Positions of Privilege

The significance of Liston's writings emerges very clearly when they are set in the context of travel writing about the Ottoman Empire by other British women in the eighteenth and the first half of the nine-teenth centuries, notably Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters (first published in 1763), Elizabeth Craven's A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789), Julia Pardoe's The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836 (1837) and The Beauties of the Bosphorus (1838), and Annie Jane Harvey's Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes (1871). These texts offer a representative selection of views of Turkey as well as some instructive points of continuity and change. To varying extents, these five women writers should be described as foreign residents as well as travellers, since they all not only travelled to and within the Ottoman Empire but also lived there for varying periods of time: the Listons were there for several years between 1812 and 1820, Montagu stayed approximately one year, Pardoe and Harvey remained there for several months, and Craven spent about a month in Constantinople. Liston and Montagu's longer residence meant that they were in a different situation from those of the others and potentially more affected by the need to make a second home in a foreign land, to adapt to it, and so on (see Section 3, above).

Katherine Turner states that there were only two eighteenth-century women's travelogues published before 1770, Elizabeth Justice's A Voyage to Russia in 1739 and Montagu's Letters in 1763, while there were ‘around twenty’ travelogues by women among the ‘hundreds’ published between 1770 and 1800 (2001: 127, 3). Of these twenty, however, only one deals partly with Turkey, Craven's Journey. In relation to the period from 1800 to 1830, Turner estimates that there were ‘probably over 50’ travel narratives published by women (2013: 48). However, as she says, it is ‘impossible to know how many […] women [whose works were never published] were likewise invisibly engaged in travel writing’ (2001: 135). Liston may thus stand as an example of those women whose writings disappeared from literary history, and her account of Turkey and Constantinople places her at a time of transition in the history of travel accounts of the Ottoman Empire.