Life on the Golden Horn

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) travelled in Constantinople in 1716 with her husband, who had been appointed ambassador there by the new Hanoverian king George I. The embassy was a total failure and they were rapidly recalled. By contrast, Lady Mary's brilliant letters recounting her experience form one of the great travelogues of their period and are an overwhelmingly enjoyable record of a spectacular court and its customs.

Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband on what proved to be a wholly useless diplomatic mission to Constantinople, Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) left a vivid, informative, clever account of her adventures in the mysterious, sophisticated culture of Ottoman palaces, bathing places and courts which - even as her husband's career was falling apart - she could not have enjoyed more.<br/>
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Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries &ndash; but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own.  Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw <I>astounding </I>things:  Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science.  Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Letters

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Isobel Grundy

A revised selection of Lady Montagu's letters. Besides presenting a vivid picture of manners in a picturesque age, they contain a unique series of impressions from foreign courts seldom visited and nowhere else so intimately described. Lady Mary was the wife of a popular ambassador and, wielding the charm of a strong personality, was enabled to see and hear many things of which the ordinary traveler, or resident abroad, knew-and knows-little or nothing. Originally written, for the most part, to her sisters, her daughter, or to very intimate friends, her Letters are unusually detailed and frank. She was a keen observer, not superior to the love of gossip with a quick eye for the telling features of a story or situation, and an easy, effective style.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Books by Mary Wortley Montagu

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