The book is the first print publication of Henrietta Liston’s Turkish Journals, a significant yet virtually unknown work of women’s travel writing. It is composed of the full text of the 1812-1814 journal and some further writings, such a significant 1813 letter from Liston to her nephew, Dick Ramage and extracts from other journals, and these are preceded by an extensive critical introduction. The journals reveal that as the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Liston had privileged access to the Ottoman elite and to the diplomatic corps. They reflect on British-Ottoman relations, combining Orientalist perspectives with a human-centred version of the picturesque. Liston offers astute commentaries on people, places, and events – including a plague-ridden Constantinople, the harem of the Grand Vizier’s deputy, the presentation of ambassadors in the Seraglio and the departure of pilgrims on the hajj. The introduction includes sections on Liston’s life and the diplomatic context of her writings, and the Ottoman social and political context of the period. Liston’s writings are considered in relation to the discourses of travel writing, to British-Ottoman relations, to Orientalism and the picturesque, and to other eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women travellers and their works on the Ottoman Empire. There is also discussion of the manuscripts on which the book is based, and of issues such as their composition, revision, and transcription.
A nineteenth-century bengali housewife and her Robinson Crusoe days: Travel and intimacy in Kailashbashini Debi’s The diary of a certain housewife
