Abstract
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's legacy as a celebrated female traveler offers a compelling case study for understanding how critics and readers sought to make sense of a woman's exceptional mobility. Her letters, written during her time in Turkey and Italy, were highly sought after and widely circulated among the British reading public in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The reception history of Montagu's travel letters reveals an underlying anxiety in British society concerning the expanding range of female mobility, as the meaning of her travels was continuously reevaluated and reconstructed within evolving historical contexts. In this article, I draw upon a comprehensive range of cultural evidence—including published periodical reviews, the reactions of contemporaries such as Horace Walpole and Lady Oxford, frontispiece illustrations, and later editions of her works—to analyze the shifting perceptions of Montagu's travels. This survey indicates that Montagu's extraordinary career as a lifelong traveler was frequently repurposed and remodeled, reflecting the diverse needs and desires of readers, reviewers, and editors over time. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the extent to which Montagu's travels challenged negative perceptions of female travelers and contributed to paving the way for future women adventurers.
