SOURCE: “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity,” in History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Beth Fowkes Tobin, The University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 64-85.

In this essay, Campbell asserts that in the Turkish Embassy Letters Montagu “attempts to use her experience of cultural disjunctions to construct a voice that can speak of sexual desire and of aesthetic pleasure.”

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is known first to students of the eighteenth century not as the authorial voice heard in her many poems, essays, three volumes of letters, and a play; but as the satiric spectacle conjured in Pope's portraits of her in several of his poems. In his epistle on the characters of women, Pope's Lady Mary, under the name of Sappho, presents the scandalous spectacle of the failed or incoherent construction of a woman's outward beauty:

Rufa, [he declares,] whose eye quick-glancing o'er...