Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), already a glittering figure in the English literary scene, traveled through the Ottoman Empire as far as Constantinople (Istanbul) with her husband, the “Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Turkey,” from 1716 to 1718. Her fame was secured with the posthumous publication of Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W---y M----e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe (1763), which derives from the letter-book she drafted during this relatively brief sojourn and polished for the rest of her long life. Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn, in their introduction to The Turkish Embassy Letters (the shorthand title for Montagu's travelogue), assert that “it is among the greatest achievements of eighteenth-century literature.” The response to Montagu's achievement has nevertheless been mixed, both in her own day and since. Among contemporary critics, some praise her as “a conscientious ethnographer trying to communicate the humanity of the peoples of another culture”—one “remarkably free of ethnocentrism”—and as “[t]he only relatively early writer to cast doubt on the common assumption of the oppression of Muslim women and to counter notions of their licentiousness.”