In 1716 a 20-something woman arrived in Turkey with her husband, who had just been appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. For the next two years Mary Wortley Montague wrote letters home, the Letters from Turkey, that have been an inspiration to women travelers ever since. Mary had a precocious child who devoured books, and wrote in her diary, “I am going to write a history so uncommon” when she was still not ten years old. Women were not formally educated at this time – she would campaign for women’s education later in her life – and so she taught herself in her father’s library,…