Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the Empire. those ladies that are rich having all their money in their own hands, which they take with ’em upon a divorce with an addition which he is obliged to give ’em. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discover. You may guess how effectually this disguises them. ’Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have. In a letter to Lady Mar, dated 1 April 1717, Montagu writes In particular, her view regarding the veil was quite revolutionary for her time, a topic which has long preoccupied Western male writers. Montagu was the first travel writer to record exclusively female spaces and criticised the previous writers on several occasions for their untruthful accounts: ‘Now that I am a little acquainted with their ways I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of them.’ ‘Thus you see, dear sister the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would make us believe.’ īeing a women and knowing the language helped Montagu to build a closer relationship with the Ottoman women that she met, which she proudly emphasised in her writing: ‘I speak the language passably and I have had the advantage of forming friendships with Turkish ladies and of their liking me, and I can boast of being the first foreigner ever to have had that pleasure.’ Given she could establish a healthy dialogue with Turkish women, she easily penetrated the private sphere and developed a rather distinctive view regarding the recurring tropes in Orientalist literature. She challenged the previous accounts recorded by male writers by presenting a rather different approach to the Turkish culture and by understanding the everyday lives of Ottoman women. Montagu lived between 1689-1762 and she kept a record of her correspondences (mainly sent from the Ottoman Empire to various cities in Europe) which were published posthumously under the title of Turkish Embassy Letters in 1763. The woman who challenged mainstream writing and started to establish a dialogue across cultures in the eighteenth century was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. With the distorted description of the veil and the harem, a fantasy world has been formed by the mainstream writers, which curtailed the development of transnational dialogues. She is currently working on Ottoman women writers (1756-1900). She has specialised in Hilda Doolittle and Kleinian psychoanalysis, and her major research interests include women writers, postcolonial literature, autobiography, psychoanalysis, gender, and war literature. Emel Zorluoglu Akbey is an assistant professor at Erzurum Technical University.
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