The Turkish Embassy Letters (selection): Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Turkish Embassy Letters (selection), credited to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Turkish Embassy Letters (selection) by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Read by LibriVox Volunteers Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont) was an English aristocrat and woman of letters. In 1716, she accompanied her husband to Vienna, and thence to Adrianople (Edirne) and Constantinople, where he took up his post as the new British ambassador. The couple remained there until 1718. Lady Mary told the story of their voyage in a series of private letters full of vivid descriptions and unconventional commentary. Their posthumous publication in 1763 presented to the public the first secular work written by a European woman about the Muslim Orient. They were praised by Voltaire, and the Scottish author Tobias Smollett opined that they were "never equaled by any letter-writer of any sex, age or nation". This selection contains sixteen of Lady Mary's Turkish Embassy Letters, as they came to be known, addressed her sister, Lady Mar (letters 1-5, 8, 9, 13, and 16), to Lady Rich (letters 6, 12 and 14), to the Abbot of __ (letters 7, 10, and 11), and to the Abbé (letter 15). (Summary by Kazbek & Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Turkish Embassy Letters (selection)
• Author credits: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 6
• Listed recording duration: 2:29:48

Catalogue topics

• Istanbul
• ottoman empire
• orientalism

Track guide

1. 01 - Letters 1-4 (Rotterdam, Vienna, Prague) — 18:16
2. 02 - Letters 5-6 (Peterwaradin, Adrianople) — 17:30
3. 03 - Letters 7-8 (Adrianople) — 20:30
4. 04 - Letters 9-10 (Adrianople) — 21:16
5. 05 - Letters 11-13 (Constantinople, Belgrade Village, Pera) — 31:39
6. 06 - Letters 14-16 (Pera, Tunis, Genoa) — 40:37

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.