Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote “The Lover: A Ballad” in an effort to dismiss the sexist attitudes of several male poets from the period. John Donne (“The Flea”), Andrew Marvell (“To his Coy Mistress”), and Robert Herrick (“To Virgins, Make Much...

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poetry reflects her keen awareness of the gender politics that pervaded her lifetime. Exploring themes of power, sexuality, and beauty in her writing, she stands out because of her criticism of the patriarchal standards...

The subject of religion is prominent throughout many of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, having experienced many aspects of Muslim and Christian cultures whilst traveling the globe with her diplomat husband, Edward, the British Ambassador in...

Whether from one city to the next, one country to the next, or one continent to the next, travel is essential in allowing people to form new ideas about the world around them. Travel allows a person to step outside of the bubble of comfort that...

Identity is an idiosyncratic definition of a person that can be constructed through many variables: race, gender, class and culture, to name but a few. The Turkish Embassy Letters, comes with a pre-constructed, orientalist ideal of the East, where...