Janet Schaw traveled and wrote more than half a century after Montagu's trip to Turkey, though just a decade after the publication of her letters. The circumstances of the two women's journeys were quite disparate. While Montagu went to Turkey as a member of a diplomatic mission between Occidental and Oriental world powers, Schaw paid a private visit to British colonists, her friends and fellow Scots, the owners of sugar plantations dependent on slave labor. Montagu sets the language of aesthetics against Orientalism to dignify Turkish women; Schaw, on the other hand, aligns aesthetics with discourses of race to beautify colonial slavery. Despite these differences, the two women's writings yield complementary insights into the social logic of aesthetics. Writing the language of aesthetics in the contact zone, using it to work through encounters with non-European Others, both expose (intentionally or not) the tension between the putative disinterestedness of the aesthetic gaze and its actual implication in hierarchies of social power. Positioning themselves as aesthetic subjects, both display a mistrust of woman's conventional status as spectacle. Their appropriations of aesthetics differently exemplify women's multiply determined, conflicted relation to the powerful languages of the dominant culture.

Schaw was a single, middle-aged woman from a well-to-do Scottish family who traveled to the islands of Antigua and St. Kitts in the British West Indies in 1774 and 1775.