Henrietta Liston’s Travels: The Turkish Journals, 1812-1820, eds., Patrick Hart, Valerie Kennedy and Dora Petherbridge, with F. Özden Mercan, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2020. pp. ix-246, illustrated. ISBN 9781474467353
Donna LandryThe history of British diplomatic wives has a lot of ground to make up. As long ago as 1975, Hilary Callan wrote a seminal study, ‘The Premise of Dedication: Notes Towards an Ethnography of Diplomat’s Wives,’1 but the topic remained a major gap. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, of course, generated a long tradition of scholarship, and Katie Hickman’s popular survey, Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (2000) was widely reviewed and sold well.2 But the history of British women in foreign service continued to be ignored until the appearance of Helen McCarthy’s Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat (2014), her pioneering investigation of letters, memoirs, and government records detailing the lives and careers of British women serving officially and unofficially in overseas offices from the mid-nineteenth century until the present.3 It was also in 2014 that Ashley Cohen introduced historians to Maria, Lady Nugent, the American-born wife of Field Marshall Sir George Nugent, in her detailed critical edition of Lady Nugent’s East India Journal covering the years 1811 to 1815.4 Now, with the appearance of Henrietta Liston’s Constantinople Journal, 1812-1814, the field takes another leap forward.
