Since the publication of Robert Halsband's biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1956 and his later edited collection of her letters, modern scholars have been fascinated with the network of critical discourses in Montagu's writing in the Turkish Embassy Letters. Analyzing her work on multiple axes – religious, political, scientific, and gendered – contemporary critics have made this classic text accessible to new generations of readers and thinkers. Yet as scholarship on these letters continues to flourish, certain trends persist, often at the expense of new avenues of inquiry. This article proposes that several recent threads in the scholarly conversation surrounding the Turkish Embassy Letters have the potential to be expanded in three promising new directions to more fully explore Montagu's religious identity and its relationship to her discussions of religious belief and practice; her unique role as a mother while traveling; and her place in the smallpox variolation controversy and its relationship to disability.
This article argues that Eliza Haywood’s periodical Epistles for the Ladies is an important contribution to the perennially popular eighteenth-century dialogue about female friendships. Contextualizing this work in other seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writings about women and friendship, this article also makes the case for Haywood’s radical vision of female virtue in contrast to didactic and pedagogical literature. Likewise, the article argues that Epistles showcases Haywood’s ambitious critical aims by incorporating both amatory pleasures and moral concerns.
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