolific writer. Her talents justified her ambitions and fuelled a combustible friendship with the poet Alexander Pope, whose corrosive jealousy later spurred him to torch her reputation. But what secured Lady Mary’s place in history was her voyage to Turkey, and its startling impact on the history of medicine. Indirectly, her courage and persistence helped save countless millions of lives.
When her husband Edward was appointed Ambassador to the Ottoman sultan’s court in Constantinople, 27-year-old Lady Mary and their toddler son travelled with him. She sent home vivid, intensely observant letters, recounting of her eastward travels. “I am got into a new world,” she enthused.
While her diplomat husband flunked out of his own embassy, Lady Mary’s dispatches from Ottoman harems and bath houses electrified Europe and inspired generations of explorers and artists. Many male travel writers and painters had concocted lurid fantasies about what happened behind harem walls. Lady Mary didn’t have to: these women became her friends.
Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy Letters are not her only legacy. Her family had been devastated by smallpox. Lady Mary herself barely survived the disease. But in Turkey, she was astonished to witness the local practice of “inoculation”, a primitive version of a smallpox vaccine. The practitioner would dip a needle in a walnut-shell full of pus from smallpox sores, and deliberately infect a healthy patient. After a brief illness, the inoculated patient was immune. Lady Mary was so impressed, she had her young son inoculated. Her aristocratic British friends were horrified. But the little boy thrived. On her return to England, Lady Mary defied the medical establishment and risked her reputation to champion inoculation. Doctors were outraged by this bizarre, eastern practice – foreign women’s folk medicine, no less! But Lady Mary succeeded in popularising the life-saving procedure. After testing on convicts, even members of the royal family were inoculated.
I picked up Lady Mary’s trail in imperial Vienna, the gateway between western Europe and the Ottoman empire, which she – like most of her contemporaries – imagined as an exotic land of mystery and danger, like the painting of The Slave Market, Constantinople (1838) by Sir William Allan at the Scottish National Gallery (www.nationalgalleries.org/artandartists/5659/slave-marketconstantinople).
Lady Mary was delighted to discover that in Vienna, “A woman till five and thirty is only looked upon as a raw girl, and can possibly make no noise in the world till about forty… I am content to be insignificant at present, in the design of returning when I am fit to appear nowhere else.”
Lady Mary departed for Hungary to an ominous chorus of warnings. She wrote, “I am threatened at the same time with being froze to death, buried in the snow, and taken by the Tartars who ravage that part of Hungary…possibly I may be diverted…by finding myself in the midst of battle.” In Mary’s day, Buda and Pest had not yet coalesced into a single, cultured metropolis. Buda, where she stayed, was a small hill town, struggling to its feet after more than a century of Ottoman occupation.
I traced Lady Mary eastward to Mohács, where the unchained Danube and golden fields “over-grown with wood,” looked much as they had 300 years before. Lady Mary noticed the local costume of Mohács was “very primitive, being only a plain sheep’s skin…a cap and boots of the same stuff.” For six days each February, Mohács residents still parade through town in these shaggy sheepskins, wearing grimacing horned búso masks and cheerfully teasing passersby, in a nominally Christian festival to scare off the winter.
En route to Belgrade, Lady Mary crossed the battlefield of Carlowitz, where Prince Eugene had won a famous victory. She found it “strewed [sic] with the skulls and carcasses of unburied men, horses and camels…nothing seems to me plainer proof of the irrationality of mankind… than the rage with which they contest for a small spot of ground when such vast parts of fruitful earth lie quite uninhabited.” Looking at the bombed-out buildings, I could not disagree.
I took a bus across the mountain pass between Serbia and Bulgaria. In Sofia, I found hipsters and grandparents filling bottles with steaming, gushing mineral water by the site of what had been – in Mary’s day – the Ottoman bathhouse. Eastward, in Plovdiv, I found a nearly intact Ottoman town, complete with sunbathing cats and Turkishspeaking, baklava-serving historic mosque. Meanwhile, across the Turkish border, a violent failed coup attempt had triggered a state of emergency. Reports rolled in of purges, torture, unjustified arrests of both Turks and foreigners, especially journalists. As I followed in Lady Mary’s footsteps through some of history’s darkest landscapes, I witnessed remarkable resilience. Violence ends. Civil society triumphs, and rebuilds. Despite the painful situation in
Turkey, I have every hope in the resilience and persistence of the Turkish people.
In 1718, on her return to England, Lady Mary wrote, “having seen part of Asia and Africa and almost made the tour of Europe, I think the honest English squire more happy, who verily believes… that, in short, there is no perfect enjoyment of this life out of Old England. I pray God I may think so for the rest of my life, and since I must be contented with our scanty allowance of daylight, that I may forget the enlivening sun of Constantinople.”
In a time that set tight limitations on women’s liberty and creativity, Lady Mary pushed hers beyond all expectations. While I was in Plovdiv, my life’s dream came true: my first book sold. I celebrated by buying a chicken kebab for a Bulgarian street kitten. Dazed and grateful, I reflected how strange it was that Lady Mary had never published a book in her lifetime: out of deference to her reputation, her letters circulated only in manuscript. My book, Liar’s Candle, is a spy thriller set in contemporary Turkey. It is a far cry from Lady Mary’s letters. But there is one notable similarity: each is the story of an observant young woman in Turkey, driven by compassion and curiosity.