One of my favorite collections. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a wit, a scholar, an ambassador's wife, and (of course) a lady. These letters record her journey through Europe to Turkey, where her husband was stationed from 1717-18. She kept copies of all her letters to friends and family and, after returning to England, edited them into a complete volume (which wasn't published until after her death in 1762). Her voice is by turns sensitive and sharp-edged ("catty," one of my students said), and her observations on Turkish culture in particular are both very much of the literary culture of her age and uniquely given from the perspective of a female traveller to the "orient" so reviled and romanticized in existing accounts.